Top Three Priorities

Police

Housing

Homelessness

The top priorities for my district would be, first, public safety with improvements in the police force. Second, addressing the housing needs by balancing private property rights with community needs. Finally, addressing homelessness by using a data-driven approach, reviewing how similar cities have successfully mitigated the root causes of homelessness.

Public safety would benefit from investing in the recruitment and retention of our police force. Many people are abandoning their dreams of becoming a police officer because of the lack of support we provide for them. This could be addressed in a few ways. Updating the training facility and training programs to include crisis training and Homeless Outreach Team (H.O.T.) training for the entire police force. This would have many positive benefits. One, it would allow more options for police discretion when dealing with mental illness and homelessness rather than tickets and arrests, perpetuating the cycle of incarceration. This, in turn, would also improve public perception of our police force and foster further support from the community. This positive perception would lead to higher recruitment. Next, retention would improve by including body cameras on all of our police officers. Studies have shown that both police officers and citizens act more civil when they know they are being recorded, which increases the safety of both citizens and police officers. The technology has come so far that it is no longer financially out of reach, and the automatic activation triggers, things like dispatching, unholstering a weapon, or turning on sirens, mitigate any privacy concerns and camera abuse. Increasing the safety of our officers and civilians through this technology would lead to greater retention, as they wouldn't be concerned about wrongful accusations. Finally, by maintaining a consistent dialogue with our police force about their needs, we can act quickly to support them in keeping us all safe.

The housing shortage is the cause for most of the concerns that affect us here. There is currently a shortage of approximately 27,000 units in Colorado Springs. In order to keep up with our growth, a city has many tools to address housing shortages. Looking at the big picture, there are both infill efforts as well as annexations. In order to best address this issue, we need to foster an environment that encourages an increase in supply. This would have the effect of lowering housing and rental costs and reducing the cost of living overall. In order to do this, we should look to zoning reforms to boost missing middle housing, such as multi-family houses, townhouses, patio-style houses, live-work housing, and courtyard-style developments. These zoning reforms need to reflect neighborhood inputs to maintain neighborhood character. The housing shortage could also be addressed by implementing a streamlined permitting process for development requests that fall in line with the community-minded form-based code of small-scale infill developments. As a priority, these streamlined permits should be where infrastructure has been identified as already being able to support growth. In addition, any further developments should be required to ensure a certain percentage of housing for low and middle-income residents in this streamlined process. In order to accomplish this responsibly, it is important that all developments are held to the same standards of protecting our resources, such as water, police, first responders, and electricity. This includes any and all annexations the city considers.

While Colorado Springs has been doing a good job at reducing homelessness for individuals, according to HUD, homeless families have gone up 12% in Colorado. Homelessness is a problem for everyone involved. It can be a nuisance for businesses, residents, parkgoers, and, of course, the homeless themselves. Most homeless people do not choose to be homeless and would not be so with few interventions. A policy that would help with this issue is a multifaceted approach that includes training the entirety of the police force to handle the homeless population, including mental health and trauma training, creating mandatory connections to services for homeless individuals and families, shifting enforcement focus to reducing ticketing and focusing on housing-first initiatives. In addition to this, other cities have been successful in reducing repeat homelessness, some even eliminating homelessness in their cities altogether, by utilizing safe camping spaces with co-located mental health care and work programs coupled with housing-first initiatives. Studies show that this approach is more cost-effective to the taxpayers than our current approach, which focuses on ticketing and incarceration. These sites have also been shown to reduce crime in the areas where they have been implemented and have the added benefit of supplying the city with more contributing members to the economy.