Let’s talk Kingston.

I believe politics should be boring and functional, and that it shouldn’t try to govern art, community, or be trend-setting; it should enable the community to be what it wants to be. It should anticipate the boring and make roads safer and accessible. People make community, Artists make art and music, businesses help the economy go around, and politicians get sidewalks and roads fixed in enable the others to function.

Let me tell you about myself and my frustrations with this city I love. We keep receiving large sums of grant money from state agencies and other places, still tax dollars, and we spend them lavishly on new projects. We then abandon the old ones. And with the new projects, we fail to anticipate obvious problems: parking, traffic flow, and the effects on surrounding neighborhoods. We forget to finish them, like having no concession stand or water fountain at Dietz Stadium despite the millions invested.

We hire consultants to tell us things we already know because we live here. It gets frustrating to watch.

We need our basic needs met before chasing grants. We need cost of living to go down before raises for elected positions even enter the conversation. We need to talk about housing and cost of living together, not separately, not just celebrating buildings that don’t fit Kingston and measuring them by unit count. A “unit” is a person’s home. How people live matters more than how many units fit on a site plan. Hey, we can fit 10 more units if we cram these together! Not cool.

Locally, we’ve become a one‑party system. Nationally, I can support that party (sometimes) but one‑party systems shouldn’t exist in local politics. We have individuals holding onto positions too long, not passing the torch, not preparing others. We need Term limits! (I also love rank choice voting) I believe that the second you gain a civil‑servant job, your responsibility is to find ways to make things better, have a real idea of what that means, and prepare the job for the next person behind you, not hold a seat for status. The more people who can be locally involved, the better we stand to be.

I have ideas, I think about things in terms of solutions. I don’t want to complain about every project, many can make Kingston better, but we have a lot more work to do to make it more accessible to everyone first before the ribbon-cutting shiny new things.