Commitment to Transparency
I hope to bring more transparency to how the Richmond City government operates in order to improve efficiency and reduce corruption. In line with that, my campaign platform is as detailed as it is because I want you to know where I stand on the issues. If you have any questions about my positions that aren’t answered on this page, you are more than welcome to reach out to the campaign!
Transportation
In 2020 I was one of the first people to advocate for free public transit in Richmond in response to the pandemic. The cornerstone of my transportation plan is my support for keeping GRTC access free without compromising the coverage or frequency of service. Furthermore, I support making significantly-higher investments in pedestrian, cycling, and bus infrastructure throughout Richmond than the city government is currently appropriating.
Pedestrian infrastructure should include more sidewalks and more designated crosswalks. Cycling infrastructure should include many more protected bike lanes, including an effort to connect them into a continuous network, as well as a dramatic expansion of locations to securely park one’s bike. Bus infrastructure should include the installation of shelters and benches at every bus stop. Importantly, there needs to be an increase of routes, their frequency, and their reliability to ensure every citizen has sufficient access to public transit no matter where they live in the city.
Additionally, I support expanding mixed-use zoning to allow people to live closer to where they work and shop, which makes more transportation options practical and reduces the number of traffic-creating trips that people need to make in the first place. In particular, on the Richmond City Council I will push to allow the construction of more grocery stores and more corner stores to eliminate the food desert that covers too much of the 6th District.
Food Access
Much of the City of Richmond is a food desert. As a result of historic underinvestment and gentrification in some areas of the city, Richmond has long had food-insecure and historically marginalized communities. For too many, access to food is limited to highly processed food sold at convenience stores and corner markets in our most vulnerable neighborhoods. Local developments in the area are generally not resident-driven and do not meet the needs of all residents. Dollars spent on food mostly do not stay within the local economy and the nearest farmers markets are not within convenient walking distance.
Initially, a few of we concerned residents sought to bring a grocery store to the Northside. Unfortunately no grocer that we contacted wanted to come to our area. We tried many methods to advance our cause but received little institutional support. We were not deterred because the issue of food insecurity had not gone away. We pivoted from trying to acquire a new grocer to directly providing healthy produce for the most vulnerable of our community.
This led to us forming the Northside Food Access Coalition, an organization I’m immensely proud of my involvement with and a model I would like to expand. The Coalition was formed to address the disparities in our food system I outlined above, and uses an innovative food access approach that is a farmers market/community supported agriculture (CSA) hybrid called The Northside Farmers Market. The Coalition strives to build health and wealth equity for BIPOC farmers, city residents, business owners, and beyond by increasing access to healthy food and making our local food economy more resilient.
Education
Most politicians will say that they’re proponents of strengthening the educational system, but whenever there is a tax cut looming cuts are almost always made to education first. A budget priority for me would be fully funding K-12 education regardless of zip code. Every child should be able to learn in a safe and healthy environment.
Rather than the ‘lab school’ model being pushed by Governor Youngkin, I’d like to see our schools become ‘community schools’. By that I mean that these schools, through various partnerships, could function as a site of increased wrap-around services and after-school activities for the kids that attend them. Beyond that, schools can become better integrated into the surrounding community to provide the neighborhoods they serve with spaces for community formation.
On City Council I will work with the School Board to push for equity in the classroom. Additional funds to RPS should be targeted towards priorities like teacher recruitment and retention, as well as expansions in educational opportunities like more accessible and advanced course offerings.
In the event new state and federal funds for school capital spending do not materialize next year I would push for the Council to make those investments. To hold RPS accountable to students and their families, I support periodically-recurring audits of the school system’s equity and finances.
Housing
More and more people are choosing Richmond as their desired place to live and work. Especially as the prevalence of remote work has grown, people are moving here from around Virginia and from elsewhere in this country with salaries large enough to outbid many existing residents for Richmond’s housing stock.
Housing should be considered a right and not a privilege, yet with so few affordable options, our city leaders continue to prioritize pushing uneven and inequitable developments through. The process used is too prone to being captured by special interests, whether that be through developers allowed to donate unlimited amounts to the campaigns of City Council representatives and mayors or through the fact that folks who turn up to planning meetings are wealthier than the average Richmond resident.
On Council I would push for more transparent and community-driven development that would allow the community as a whole to better be able to give informed consent to what development does or does not happen. I think that to meet the city’s housing goals and fight displacement of existing communities we should encourage more medium-density housing developments instead of top-down ‘mega’ projects, and believe that wealthy neighborhoods should not be exempted from this trend. I would support measures like a requirement for the city to inform affected residents in writing about any significant development projects being proposed, as well as an overhaul of the rva.gov website to more generally to promote citizen engagement with the work of the Council and Mayor’s Office.
Property Tax Reform
One thing I hear from residents around the 6th District is that their property taxes are too high and keep climbing higher. At the same time that many people in this district need relief from Richmond’s property taxes, the post-Covid withdrawal of federal funds is shrinking the city’s budget. All the while, there are basic city priorities like transportation infrastructure and our schools which require more funds than they are currently receiving. So how can we do all that at once while keeping the budget balanced?
We can implement progressive property tax reform, specifically split-rate taxation (SRT). My support for this reform stems from the agreement among economists and urban planners that it would allow the city to raise more revenue to fund necessary city services in a fairer way while also doing far less damage to Richmond’s economy than the current tax system. Properly implemented — and please note that I would only support a transition to SRT under this condition — working- and middle-class Richmonders would see their property taxes hold steady or, in some cases, go down.
The same way that Bill Gates should pay a higher income tax rate than you and I, the owners of million-dollar mansions should pay a higher property tax rate than someone renting an apartment or owning a more modest house. SRT would ask the wealthiest residents of the city to pay their fair share. It also significantly reduces the economic distortion caused by the current property tax system, wherein the taxpayers effectively subsidize inefficient land use. With this progressive property tax reform, land owners would be encouraged to put land to a use that better serves the community (for instance, by converting a parking lot to a parking garage or through renovating a condemned property).
Environmental Justice
Most of the previous sections of my platform have significant implications for the environment. The more we shift to multimodal transportation, encourage more sustainable development patterns, and promote local agriculture, the healthier our environment will be on local and global scales.
We need real action on climate change, not just slogans, buzzwords, or commitments on paper. That’s why I support full implementation of RVA Green 2050, the city’s Climate Equity Action plan signed onto last year by the mayor and City Council. RVA Green 2050 is a roadmap that lays out how to reduce locally-generated greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030, achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and help the community adapt to Richmond’s climate impacts of extreme heat, precipitation, and flooding. The problem is that the city government isn’t acting consistently with the plan.
As one prominent example of this, City Council has been talking about removing Richmond Gas Works since 2021, when a separate climate resolution observed that “the continued operation of the City’s gas utility is an obstacle to the City’s goal of Net-Zero emissions”. What they have done in practice is to allow the continued expansion of Richmond Gas Works into the counties. We have to do our fair share to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as we realistically can or there won’t be a livable Richmond for our descendants by the 22nd century. That’s why I am pledging to unequivocally reject any fossil fuel industry donations to my campaign.
Another, lesser-known way that Richmond’s city government can reduce our population’s impact on the environment is to overhaul the city’s combined sewer system which regularly overflows and dumps massive amounts of sewage into the James River. The downstream effects on the Chesapeake Bay (primarily a reduction in oxygen-deficient ‘dead zones’) will be well worth it. We need additional state and federal funding to accomplish implementation of the RVA Clean Water Plan, and for its part, Council should be attentive to ensuring that work stays on track.
I would also like to increase the number of green spaces across Richmond and improve the evenness of their distribution. For starters, that includes improving the equity of Richmond’s tree canopy and supporting the work of organizations like Southside ReLeaf. In order to combat urban heat island effects, improve the city’s flood resiliency, and promote more accessible public spaces, I believe the city should adopt a long-term goal of guaranteeing residents a right to accessible parks and meeting that goal through methods like the creation of parks in areas that lack sufficient park coverage, as well as improved transit access to the existing ‘crown jewel’ city parks like the James River Park System and the regional Fall Line Trail that is in development.
Ranked-Choice Voting
Ranked-Choice Voting allows you to better and more honestly express your candidate preference, instead of having to vote strategically for who you believe to be the lesser evil. It can help prevent the spoiler effect, where similar candidates split the vote and allow a candidate that the majority does not support to win with a plurality of the vote. It gives truly independent candidates a better chance at winning and gives an incentive to candidates to try to appeal to voters beyond their base of support. It is not a perfect electoral system, but it is miles better than the current, “first past the post” system and if elected to the city council I would vote to apply RCV to future city council elections.