A thriving Denver stands on five foundations.

Every major city and airport project crosses the council’s desk for approval. I’ll use that vote: community workforce agreements that put local workers and registered apprentices on the job, so the biggest construction pipeline in the state builds careers here instead of exporting them.

Denver thrives when our small and local businesses thrive. I will expand the goals Denver has already set for contracting with minority- and women-owned businesses, and make sure they’re actually met. Denver’s future starts at home.

Whether you own or rent, Denver should be a place you can afford to live. Denver already runs down-payment assistance programs and funds legal help for families who face eviction. Zoning proposals that make the best use of our land await approval. The problem isn’t that these solutions don’t exist. It’s that they get deprioritized. I’ll protect and grow them in the budget and make sure the city keeps its promises.

Expand the city’s workforce training and wire it straight into that local-hire pipeline, in aviation, logistics, the trades, and the creative economy, so a kid from any block has a real path in.

Families in Denver can spend nearly $2,000 a month on childcare alone. We must invest in programs like the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program that make it possible to raise a family in Denver, along with supporting grassroots friend, family and neighbor childcare networks. Our children are our future.

We know what makes a neighborhood safe: well-funded youth programs, well-lit and activated public spaces, and healthy community conditions. I’ll invest in what works.

Denver’s STAR program sends a clinician and a medic, not a squad car, to people in mental-health crisis. It works. But today it reaches fewer than half the calls it was built for, because the dispatch system doesn’t route them. The council approves STAR’s budget and contracts. I’ll use that to expand it toward around-the-clock coverage and fix the routing, so the calls that should get STAR actually do.

Fund the training and resources responders need to do their work well, and pair those resources with community oversight and consistent enforcement.

As a member of the Citizen Oversight Board, I helped shape a city ordinance bringing transparency and enforcement to police misconduct settlements. I’ll keep writing that kind of accountability into law, because it builds public trust and prevents harm.

✓ Already delivered: Denver Post: police misconduct settlements opened to public scrutiny →

When the budget tightens, the answer isn’t gutting the services families rely on or the workforce that provides them. Approving and shaping that budget is the council’s direct power, and I’ll use it to protect both.

As the city adds more surveillance tech, cameras, license-plate readers, facial recognition, there’s no real rulebook protecting residents’ privacy. Writing those protections into law is squarely the council’s job, and I’ll do it: your data shouldn’t be collected, kept, or sold without your say.

Push for a plain-language budget and a public spending dashboard, so any resident can see where their money goes in real time. And I’ll never vote on a contract I haven’t read.

The city just pledged to review every building permit within 180 days or refund the fees. Good. Now someone has to make sure it happens. I’ll demand the public data, make sure small and local builders actually see the benefit, and write that promise into law so it outlasts any one administration.

Santa Fe Drive’s Chicano arts district, Welton Street’s Black cultural legacy, the Asia Center along Federal, Morrison Road in Westwood, West Colfax’s makers. These corridors already carry Denver’s identity. I’ll fight to back them with real city support and zoning that fits their character. Not a one-size-fits-all template handed down from downtown.

Denver helps protect affordable homes with land trusts. We should do the same for the studios, venues, and workshops that make a neighborhood worth visiting. I’ll push to build a cultural-space land trust, using the council’s budget and land-use tools, so artists and makers aren’t the next ones displaced.

✓ Already delivered: Rocky Mountain PBS: the Latino Cultural Arts Center’s Las Bodegas →

Expand the city’s support for youth arts and weave creative skills into workforce pathways, so a kid from any block can build a creative career here at home.

Strengthen the city’s arts funding for the venues and cultural entrepreneurs who are both an economic engine and a gathering place. I will be a relentless advocate for the regional cultural funding our scene depends on.

Invest in the culture that draws the world to Denver and roots our own community in it.

In Sun Valley, about 3% of the neighborhood is covered by tree canopy. In West Highland, a few miles away, it’s 18%. A tree is infrastructure. It cools a home, cuts a utility bill, cleans the air. Urban forestry is chronically underfunded, so I’ll fund it like the infrastructure it is, aim new planting at the hottest blocks first, expand the parks and cooling centers families can actually reach in a heat wave, and make shade a requirement, not an afterthought, when the city approves new development.

Every kid in this city should be able to breathe. But Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea have absorbed generations of pollution from highways, industry, and truck traffic that other neighborhoods never had to. I’ll use the city’s land-use and permitting power to put distance between homes and heavy pollution, and push for real air monitoring where the air is worst. I’ll be straight about the limits, too. The biggest source, the interstate, is mostly a state and federal call, so there my job is to be a relentless advocate and to use every local tool the city does control.

I co-authored the River Sisters framework, now woven into Denver’s West Area Plan. It reimagines the South Platte and our westside waterways as parks that protect us: flood protection, cool green corridors, places families can actually reach. The council approves the capital budget that turns plans into shovels. I’ll keep that promise moving.

✓ Already delivered: River Sisters, adopted into Denver’s West Area Plan →

Denver voters created a climate fund that now tops $40 million a year, and we were only the second city in the country to do it. That fund carries a promise in writing, that at least half of it reaches the communities most harmed. The council approves that budget, and I’ll be a relentless advocate for keeping it honest: plain-language public reporting, and dollars landing first on the blocks that need them most, the way voters were promised. Leading on climate doesn’t just mean starting first. It means following through.

Cleaner air also means real choices about how you move. No family should have to own a car just to reach work, school, or a park. I’ll fight for safer sidewalks, the kind Denver voters already told the city to build, protected bike lanes, and complete streets, starting with the routes our kids take to school. I’ll be honest here as well: our regional transit agency isn’t run by the city, so the city’s job is to fix the streets the buses run on, build the bike and walking network we do control, and be a strong, steady voice for transit that actually shows up.