Safety is Essential
•If citizens don’t feel safe, our city can’t move forward. We've got to get a handle on the gun violence that's killing us. Our vibrant future depends on solving our crime problems.
•A quick, reliable response when calling 911 is crucial. Your house is on fire or someone is breaking in. Call 911 today, and it's a gamble whether anyone answers. That's scary. The 911 Operation Center's dysfunction has gone on for years. Solving this should be an extremely high priority for Council and City management.
Housing for All Incomes
•A Comprehensive Durham Housing Plan should exist. It doesn’t.
•The Housing Plan should include strategies to:
-Preserve existing affordable private market housing
-Include natural habitat and environmental info with rezoning reports
-Use Minimum Housing Code Enforcement creatively
-Set target numbers for housing types
-End predatory practices in rental housing
•Deregulating Developers Won't Provide Affordable Housing
-To get affordable housing, we need to hold developers responsible
- Incentivize creation of affordable housing
- There is no such thing as trickle-down housing.
Better Roads, Lower Taxes
•Durham has an erratic record of maintaining our roads, a core service. Our older roads don’t have a good load-bearing base left: much has turned to sand. So fresh asphalt cracks up quickly, and is a mostly-cosmetic waste of money. Systematic maintenance saves money over time.
•We've got a deferred maintenance hole to dig out of.
•Keeping taxes as low as possible should be a goal. Accelerating property taxes displace low and fixed income households.
•Every taxpayer dollar spent should accomplish something. All city programs should include quantifiable measures of success. Programs that don't accomplish their goals should not keep being funded unless there are compelling reasons to explain the lack of measurable benefit.
Clean Water Now and for the Future
•Durham needs a long-term Water Preservation Plan.
•Our water use exceeds—by more than a million gallons a day— the rated daily capacity of our two main reservoirs.
•“Forever Chemicals” related to Teflon and PFOS/PFAS contaminate our water at 4 to 6 times the current EPA action level.