Practical, hands-on representation for Lakeside. Fixing what's broken, opening up what's been fenced off, and watching every dollar the way you'd watch your own.
Specific, local, fixable problems that a councillor can move on.
Too many Lakeside streets and pipes sit on a repair list nobody can actually find. As a landlord, I deal with maintenance timelines every week, and residents deserve the same standard: a public issue tracker for roads, sewers, and water mains, with real dates attached, not a call centre that goes nowhere.
The goal is simple: when something breaks, you should be able to see that it's been reported, when it's scheduled, and when it's done.
Lakeside needs more than upkeep, it needs investment in the places people gather. That means looking seriously at expanding recreation and community programming for kids, seniors, and everyone in between, and it means finally moving on redeveloping key sites like Centre 70 into something the neighbourhood is proud of, instead of letting it sit underused.
Food security is a real problem for a lot of Lakeside households, and there are local answers worth building on. That includes expanding initiatives like Fines for Food, which turns bylaw penalties into food bank support instead of dead-end fines, and pushing Kingston to get serious about vertical farming technology so more of what we eat can be grown right here, year-round.
Every dollar wasted on a bloated or poorly scrutinized contract is a dollar that isn't fixing a road or funding a program. I'll bring the same scrutiny to city contracts that I bring to a project budget in commercial real estate: asking hard questions before money moves, not after it's spent.
Right now one of the best natural sand beach coves on our waterfront sits fenced off behind an industrial site, unused and inaccessible to the people who live minutes away. That's a waste of a genuine public asset. I'll push hard for public trail and beach access along this shoreline, so Lakeside residents can finally use what should have been theirs all along.