Whether you have lived in Aiken for ten days or ten generations, we have all decided to call Aiken home due to its unique quality of life. I will zealously defend that quality of life. As part of my specific initiatives under this pillar in my platform, I will ensure that we recognize traffic issues before they become a problem; not only on Whiskey Road, Silver Bluff Road, and Pine Log Road, but everywhere in town. I will also ensure that our neighborhoods are free from encroachment. Wherever you live in town, you should be able to sleep at night knowing that your neighborhood will still have the character tomorrow that it has today.

And we can do this while respecting property rights. While I will always prefer greenspace to blacktop, I also do not want a local government that can tell us what we can and can’t do with every blade of grass in our lawns. And unless there’s a compelling interest on the part of the city, you should be left alone to run your neighborhoods the way you see fit.

We need local government that has the courage to act when it should, the restraint to not act when it shouldn’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. When government gets involved in issues that are not part of its mission, we taxpayers lose. Thus, wise use of local government is the backbone of fiscal responsibility. Specifically, I will continue the initiative to have all of Aiken city government’s expenditures put online. If we can see where every dollar of our tax money is being spent, our city government will think twice about spending money where it shouldn’t.

If you own a family business, I have good news - we are in the same family. My wife has a horse training business and I have a downtown tour business. We understand the fears, challenges, and triumphs of being in business. You’ll hear me talk a great deal about Aiken’s character, and there are two things that provide us this character. First are things such as the Hitchcock Woods, the Horse District, our historical homes, and the like. Second, our family-owned businesses are part of Aiken’s character. Yet recently we’ve been erecting barriers to the success of the businesses that give us this great quality of life.

Specifically, the price of business licenses has become punitive and excessive. When you first received a business license or renewed one in times past, you paid a nominal, flat fee. Now you pay based on your gross receipts. Therefore, the more successful you are and the more you serve the community, the more you pay. I will fight to reverse that.

Everywhere I go I hear the same thing – we have too pretty a town to occasionally let our politics get so ugly. I am a strong and principled man, and there will be times on City Council that there is a right vote and a wrong vote with no middle ground. However, most of the time local issues are not dogmatic. Therefore I will take every issue on a case-by-case basis, and I’m approachable, reasonable and easy-going. Seven councilmen and councilwoman cannot know everything, so I will encourage more citizen participation in local government. When citizen ideas are implemented in the city, citizens feel empowered and the discourse is less divisive.