Why do you want to represent your district on the Sunnyside City Council?

I want to be on the city council for selfish reasons:

• as an employee of a local small business I want my company to thrive in the kind of pro-business environment that once made Sunnyside the retail center of the lower valley.
• as a commercial property owner I want to clamp down on the torrent of capricious regulations that have crushed property values and disincentivized business investments.
• as an entrepreneur I want to bring an appreciation for the wisdom of free-markets and displace the delusion that our city officials can centrally plan the economy.
• as a taxpayer I want at least a minimal amount of due diligence done before the council hires another retail recruiter, marketing consultant, or media firm who prey on the naivete of small towns and dysfunction of local governments.
• as a member of a multigenerational household I want to be free from fear for the safety of my children and their grandparents.
• as a lifelong native of Sunnyside I want to make it easier to justify the pride I feel for my hometown.

What is one of your goals for your time on City Council?

We need to quash the recent resurgence of crime in Sunnyside. Our police are the most impactful public good that our city controls and the contentious stances the city has chosen to take with the police unions over the past 5 years has been detrimental to our security and economy. Our rising crime acts as a tax on the entire local economy: destroying productivity, reducing competitiveness, raising security expenses, creating uncertainty and inefficiency, and inhibiting investments.

If elected to City Council, you will represent just one vote on the Council. How do you plan to work with fellow councilmembers to accomplish your goals during your time in office?

That question certainly reflects the mentality that has kept the same revolving cast of council members presiding over decades of decline in Sunnyside’s retail sector. “Why should I vote if the candidate who best represents my voice will just be shouted down by entitled elites making decisions behind executive sessions?” Is the purpose of November’s election to install sycophants who will passively support the agenda of an exclusive few?

I am not one of Sunnyside’s elites, and looking at the bio of the current council members, neither are they. But that is not why we are elected. Especially in small towns, city officials are elected based on the size of their social support networks or prominence in the collective local history - not irrelevant considerations as these can point to candidates with the skills and resources to best engage the many different stakeholders, incorporate the community’s diverse expertise, and mediate competing interests to arrive at the optimal balance between disparate concerns. It is when these same elected officials then govern by elitist principals, cloaking deliberations and intentionally excluding inconvenient voices, that they render these participatory leadership qualities irrelevant. The result is a breakdown of the pluralism upon which local government is built.

I may represent just one vote, but is it better to be without any representation on the council? Is it better to have city officials whose primary goal is to maximize the camaraderie within the council? Are decisions reached by a consensus of city council members preferable to decisions that reflect the values of our community? Should our city council be filled with members unable to speak with our community and unwilling to listen to our local businesses?

Don’t be deterred from voting by the premise of the Daily Sun’s question. We do not have government by the majority, we have government by the majority who participate.

What is your plan for staying engaged with your constituents during your time in office?

Walking into a store and speaking to the local business owner would be a helpful start. Yet most small businesses in Sunnyside today have never seen a city council member, mayor, or city manager walk through their doors. A “plan” for staying engaged with constituents implies a desire to be engaged with constituents, but does such a desire exist within our current city council members?

During the 70s and 80s you could always see the faces of city officials inside local stores speaking with Les Amundson, Lee Rowan, Gordon Killingstad, Russ Lindstrand… not because they needed a floor lamp or a pair of PF Flyers, but because they understood that small businesses are the economic engines that drive a city’s growth. I refuse to believe there exists no correlation between that attitude and the health of Sunnyside’s economy back then.

The first step towards more government transparency and voter engagement is to elect someone with the ability to speak with our community and a willingness to listen to our businesses. Without that, a stated “plan” is merely another smokescreen to withdraw behind.

Why should residents in your district vote for you?

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking used to create them. It is impossible to restore Sunnyside’s retail prominence by removing factors that led to its downturn - we cannot blowup the I-82 freeway, block access to the internet, or reverse demographic changes. We must look at what exists now, implement modern business practices that respond to contemporary society, and incorporate current technology to make something new that helps Sunnyside’s entrepreneurs of today.