We are basically concerned with active transportation. Moving to them after becoming our city engineers major focus. We are pretty well completed on that. We need bike trails, walking trails, running trails. Part of the city moving toward higher densities. The traditional part of our city, horse trails and are expanding those as well as we go along and do that. The 3rd role is Economic Development, critical to develop because we are so dependent upon salestax and franchise tax. When the process right now hopefully it we will bring 400 million of construction into commercial construction into our area. Area. Retail development, regional Retail Development office space hotel big boxes as well. During my administration with the opportunity of seeing big boxes move in. Two walmarts in our city. Home depot laws before that we had pieces market and the rich and drug. Development comes from the north and east. So i learned easily and quickly that we have to wait your turn. My time was spent a
Do that way and one of the things i wrote down that wasnt in my campaign, but as i took office, my major job was to spend money. Not to save money. But to spend money, but to spend it in the right way. And then as i analyzed and had when i was on the counsel, the very negative funding for us is property tax. If you raise property tax they want to hang you by the nearest tree. If theres not a tree, theyll just run over you with their pick up truck either way. But you dont mess with property tax, so i got our city out of the property tax business. We fund our city basically by two sources. Sales tax and eweutility franchise and when you do that, people dont care where you spend money. As long as you dont raise their taxes, they are fine and we raise the taxes by good, Economic Growth that ill talk about in a minute and so, that is where we have come from and that is a that has allowed me to do that in that way. Philosophically for my goals my overarching goal or principle is if it doesnt
The other thing that weve started doing is we call it moral monday iowa. And i believe it started in one of the carolinas. By right. With the naacp. But we just stole the idea. So every monday at noon before we gavel in at 1 00, we have a gathering that draws a lot of press and a lot of advocates, and we talk about an issue that were not getting any legs on. So weve had moral monday iowas on date rape. Weve had moral monday iowas on disparities in education and prisons. Weve had moral monday iowa on education spending, and next week were having it on womens health. We get these huge crowds. We picked a small room, so thats kind of cool because the huge crowds look really big. But i think we want to reclaim the moral and the freedom issues, because we believe that were the ones who work for those, and i think anybody could do some of those things. We get a lot of press coverage for it. Thank you. Senator winfield from connecticut. I wanted to go back to the point about how we talk about
The number of people who turned 65 a day, and will for the next ten years, if you havent googled it, google it it will blow your mind how many of us there are. And im one of those. And they tell me all the time, we want transit because we want to age. Were not going to drive for much longer. Hopefully they will but many of them wont. They want to be able to take transit but they want to be technical savvy. They want to pull up the next bus locator and see when the bus comes. Texas is hot. Fort worth is 110 in july and august. And you dont want to stand on the corner looking for your bus. You want to be able to be in your office or in your home and say, oh, here it comes all i got to do is walk down the street and catch it. And were beginning to get there. The federal government has helped with some of that. But its also got to be a ride that appeals to people. Theyve got to be able to put their bicycle on the front, which they currently cant, hop on the bus, go to work, take their bike