My wife Meg and I made a choice to put down roots here in Mount Rainier. Meg grew up just on the D.C. side of Eastern Avenue and her family was very much a part of the Mount Rainier community. As I grew to know the community, I knew it was a place I wanted to raise my family and it has become just that - a place where we love raising our two sons, Austin and Finn. Our hope is that through our own community engagement we can help carry the baton forward in sustaining that character for their generation.
And while there are a lot of things that make us different as residents of Mount Rainier, I am a firm believer in the idea that there is a lot more that unites us as a community. In listening to constituents at City Council meetings, through door knocking, or out shopping in our local businesses, three broad themes emerge. Folks want us to celebrate and retain our diversity, make the investments necessary to create a vibrant downtown core, and steward our little square of earth as best we can through targeted sustainability efforts.
While you'll find policy proposals for addressing each and every one of those themes on this site, being an elected official is about more than good policy. It's about creating partnerships, avoiding a culture of shame and blame, and focusing on what we have in common to bring people together to actually enact all those policies.
Towards that end, I will continue to apply what I have learned from my day job - as a labor attorney negotiating collective bargaining agreements - to work hard to listen patiently to find shared interests with my fellow elected officials that will help move the ball forward on each one of these fronts. That's what believing in community is all about.