Candidate for
Council Member; Town of North Salem

I will work to keep our Town both affordable and a safe and pleasant community to live by promoting policies that deal with escalating property taxes,future growth, environmental degradation,and quality of life issues. Our middle income residents cannot afford to continue to pay the highest property taxes in the U.S. In order to control constantly rising property taxes i advocate that the Town expand the tax base with low impact development that requires little or no Town/School services. I also would promote cutting costs by exploring the sharing of municipal services with the School District, providing better management and long range planning of Town budgeting and finance. I oppose the enactment of a local property transfer tax as it will make our homes less affordable than those in surrounding towns,and it will affect both expensive and modest priced homes. i believe we should preserve open space. I would promote both active and passive conservation easements as a means to accomplish this along with assessment policies that encourage the donation of easements. Surface and subsurface water should be protected through environmental and land use policies and made affordable to residents through appropriate community infrastructure improvements. An important quality of life issue is traffic. We need to control traffic through better use of our police force and consider lowering speed limits on hazardous roads. We need to complete our Comprehensive Plan Update with a plan for the future that represents the views of our residents and ensures that the Town has a balanced land use plan.