Pillar 1: Fix It Before It Fails

Deferred maintenance is public debt. Novato alone has a $40 million backlog on roads rated in the C range, $277 million in pavement replacement value slowly deteriorating, and aging water and sewer infrastructure that was designed for a smaller population in a different climate. Across District 5, levees protecting Bel Marin Keys and bayfront neighborhoods were not engineered for the sea level rise that is already measurable in San Pablo Bay. Creek channels need sediment removal. Evacuation routes in the wildland-urban interface need vegetation management. And homeowners are paying $300 a month or more for fire insurance because the county has not moved fast enough on home hardening and defensible space programs that bring premiums down. None of this is hypothetical. It is the predictable cost of decades of deferral, and the bill is coming due whether we plan for it or not. As Supervisor, I will treat deferred maintenance as a line item, not a footnote. I will push for a published, dollar-denominated backlog estimate from every District 5 agency every year, require that capital improvement plans account for sea level rise and wildfire risk in their project prioritization, and fight for coordinated infrastructure planning so that a water district replacing a main, a sanitary district relining a sewer, and the city repaving a road are not digging up the same street three years apart. Growth is an opportunity. Bad accounting wastes it

Pillar 2: Modernize Marin for the Density Era

Marin’s tax and fee system was built for subdivisions, not today’s dense housing. A single new apartment building can add hundreds of students, drivers, and service users, yet under flat parcel taxes it often pays the same as the house next door. On the impact fee side, many school districts still charge only the basic Level 1 fee, recently about $5.17 per square foot, even when their own studies show the real school facility cost of new housing is significantly higher. That gap does not vanish. It lands on existing residents through new parcel taxes, bond measures, and higher rates. At the same time, state law now expects stronger, regularly updated nexus studies under AB 602 and the Sheetz decision, which small districts struggle to deliver on their own. I support modernizing parcel taxes so they scale with building size and units, and building a shared countywide impact‑fee and nexus‑study service that local agencies can plug into. Growth should pay its honest share for the schools and infrastructure it uses, so homeowners are no longer the silent backstop.

Impact fees are not just a cost-recovery tool, they are one of the few remaining levers a community has to influence where and how growth actually lands. In a post-SB 35 world where much of traditional zoning discretion has been preempted, a well-designed fee schedule functions as a transparent price signal: full fees in locations where new infrastructure is expensive and capacity is thin, reduced or waived fees in areas where roads, utilities, schools, and fire service already have room. A partial or full waiver in a place like Hamilton, where surplus federal infrastructure and open land can absorb growth at low marginal cost, is a defensible incentive that pulls housing toward the location that best serves the community. The same waiver applied to a constrained downtown block with no surplus parking, no excess sewer or water capacity, and an already-stretched fire response zone is not an incentive, it is a subsidy for harm, quietly transferring tens of millions in real infrastructure costs onto existing residents. The point is not to block housing anywhere; it is to make the fee schedule honest about what growth actually costs in each location, and then use targeted reductions where the community genuinely benefits, transit-adjacent infill with existing capacity, family-oriented ownership units, or projects that fill gaps in the local housing stock, rather than granting blanket waivers that reward whichever developer games the system most effectively.

Pillar 3: Open Government, No Exceptions

The Brown Act is not a talking point. It is the law that guarantees you a seat at the table when decisions are made about your money and your community. But that right is only real if meetings are actually accessible. The Board of Supervisors meets at 9:00 a.m. on weekdays. The Novato Fire District meets at 9:00 a.m. NUSD and the City of Novato schedule meetings that conflict with each other. If you work, if you have children, if you cannot take a day off to sit in a government chamber, the process was not designed with you in mind. As your Supervisor, I will push every District 5 agency to meet at times working residents can attend and to coordinate calendars so no one is forced to choose who to hold accountable. I will hold quarterly public forums across Novato, Ignacio, Bel Marin Keys, Black Point, Green Point, and Indian Valley where residents set the agenda, and I have already called for candidate forums because voters deserve to hear hard answers before ballots arrive May 4th.

Measure M asked voters to trust stronger financial controls, but it also replaced the independently elected Auditor-Controller with a position appointed by the Board itself, the same body it oversees. Audits confirm numbers. Committees advise. But no one is independently asking whether decisions are sustainable, effective, or duplicative before the consequences arrive. An Inspector General fills that gap: independent review of performance, contracts, and long-term risk that does not report through the structure it examines. That is how I will govern, in the open, on the record, and accountable to you.