As Mayor, my focus and daily work will be guided by the following priorities. Over the next few weeks, I'll give more substance and support to each of these ideas, and I'll also be supporting them with examples in our own community of ideas in action, examples from outside our region of things that work; and ideas from our community that illustrate their hopes for how we can do things differently in the future. Please email me with your thoughts and ideas, hopes and dreams and ways you can contribute to bring these ideas to life.

BUILD HEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS

We must have livable, walkable, vibrant, health-building communities. We should be planning our communities around health, walkability, and serviceability. On any given day, folks should be able to walk out their door and have access to healthy food and nature; businesses that meet their immediate needs; and community spaces that nurture a sense of belonging, community, and togetherness.

PRIORITIZE & IMPROVE EDUCATION

We must prioritize and participate in the education of our children, the mentoring of our teenagers, the training of our workers, and focus and direction of our universities and colleges. We must have more access to preschool for our youngest children. We must have strong services for pre apprenticeship training and mentoring for our out of school and underemployed young adults. We must have relevant and meaningful primary and secondary education to prepare our youth for opportunities in the trades, entrepreneurship and higher education - give them choices. And we must align our training programs and university programs with the emerging opportunities and needs of our communities.

BUILD SAFETY, TRUST & RESPECT

Our police, fire protection services and other first responders must reinforce a culture of safety, trust, respect, and community strength. Our public servants should be from our community; involved in problem solving with the community; and be setting the standard for a healthy, safe and collaborative community. They should be effectively trained to de-escalate situations and build trust; be proactive, compassionate, and supportive of the surrounding community in which they work; and everyday lead with care. 

INCLUDE EVERYONE

Our City must be more equitable, more inclusive, more transparent and less segregated. Concentrated poverty creates many of the most challenging problems that we confront as a community. We must be both strategic and proactive with ensuring that every long term commitment of funding and every plan that we create addresses the root causes of our problems. 

ACTIVATE VACANT PROPERTIES TO STRENGTHEN & STABILIZE NEIGHBORHOODS

We must have a proactive strategy to activate vacant properties to improve our neighborhoods, generate revenue, and model innovation. The City of Buffalo holds title to nearly 7,000 vacant properties, largely on the East Side of Buffalo. These properties are an immense burden for our city in terms of maintenance and a burden to the economic vitality and safety of our neighborhoods. We need a strategy for using this liability, to create value and opportunity for the City.

BUILD INNOVATION & CREATIVITY

We must take an innovative approach to leadership that identifies the next generation of change makers, supports creative ideas, and opens doors to enable solutions to our city’s most challenging issues. There is so much creative potential here and Buffalo is unique in that you can come here with an idea and make great things happen. In government we can support this culture of ingenuity and weave it into the fabric of what gives our City strength and what allows us to be nimble and solve problems. 

SUPPORT BUSINESS & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

We must focus our effort on supporting, expanding, and growing our entrepreneurial and business community. Community organizations like The Foundry and PUSH Buffalo and entrepreneurial ventures like 43 North are leading the way with support for entrepreneurship. This is just the beginning! We must identify as a community that embraces our local businesses, that spends locally, that keeps our money here in Buffalo, expanding opportunity for Buffalonians. 

IMPROVE THE HEALTH OF OUR ENVIRONMENT

We must be conscientious and intentional about improving the health of our urban environment. Initially, we’ll need aggressive inspection and remediation to ensure the health and safety of our rental properties. Long term, we need a strategy for remediation of our soils, our watershed, and long contaminated industrial and brown field sites. Additionally, we need a city-wide plan for reforesting our city and expanding parks and playspaces. A commitment to planting 20,000 trees in the next 10 years would be a great start!

REPAIR OUR INFRASTRUCTURE

Our existing infrastructure is beyond its lifespan, antiquated, and inefficient. We must create a plan for upgrading our infrastructure for water supply, stormwater, and waste disposal and removal systems. We must also look creatively at our transportation infrastructure with a critical eye to desegregating our communities and reconnecting neighborhoods, while also improving multi-modal access to all corners of our city. We should have easy access to nature and our waterfront; and the opportunity to walk and bike safely in all seasons. 

REQUIRE ACCOUNTABILITY, COMPETENCE & TRANSPARENCY

We must be rigorous in our review of every City department with specific focus given to the following: their budget, needs, and challenges; coordination with other departments; staffing qualifications, strengths, and deficiencies; and short and long term goals. We must create an accountable and transparent budget, one that is equitable and that reflects the immediate needs and priorities of our city. 

CONNECT & EMPOWER ALL STAKEHOLDERS

We must "Connect the Dots" with a renewed approach to leadership and governance. Too many times the priorities and daily responsibilities of our public servants, community leaders, political leaders, business leaders, and our universities are conducted in a vacuum with little consideration for the overall organism, our city. These ideas may seem “pie in the sky”, but they are all very attainable, if we coordinate our resources, plans, and long term priorities. Consider underemployed young people involved in a mentoring and training program that maintains city sidewalks, inspects city infrastructure, and assists with the ongoing maintenance of parks, playspaces, and tree planting. Envision our university system, collaborating with our not for profit organizations to innovate and test strategies for remediating urban soils or improving the quality of our waterways. What if our vacant spaces could become incubators for urban food production or energy production? It is possible that our firefighters work in coordination with block clubs to investigate, inspect, and secure vacant housing to prevent issues or emergencies in the future. These are only a few examples, but in many cases, if we think more broadly and creatively, we can solve problems with the resources and people that are already working in our community. We just need to rethink our approach.  

REQUIRE ETHICS & INTEGRITY

Last, but not least, we must have a government accessible to the people, accountable to the people, modeling the highest standards of ethics and integrity. We must be guided by the engagement of our people, the leadership of our communities, and the wisdom and needs of our residents. We need to reject the self-serving, self-promoting, power seeking and corrupt paradigm of our current political institutions. We need to recreate and model a system of leadership committed to the common good and the long term economic health, equity, and vitality of our City.