The People have the right to decide what happens in their city. We must remember it is the people who grant authority to the government to begin with.

While I do believe that we need new land development code, the entire CodeNext process was done foolishly. To codify such a massive amount of varying topics in one single document based on the binary vote of 11 people makes no sense. There are way too many nuances in the code to accomplish this all at once.

This issue is highlighting two major problems with City Hall: (1) hierarchy and (2) deafness. The city was trying to cram (and has already) a top-down industry- driven market-based mandate to the people, from above the people, on top of the people. This is not a free society in action. This is a greed driven approach. While I do acknowledge and support the reality that there was indeed community involvement, it pales in comparison to what we are capable of, and with the size and scale of the document, there is no available bandwidth of the people to effectively vet the level of inclusion of their input in the final product.

This speaks to our lack of voter engagement, and how we’ve failed as a tribe to honor our most basic and vital function of the American system: voting. As mayor, I am declaring it possible for us to come together and achieve 100% voter participation by the 2020 election. How we will do this is a series of Listening Tours (6 days a week, 6 hours a day) to engage more directly with people, take copious notes, and incorporate this into new mobile/online technologies to enhance citizen engagement like never before seen, plus a package of voter education programs, public transit assistance, dramatic increase in polling locations, election day holiday, and much more. I do believe that no election is legitimate unless everyone participates.

My approach to the rewrite of the land development code would be to take the issues one by one, section by section, neighborhood by neighborhood, and codify each issue in segments. This way, we can make daily progress on our code. We must lay one brick perfectly at a time… This process will be the result of our intense new focus on listening to the people and truly discovering what they want and need, and adherence to a sacred principle of full-sovereignty. We must respect the rights of people and protect the rights of our planet.

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