One of the things that I’ve thought about doing is having continuing the listening sessions, which I found personally as a resident, to be wonderful. I also think that it would be good for us to have opportunities like that. Maybe in the winter time in local establishments to help us get to know our restaurants. But I do think it’s very important that the city Council has greater exposure with the citizens and the residents.

I would also utilize things that already exist, um, part of not being the incumbent is doing a little bit of research and utilizing the residence surveys from 2025, which has been really helpful to understand what the priorities in Plymouth here with the residents, and also reaching out and connecting with the organizations that already exist here. Um, I think just keeping it transparent, open door for residents to be able to contact me directly is also very helpful.

If you haven’t already heard, we have these things called listening sessions. They’ve been very popular and I’m so glad that we did them. And I helped to champion that change that we brought to our community. But you already know about that. And I definitely want to keep those going. And they’ve been a great attribute partially for you, partially for us, because we want to be able to engage in in a dialogue with you. And that’s not provided as an opportunity in our forum. So we’ll keep those going for sure.

I actually spoke with someone who used to live in Bloomington, and I talked to him about this exact issue about communication, and he brought up that in Bloomington. They would send out a survey, a quick little vote about what projects they should move forward with in the future and how they should spend their money when building up highway exits or new buildings, all that sort of stuff. And I think that’s just a great idea and a great thing to have here in Plymouth.

We also need to remember that Plymouth, uh, 30% of Plymouth residents are not white. So we need to make sure that diverse communities also are represented in the city meeting with groups like our Plymouth, um, diversity, Equity and Inclusion Group. Um, and supporting things like the West Metro Asian Fair, which brought 10,000 people into our city to spend money.

I think one of the things that we have to be very careful on when we redevelop is using that land very purposefully, um, because again, we don’t have a lot of land left to, to develop one thing. That’s one of my priorities is housing. We want new families to come in. We want our seniors to stay in Plymouth after they’ve spent 30 years paying taxes. So when we talk about redevelopment, we need to make sure that we are including the infrastructure that supports housing for the lifespan as well.

But senior housing specifically, if you knock in Ward four, you will find out constantly. And I have been begged and people have cried. Seniors want options that are not rental. They want co-ops. They want condos. They want buildings that they have ownership in. Not that they rent.

There is one stretch of land left, the Bear Farm north of the high school. But we need to focus on redeveloping, bringing in the right developers to develop our city the right way, at the right pace, financially, even though we are sitting financially stable right now. Um, that’s mainly because of our high industrial base, and we don’t want to lose that. So when we do redevelopments, let’s not take industrial out to put a section eight housing in, um, the the trade off in taxes is on the stable.

So we’re going to have a different look, which might be mixed use areas where we can build some higher density residential, along with maybe some restaurants, businesses, um, so that people can live closer to where they shop, where they eat, hopefully where they work. Part of that is going to be transportation. Um, as a metrolink commuter, that’s something that I’m very passionate about. Um, we need to have a range of different ways to get around Plymouth. If your primary mode of transportation is not a car.

I live near the new Coburn’s and I love that place. It’s a great place to shop, but with those new apartments being added, there’s going to be more people, there’s going to be more traffic and I’ve already had to take backroads to get to my house. My whole family does it because we’ve been hit multiple times, sitting, waiting to turn, and there’s no turn lane off the northwest. And so I think making sure we make the proper changes to handle that population, I know in Vicksburg and in parts of Schmidt Lake Road, we already have those center left turn lanes. I think we added those in northwest and other places where we’re adding more housing. I think it’ll be a lot safer and we’ll have less issues in the future.

One of the greatest assets in our community right now is our industrial corridor. It is the reason that we’re the fourth largest economy in the state. And somebody years ago had the bold, visionary idea to create it. I don’t exactly know what’s going to come out of our comprehensive planning process, but I want the decisions that we make to be bold and visionary so that people 20 years from now think back to the council in the mid 2020s and said, wow, that was a great idea.

And so as we reimagine and we think about this next stage of development and redevelopment, I think one of the biggest things the city council needs to wrestle with is to not lose the unique character and nature of Plymouth that has made Plymouth such a great place to live. We don’t have a destination, we don’t have shopping districts and restaurant districts, and yet people love Plymouth.

First, I need to make it clear that this was an option from the state that we asked the state legislature, along with a bunch of other cities. It wasn’t just Plymouth making this ask. Um, we asked them for this half cent we it could have been it totally different amount. Once this was asked is then just to get permission to bring it to the voters. The things that we have in Plymouth need updating. Things in Plymouth are out of date. Things in Plymouth, um, need to grow as we’ve seen were redeveloped. We’ve talked about it up here. We need things that to grow in Plymouth. And so the sales tax we one of them. Am I for it. I don’t all I did when we made the decisions. My part in it was to decide what were the important projects, what could we put there. The decision is up to the voters, the decision on what to do in the council. We all decided to help with where would we put this money? And it’s a regional project. It is not something that’s just for Plymouth.

That being said, with a sales tax, you’re going to have a regressive form of tax, meaning that the people who have the least amount of money are going to be disproportionately affected by that tax. Um, so what I would like to do in terms of funding is look for state partnerships and county partnerships that I’ve helped build those relationships over the years, as well as private and public partnerships to see if we can fund it in a way that doesn’t affect our most vulnerable communities.

The initiative was called Play It Forward, which was why it was, you know, focused on these recreational opportunities for the community right now. Are we have three sheets of light at the ice at the Plymouth Ice Center. And our hockey community rents out the equivalent of an entire sheet of ice already in other communities. The need for that is there, but the cost is also high. Um, it’s better than maybe putting it directly onto residents property taxes by allowing drawing a lot more into our community, enhancing our local economy, and providing more opportunity for our residents who already live here.

Alternative than a property tax, because the property tax only affects a certain small amount of people in Plymouth, where a, where a sales tax gets everybody, um, 90% of the people that eat at Arby’s every day, because I eat there every day don’t live in Plymouth. And that’s across all the areas here.

I think we just need to look into other areas of taxing and gaining revenue in another way. We’ve talked a few times, a few people up here about that industrial tax base that we have, and again, that was built for a reason. It was built so that we don’t have to tax the people who live here as much. And so I think looking at that and maybe using that to gain extra revenue would be a better spot than just throwing a sales tax on the people where it could affect some people that can’t handle that extra cost.

The reality is data centers that are built in the US are not done in a way that’s environmentally friendly. Um, we do not consider utilizing the heat that comes off data centers like we like is done in Europe. It, um, they use an immense amount of electricity and water, um, when they’re being built. If one is proposed, the reality is we need to have we need to make sure that it’s done in a very safe way. That will. And it won’t over, um, use the existing infrastructure that we have. Um, we have to make sure that we have water for our citizens, not just for our data center.

With the moratorium that Plymouth has passed, the city now has time to study it. Take our time. Be methodical. When a land use application comes in, there’s a clock that starts running and we didn’t have any, um, any ordinances that contemplated exactly what a data center is or what the current version of a data center is. So thanks to council Member Pointers leadership, she put that proposal forward, and now we have the time to be methodical, take our time, not be on the clock. Get it right for the community and the residents of Plymouth. And I’m really glad we’ll have the time to do that.

To address some of the issues we’ve talked about the size of the data centers that are allowed, uh, decibel levels, water and electricity uses, usage and pay rates and other environmental concerns. Data centers can provide essential digital infrastructure and tax revenue, but they also strain our local power grids, and they consume massive amounts of water. Even if you’re using a closed loop system to try to keep the water clean, there’s still a volume issue. So in Plymouth, we are self-sustaining. Financially. I don’t see Plymouth as a good home for data centers at this point.

I can say right now, at the current state of data centers, I would say, no, I don’t think Plymouth needs a data center. It adds so much electricity, so much water. It’s going to cost so much more. For all the residents of Plymouth. And it’s just going to lower the quality of life all around. And sure, it’ll offer jobs and tax opportunities, but I just don’t think that taking money to make the quality of life worse is a good idea in any sense of the word. And so when it does come around where the moratorium ends and we do have to vote for it, I’d be against adding a data center.

Plymouth doesn’t need data centers. Not at all. We don’t need the money. We don’t a we don’t have the land. There’s nowhere to put them. And even if we had the land to put them on, it’s too expensive. The margins in that data center won’t work in Plymouth. It’s too expensive to live in Plymouth to build a data center, to build industrial. It’s expensive here, and that’s what keeps these negative projects out of Plymouth. And I like that. I like the direction Plymouth is gone.

It didn’t affect us at all. We caught it right away with the systems we have. If our systems wouldn’t have caught it, I’d say let’s tighten upon our systems. Um, it’s a lot of the reasons why I don’t do Facebook or none of that stuff because of the hackers out there. Um, I live a very simple life, and I think that’s how putting everything over the wire inside. So if we can keep it more in-house is the way to do it than putting it over the web without safeguards. Um, so, yeah, safeguards. But we got through it quite well.

In terms of the cybersecurity, I think it was a wonderful wake up call as we didn’t have bad outcomes. But it is a reminder that we are living in a different day and age. And this is another one of those unexpected, not talked about costs that’s going to be added going forward. Cities need to be very mindful of the cyber threats that we’ve are faced with, and they need to address that with added funding for the departments.

I’ve done a lot of work on infrastructure like hydropower and what you do when you design anything that’s online is you actually contemplate how it could be impacted, how what is the cybersecurity of your system if somebody can actually get to it? Sometimes you have systems that are 100% offline intentionally because they’re that secure. However, other systems you need to run remotely. So when you design them, you take them into account. And you you go through essentially a checklist to make sure these processes are in place. Plymouth did a fantastic job. They did everything right. And we need to we need to, um, encourage that that continues that they do it how they’re supposed to design things. Um, and they put those safeguards in place moving forward on anything else that we build.

I have personally worked in risk management for the past 18 years. So I can tell you from personal and professional experience, the best way to deal with risks is to prevent them from happening in the first place. And that takes a risk mindset and planning ahead for these types of attacks. I want to echo that. I think the city employees who reacted very quickly to this emergency so that it didn’t affect us as residents, um, also want to thank the city for being transparent about the fact that this happened. Not every city who was attacked actually told their citizens about it. Um, so I appreciate the transparency from the city on this.

It is a is a huge challenge, and it is only going to get worse and get worse fast as AI, uh, continues to come into our world, one of the most important things about cybersecurity is your defenses need to be robust. But you also on the other side, sometimes it’s not a matter of when or if, but when and being able to be resilient and responsive when it happens is as important as trying to prevent it from happening. So the fact that our staff was able to quickly switch over what’s an everyday automated process and shift it to manual. And they knew how to do that. They’d been trained and they were prepared. That’s part of resilience and that’s really critical.

I do not support the extension of our contract with FLoC in its current form, there is plenty of evidence to show that automated license plate readers have been used for good as a father, especially with Amber alerts. Uh, that’s something that we definitely want to have a quicker response. Um, public safety officers should have access to innovative tools to help them keep us safe. That’s a separate conversation in my mind with Flack. There are big issues with who owns the data. Uh, it’s not the city, um, how it’s stored and how it’s shared. So I have unique skills and experience in technology and risk management. I will make sure we have proper security in place to balance your personal privacy and public safety.

Until then, officially, I’m keeping an open mind because I do want to make sure I’ve heard all the facts and information about the issue. But with that said, I have heard from many residents who are opposed to the continued use of FLoC Alpa. Alpa cameras in Plymouth, citing concerns about privacy, data security and misuse. I’m trying to parse facts from misinformation. There’s a lot of that going around as well. Um, and on the other hand, established guardrails can address many common concerns we hear about in the news. Um, well, the cameras have been used to solve multiple crimes. I’m not yet sure that what we gain is worth what we give up. It is a paramount thing that our community has trust, not just in our law enforcement, but also in the tools that they use.

So the police chief. Has spoken about this, and he does say it’s a valuable tool that helps out the police. And I think that is an opinion to consider. But in the long run, flock cameras are not security cameras. They store database on where you’ve gone based on your license plate. And at the end of the day, that’s not security, that’s mass surveillance. And I think that’s just not something I’m willing to have in this city or anywhere around here.

The Plymouth Police Department has done a great job of keeping Plymouth safe, and has done so long before flock cameras were installed, personal privacy is daily sacrificed through smart devices, appliances and vehicles with a warrant. This voluntarily sacrificed data is available to law enforcement. It’s one thing to be recorded on Lowe’s camera. It’s another thing to have a governmental organization recording data and storing it. About me. The, um, the topic that also touches on is our right to privacy, our Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Um, and the right in the fifth, at the 14th amendment. That speaks to the presumption of innocence. Photographing our license plates without any cause is assumes that maybe there is a reason that they need to be photographed.

I embrace the technology. We need it for Amber alerts for security. If they’re used properly, like when they were first introduced, you put them in key locations, not everywhere in town. You put them in key locations to keep police from having to do high speed chases and things like that. Not every intersection, only certain ones and the data should be deleted within 30 days.

One thing that I have heard is that the Plymouth Police Department is understaffed. They’re authorized for about six more officers than they. And I think it’s important that we go out there and make sure it gets staffed. I think reaching out to high schools and trying to get people who are looking for a career future would be a great place to start. If we want to hire more police officers. I also think that we need to focus on the road infrastructure. As I mentioned earlier, because part of public safety is being able to drive and making sure that you aren’t getting into car crashes and that you can drive around safe.

I think one of the biggest changes we’re trying to make and are currently working on is, um, how our fire department is asked to be used. Um, there’s a lot more medical things that are happening. People who fall and they need help getting up. And so we we have been talking internally about what we can do to support our fire department. Um, and, and what changes do we need to make in equipment? Do we need to give them so that they can they can attend to these calls because that’s one of the medicals are the largest call.

One thing that I was really happy to hear, and again, from my nursing background, um, is that on Plymouth staff, we do have a behavioral or mental health specialist so that when an officer goes out, it’s not just a uniformed officer that is responding to mental health or behavior issues. Um, and there is also a social services network within it, which I think a lot of, um, our residents would, would, uh, value.

Um, cars have laws about wearing seatbelts. We currently don’t have laws about whether kids operating these vehicles need to be wearing helmets. I think that’s a huge public safety issue. Maple Grove recently amended their city code to help with some of the enforcement. Um, so the way that they did it is a rider that has violated the law would be issued a warning. After the second warning, they could be issued, issued a citation if they are underage, that citation could go to a parent. I think that helps us understand the laws better and protects our community.

The fire department needs station one to be opened. And Chief Axel is working on that. He needs to get firefighters hired to staff it. Because I brought that up with the new projects up at the Boulevard, three, four more apartments going in there. Got the apartment going in at Plymouth Plaza. We’re really putting a stress on our resources by adding all of these extra apartments, and we need to step up on our our public safety and our, you know, more about it.

Um, some opportunities, I think, that are before us is preserving NOAA the naturally occurring affordable housing that’s already here. Um, we need more options for our seniors who are here now, and they want to stay in Plymouth, and they’re looking for a place where they can do that. Um, also and again, council member pointers leadership on this has been great. But looking for ways to have more housing that isn’t rentals so that people can own something and grow their own wealth. As residents of our community. Um, and then also, I think there’s a real opportunity for us to explore co-ops as another housing tool in our community for people to have an affordable place to live and keep calling Plymouth home.

Sustain the homes that we have that would be considered affordable housing, entry level housing, which I’m not really sure that we have any of those in Plymouth. And so what I would love to see is an effort put forward to actually build housing that would be entry level, whatever that looks like in 2026, so that people actually can have a pathway to ownership, not just rental, which feels like a lot of what we’re we’re doing right now is putting a lot of money into more rentals and government subsidized housing. I would like to see more paths, creative paths, and effort to create creative paths to homeownership.

My mom and dad are 82 years old, and they don’t want to drive to new places. They know where their target is, they know where their grocery store is, and that’s the only place they drive. They have a right to live in their city. We need senior housing. Just think for a minute. If we could move 20 houses out of my ward four into a co-op, that’d be 20 houses that we could free up for first time homebuyers. I think that the LA money and all the other funds that we’re setting up are a great place to start looking at helping seniors and helping keep our Noah.

What I’m hearing from the seniors in Ward two, they don’t want to own anymore. They want to rent. They like my tiny home community that I’ve been pushing. That’s what I would like to see Plymouth invest in Plymouth city owned tiny home community to be able to keep it low for our seniors that have been paying to build this city over the last 50 years.

The other thing that really and this has been brought up several times, and I found this so many times when I Dornoch and it breaks my heart when you, when you chat with a resident who’s been here for 30 years and have paid taxes for 30 years, and when they want to go downsize, they are not able to remain in Plymouth. I think there’s a lot of creative things the City Council can do. We probably can’t solve all of the problem, but there’s a lot of creative ways that we can help support seniors and young people moving in.

I also sat on the homeless Advisory board for the City of Sioux Falls. So a lot of what we’ve talked about with affordable housing has already been mentioned. I’m going to transition quick to inclusive housing, which is the idea that with some of the affordable units that we want to see, we can actually create mixed income communities. So various incomes within the same community. Um, another thing that I care about is pet inclusive housing for renters. People like me who had a golden retriever who was a little too big for most rentals.

I couldn’t move into my neighborhood now, and I am a civil engineer with 20 years of experience. My husband’s a professor, but we couldn’t afford our house if we tried to move there today. And I do think that’s a concern. Um, the city can encourage, um, housing variety and and help to remove barriers. But ultimately, we can’t do it alone. We need to work with the county. We need to work with the state. We need to work with private, um, private equity or private developers to for different solutions. So I would actually say that the first thing is a workshop bringing all of those different entities together to say, how can we do this? Because the council alone isn’t necessarily going to have the solution to this. Um, so we need to work and we need to gather the ideas and then put together a plan.