Age: 70
Address: 38 Lane Ridge Road Claremont NH
Years lived in Claremont: 3+
Community organizations you belong to: Sullivan County Republican Committee Vice Chair, City Council’s Policy Committee, Claremont Community Center née CCTV board of directors and show host, a member of the team advising the city manager on the redesign of the City’s website, and Claremont Makerspace.
Employment: I am a retired computer scientist with nearly a half-century of experience developing large-scale mission-critical systems for Wall Street firms.
Incumbent? If so, how many terms? No
What do you believe are the top 3 issues facing Claremont?
The top three issues in Claremont are:
The state of the roads. We have many infrastructure needs, but paving our roads in a fiscally sustainable manner is most important.
The city’s value proposition to taxpayers. We pay high taxes yet get schools and infrastructure that disincentivizes potential residents and business growth.
Access to city information. We need to improve information access on many fronts drastically. From online access to current city ordinances to emergency notifications regarding road closures, water supply faults, etc., finding, accessing, and acting upon important city information takes too much effort.
What do you propose to address them?
The property value reassessment process and the continued difficulties SAU#6 has experienced administering the school district provide the citizens of Claremont with an inflection point at which we can change the direction of Claremont for the better. This change requires the entire electorate to explicitly decide if two-thirds of our taxes should go to miseducating five hundred children or paving the roads.
Is Claremont headed in the right direction or the wrong direction? Please explain your answer.
Claremont is headed in the wrong direction. We pay more and get less. Most of our tax dollars go to schools that spend more and more money to miseducate fewer and fewer children. Stevens graduates are not college-ready. Our roads are crumbling. Parallel to Pleasant Street, with its pristine paving, is Franklin Street, which looks very much like a Class VI road.
How do you plan to engage the public, get its input on city matters and address those issues with the council?
I plan to partner individually with each of the three ward councilors to have public listening sessions, office hours as they are sometimes known, at convenient locations and times in each ward, such as the Senior Center, to provide a means for the electorate to provide direct input on the city’s business outside of the Citizen Forum of the council meetings or electronic means of communication.
How could city government be more transparent to the public it serves?
The city manager’s effort to transform the city’s website is the critical component required to make government more transparent. The website must become a vehicle by which the city’s information becomes findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. In plain English, everyone must be able to easily find what they’re looking for, access it by simply clicking, be able to see it on your phone, laptop, or desktop, and easily use the information in an email to your elected representative, accountant, legal representative, etc. Specifying the requirements for the new website will enable the required transparency.
Do emergency responders need mental health training? If so, how should it be provided?
Claremont’s emergency responders must be adequately trained to handle various circumstances. Mental health training, de-escalation training, and less-than-lethal force training are all required, but these needs should not create new mental-health-specific roles.
Businesses on Pleasant St. have not only had to contend with the COVID shutdown but also Pleasant Street’s construction shutdown. What, if anything, should Claremont do to assist businesses struggling to recover from these events?
Continued development of our downtown core will best be served by rationalizing city ordinances that restrict development for no apparent purpose. Enforcing personal, stylistic choices via ordinances and committees does not help business development.
What do you like about Claremont?
The people and the environment are the two things I like the most about Claremont.
If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change about it?
Given omnipotence, I would change the educational opportunities so that Claremont is widely perceived as the epicenter of educational excellence, providing a range of choices and options and competency results that attract young families and new businesses. And then I’d pave all of the roads.
What would you like voters to know about you?
My wife and I chose Claremont to spend our golden years due to the apparent potential of downtown, the quality of the people we met and the location of our forever home.
The community’s response to COVID confirmed our judgment.
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