ISSUES

• Community Peace of Mind: Every resident deserves to feel completely safe in their neighborhood.
• Family-Friendly Spaces: Ensure children can play safely outside and residents can enjoy evening walks without worry.
• Compassionate Accountability: Address homelessness by balancing compassion with consistent enforcement of local laws and ordinances for everyone.
• Equipping First Responders: Provide Police and Fire departments with the tools and technology needed to maximize efficiency and prevent staff burnout.
• Recruitment & Retention: Maintain competitive salaries, clear advancement opportunities, and strong retirement benefits to attract and keep top-tier public servants.

Strong Local Businesses & Economic Growth

• Fostering a "Can-Do" Culture: Shift the mindset at City Hall to be genuinely business-friendly. We must work collaboratively with management to replace automatic "no" responses with solution-oriented partnerships.
• Targeted Business Recruitment: Empower our economic development director and team to aggressively recruit high-wage, high-revenue businesses. Let’s learn from the proven successes of neighbors like Morgan Hill and regions further north to replicate their economic wins, possibly partnering on some level.
• Community-Wide Benefits: Cultivate thriving local commerce to deliver meaningful benefits back to Gilroy, including robust job creation, higher wages, increased local investment, and enhanced tax revenue to fund city services.
• Retaining Next-Gen Talent: Build a strong local economy that provides premier career opportunities right here at home, giving our young professionals a reason to stay and invest their futures in Gilroy.

Thoughtful Economic Development

• Reimagining the Gilroy Premium Outlets: Partner proactively with property owners to design long-term contingency plans. We must protect shared sales and property tax revenues by future-proofing this vital commercial hub.
• Community-First Development: Set strict goals for negotiation to ensure incoming developers respect our town. New projects must benefit residents directly by laying groundwork for future growth, funding parks, or building community spaces.
• Accountability & Trust: Think outside the box to forge strong public-private partnerships while placing ironclad safeguards on agreements. We need enforceable accountability metrics to ensure developers deliver on every promise made.
• Recession-Proof Revenue: Secure the future of public safety, public works, and parks by intentionally recruiting high-wage, high-revenue businesses. Diversifying our economy will build a resilient tax base that protects essential city services from future downturns.
• Connecting Neighborhoods with Green Space: Deliver a new park to the Las Animas and Murray Avenue area. This will provide a vital, shared community space that bridges the new Ten South housing development and the neighborhood on the other side of Monterey Highway.
• Cost-Effective Community Spaces: Prioritize the preservation and retrofitting of historical sites like the Wheeler Manor Auditorium. By building outwards from existing foundations, we can deliver the long-awaited community center while remaining fiscally responsible.

Fiscal Responsibility & A Strong Future for Gilroy Families

• Business-Minded Oversight: Apply private-sector business experience to City Hall to ensure no taxpayer dollar is wasted.
• Rigorous Internal Audits: Establish active, continuous internal audits to guarantee every dollar spent is producing real, measurable results for our community.
• Protecting Taxpayers: Prioritize efficient spending and strong economic growth over tax increases. Government must live within its budget, and raising taxes should never be the default solution to financial challenges. Through absolute fiscal vigilance and disciplined budget management, we can fully fund our city's vital services without ever asking taxpayers to pay more.
• Mitigating State Public Safety Mandates Through Structural Consolidation: Prepare immediately for impending state-mandated retirement cost increases that threaten to place massive financial hurdles on our community. Because our general fund cannot absorb these unfunded mandates, we must proactively audit and roll non-essential administrative departments into unified operational units to eliminate duplicate overhead. By consolidating management structures and aggressively pursuing shared regional services, we can systematically cut internal bureaucracy to shield frontline community programs and essential services from being defunded.