On January 4th, our community came together for the inauguration. Our community leaders and small businesses worked to put together a beautiful event that truly highlighted how open Columbia can be.

We haven’t been in office long, but we are already making tremendous progress at finding innovative solutions to our city’s problems.

To get started on infrastructure improvements immediately, we met with Good Roads and discussed outfitting our city fleet with their technology that can track potholes and steel plates in real-time. Our city vehicles will turn to the eyes and ears that report water main leaks and cracks in the roads.

We also met with our city HR department to discuss creative solutions to the city’s staffing issues. We want to offer part-time options and remove arbitrary hiring requirements that prohibit good people from doing good work. We want to incentivize great customer service, efficiency, and timeliness.

We’re working with our city partners, like Transitions to address homelessness and make sure that we are addressing the root causes of these issues. We’re focused on accountability for the dollars we allocate to these efforts. Investments made by Columbia will be in services that include job training and pathways to get people off the streets for good.

These are just a few quick examples of what we’ve been up to, and much more is to come. For the meantime, Columbia is open. If you’re looking to make our city better, come join the conversation.