We shouldn't be cutting the heart out of our community—like our library staff—to fund a bloated back-office. I propose an immediate audit of Internal Service Charges to find the real savings. City departments currently pay each other hidden fees for services that are often outdated or inefficient. We are maintaining a fleet of underutilized sedans and expensive printing facilities in a digital-first era. By auditing and consolidating these internal cost centers, we can flag losses for immediate elimination. My goal is to move Beaverton from a model of hidden bureaucracy to one of visible value, ensuring every tax dollar supports the services residents use, not the machines the city no longer needs.

A city's budget is a statement of its values. If we are cutting front-line library assistants—the very people who serve our children and seniors—while leaving the executive suites untouched, our values are out of alignment. I propose a mandatory efficiency-based reset for City Administration and Human Resources. Personnel costs in the General Fund must reflect a healthy ratio of service delivery to oversight. We cannot justify millions in salaried positions for niche offices while our core services are on the chopping block. Beaverton is built on the strength of our Neighborhood Association Committees. I advocate for consolidating those lost administrative functions and returning to our roots of volunteer-led community boards. By deferring luxury soft services, we can redirect millions back into the verbose problems—public safety, infrastructure, and the essential services that affect every resident, every day.

When we ask residents to pay a City Services Fee to protect our police and fire positions, that money should be a locked vault, not a slush fund. Currently, a portion of this fee flows into a ≈$13M non-departmental bucket. This revenue is often used for administrative support—a vague term that can hide costs for things like city hall renovations, expensive consultants, and software upgrades. I demand a full breakdown of the non-departmental budget. We must ensure that not a single dollar intended for public safety is diverted toward administrative overhead or endless studies. By auditing these professional services and consultant lines, we can stop the leakage. We would redirect those funds toward front-line staffing—addressing our expiring levies and recruitment shortages with personnel, not more paperwork.

Beaverton is full of brilliant, capable staff, yet we are hemorrhaging millions every year on high-priced external consultants for things like urban planning, equity audits, and economic studies. It's time to stop paying outsiders to tell us what our own experts already know. We currently spend a massive portion of our Community Development and City Manager budgets on special studies that often lack a clear return on investment. Why are we tapping into a ≈$14M budget for multi-year contracts instead of freezing all non-essential external professional service contracts and utilizing our in-house engineers and accountants? Before any department spends a dollar on a consultant, they should have to demonstrate exactly why the work cannot be performed by existing staff. By canceling these bureaucratic gatekeepers, we convert administrative loss into city gain. We return the agency to our local workforce and ensure that every dollar spent on development goes into the ground and the community, not into a consultant's slide deck.

We shouldn't make it harder for Beaverton residents to invest in their own property. I propose a pre-approved design catalog for Accessory Dwelling Units, home extensions, and sustainable backyard offices. The city would commission a series of high-quality, architecturally diverse, and energy-efficient building plans. If a homeowner chooses a design from this catalog, their structural permit is pre-approved. No more $5,000 design fees, and no more six-month waiting periods for plan reviews. This allows us to increase our housing supply while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods. We are giving homeowners the tools to create generational co-ops on their own lots, turning bureaucratic bloat into civic value overnight.

Our current traffic system is a 20th-century relic draining our time, our health, and our climate. It's time Beaverton stopped idling and started moving at the speed of data. I propose replacing outdated static timers with Time-of-Day Signal Synchronization. By using real-time flow data, we can harmonize our lights to the rhythm of the city, reducing the stop-and-go friction that creates improved peak-hour throughput. We would modernize our emergency response by implementing Green Wave preemption for first responders. Furthermore, we would work to leverage V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) technology to broadcast Inbound Emergency Vehicle alerts directly to car dashboards. By using stop-cameras for automated enforcement of basic traffic laws, we can reallocate our police officers to the high-value duties—like investigating property crimes and community policing—rather than sitting at intersections with a radar gun.

Our residents are the primary shareholders of this city, and they should see a direct return on their investment. I propose a resident preference program to ensure that those who fund Beaverton get the first and most affordable slice of its benefits. We can launch Beaver Bucks, a quarterly resident preference program in partnership with our 'Main Street Small Businesses'. This drives local wealth, keeps tax dollars within city limits, and fosters a thriving business district. True prosperity is linked to public safety. A thriving business district generates the revenue needed to solve our recruitment and retention crisis for police and fire services. Sending a $500/hr tactical unit to a $50/hr mental health crisis or welfare check is a budgetary error that leads to burnout; By fully integrating our Mental Health Response Teams, we ensure police handle only high-risk calls, reducing officer burnout, lowering municipal liability, and protecting pensions. I advocate for using this stabilized revenue to create specialized housing incentives for our first responders and their families, ensuring those who protect our community can afford to live within it.

Our city budget shouldn't just be an expense report; it should be a local economic engine. I support a local-first procurement policy that mandates a preference for Beaverton-based businesses for city contracts, supplies, and services. When we buy our food, landscaping services, office supplies, or tech consulting from a national giant, that money leaves our community forever. When we buy from a Beaverton business, that owner spends it at a local restaurant, who then hires a local student. We would simplify the bidding process so that micro-lease startups and family-owned shops can compete with the big places. We aren't just spending money; we are investing in the very people who pay the taxes that fund our city. If a Beaverton business can do the job, they should get the job.

Leadership isn't a title; it's a responsibility. Before we ask a senior on a fixed income or a single parent to reach deeper into their pockets, the people at City Hall must lead the way. I propose a voluntary 15% pay-cut and stipend reduction for City Council members and top-tier administration. This isn't just about neutralizing the deficit; it's about proving that we are in the trenches with you. We don't just manage the budget; we share the burden. Our city is increasingly powered by an alternative working class—gig workers, independent providers, and freelancers. These essential roles have been ignored by traditional policy for too long. I am committed to a long-overdue discussion on how Beaverton can protect and serve those who don't have a traditional 9-to-5 but who keep our community moving every single day.

The Civic Guardian is a strategic commitment to communal welfare through the lens of rigorous fiscal defense. Macroeconomic data demonstrates that gun violence strips ≈$557 billion annually from the United States economy. On a localized municipal scale, a single firearm-related homicide inflicts a calculated societal and administrative cost of ≈$15.6million (encompassing emergency medical response, forensic investigations, judicial and prosecutorial overhead, long-term incarceration, and the permanent loss of lifetime tax contributions and economic productivity). Beaverton must audit gun violence not solely as a public safety metric, but as an acute fiscal liability that drains the resources necessary for a thriving city. The central mission of this initiative is to insulate Beaverton from federal budgetary volatility by hardwiring Community Violence Intervention frameworks directly into the municipal budget with the assistance of Oregon State Chapters of organizations like Moms Demand Action, ensuring our neighbors always have the resources they need to thrive. By deploying community-based personnel to disrupt cycles of retaliation before they escalate and hosting educational seminars and skill-building classes to empower our youth, the city achieves a dual-layered victory: protecting the lives and belonging of its residents while preventing the catastrophic financial drain of a reactive response. This initiative reallocates a micro-fraction of reactive capital into proactive municipal defense, ensuring that the spirit of gun safety is backed by the hard logic of a massive Return on Investment. We should treat violence as a preventable economic and communal trauma, securing Beaverton’s future through strict fiscal surgery and compassionate local action.

When static municipal fees, such as local business registration and service permits, remain unadjusted for extended periods, the resulting fiscal stagnation eventually forces emergency shock hikes of up to 150% to achieve cost recovery. These massive, uncoordinated spikes traumatize the local economy, forcing Beaverton business owners to absorb sudden overhead costs that threaten their operational margins and long-term planning. Amending the Beaverton Municipal Code to implement an automated capped index ties these static fees directly to the Western Region CPI-U, protected by a safety cap (set at the lesser of the CPI or 3.5%). This mechanism ensures predictable, incremental operational smoothing that keeps city revenue in line with reality without subjecting our neighbors in the business community to compounding inflation spikes or political procrastination. By shifting fee updates from resolution-based political decisions to data-driven automated formulas, the city eliminates the hidden subsidy deficits that lead to budget panics and provides local entrepreneurs with the fiscal certainty required to thrive in our own backyards.

The infrastructure of waste management in a fragmented community is a case study in recurring inefficiency. If we look at our street on pickup day, most of us will see a fragmented landscape of plastic obstructions—a scheduled obstruction of our public right-of-way that we have been conditioned to accept as 'business as usual'. But the math says otherwise. Lining sidewalks and bike lanes with sporadically spaced bins for the better part of a day is a failure of structural coordination that imposes an avoidable tax on our aesthetic, environmental, and fiscal health. While the legacy guard suggests reducing bin volume as a fix, your Auditor has reconstructed the entire route. The Pirog Project targets the math of The 24-Hour City, shifting from individual convenience to block-level optimization. By establishing a Centralized Pickup Node for roughly every block length of homes, we transform a fragmented route into a streamlined system. This minor logistical shift for residents triggers an immediate cascade of civic savings:

- Emission Reductions: Fewer idles and rapid route completion significantly lower the carbon footprint of essential services by eliminating the stop-and-start mechanics at every driveway.
- Infrastructure Preservation: Shorter, more efficient routes translate directly to lower maintenance costs for municipal asphalt by reducing the pivot and acceleration stress of 30-ton vehicles.
- Reclaiming the Heart: Reclaiming public space from plastic clutter ensures that bike lanes and sidewalks remain functional assets for people rather than hardware storage.
- Route Optimization: Centralized nodes reduce 'at-curb' collection cycles by up to 50%, turning a day-long logistical hurdle into a model of collective efficiency.

The Logic of the Node: The current model assumes that door-to-door service is a sign of a 'premium' city. In reality, it is a sign of a disorganized one. By centralizing the collection points, we are not just moving trash; we are optimizing the physics of the block. The effort to walk a bin a marginal distance is the friction-reduction required to save millions in long-term infrastructure repair and fuel consumption. We are replacing the fragmented approach to waste with a structured, data-driven utility path. The only variable left unsolved is whether the initial pilot should be prioritized in high-density residential blocks to maximize immediate emission reduction, or in narrow-street neighborhoods to solve the heavy-vehicle road-wear issue first.

The entry point to understanding Beaverton’s traffic gridlock is only a simple observation away. Go to any stop sign in any neighborhood—north, east, south, or west—and observe the next five vehicles. You will notice a systemic structural breakdown: drivers no longer stop out of obligation; they only stop if they're being surveilled or absolutely have to to avoid a collision, and many times their reckless haste has made it too late for evasive maneuvers. The cost—whether it be financially, temporally, or to our vitality—for this misperceived shortcut to save oneself 1-3 seconds is high, and its ripple affects us all in the long run. Drivers are treating traffic control infrastructure as optional suggestions, consistently prioritizing selfish momentum preservation over civic obligation and one another's well-being. The modern driver approaches an intersection in a state of high anticipation, jumping ahead mentally to scan for oncoming cross-traffic. They are checking for cars to yield to before they have even gotten to the intersection, let alone stopped and taken the 2-3 seconds required to scan the bike lanes and sidewalks. Because their focus is entirely on the roadway, cyclists and pedestrians appear to 'come out of nowhere' when really where they were was simply not looked at. Checking the bike lanes and sidewalks has become an afterthought (if given any thought at all). From private commuter vehicles to marked corporate fleets and federal delivery trucks, motorists are calculating how to maintain momentum rather than doing what is correct and executing a complete stop. Even our institutional transit systems are failing the compliance metric, with passenger-loaded multi-ton school and TriMet buses rolling right over crosswalk bars while executing neighborhood loops.

The structural irony of the rolling stop is that it introduces entropy via hesitation into the grid. Watch the intersection dance: drivers inching forward, tapping brakes, second-guessing cross-traffic, and confusing other motorists. This inefficient 'shortcut' of attempting to save oneself 1-3 seconds takes significantly longer than it does to simply use the system exactly as the [eight-to-ten years of college learned] engineers designed it to be used: stop, check, and proceed when clear—total stop execution creates predictable traffic patterns, which inherently accelerates system velocity.

The civic liability of this lawlessness is a consistent and massive untapped fiscal stream. Tens of thousands of vehicles bypass this obligation daily across multiple key locations, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. During the day, drivers time traffic gaps; overnight, when the streetlights change and physical policing vanishes entirely, compliance (when it should be at its highest due to limited visibility) collapses to near zero as motorists cruise straight through the white bars. Under our current system, this represents a catastrophic loss of missed revenue for our General Fund—capital that could be actively balancing our municipal deficit. (To ensure this grid functions with absolute socioeconomic fairness, this system integrates directly with Idea 34, Progressive Citation Revenue: The Fairness Scale. A flat traffic fine is fundamentally broken. A $250 penalty can destroy a working-class family’s monthly budget, while a high earner treats it as a minor fee for convenience. That is not a deterrent; it is a 'pay-to-play' system for public safety. By coupling automated stop-sign enforcement with income-indexed citations, the penalty scales relative to the offender's financial reality. The law treats everyone's struggle with equal respect, and the financial returns to Beaverton's General Fund scale exponentially when high-earning violators are fined proportionally to their tax brackets.)

The only individuals who have any reason to oppose a precise, automated system such as this are those actively violating the safety and serenity of our neighborhoods. Automating this baseline traffic enforcement delivers another boon, passively, and that's reflected directly into Beaverton's budget by restructuring our emergency services. Code enforcement shouldn't require highly compensated, armed police officers to sit in patrol cars 'babysitting' stop signs. By transitionary automation of traffic compliance, our police force is instantly liberated to focus on Priority 1 emergencies. This laser-focuses police department funding where it belongs—on violent crime and immediate public crises—while the automated grid quietly and continuously stabilizes our streets and funds our city without any need for new bonds, levies, or taxes.

Civility, capital, safety, and time. The math is absolute.

While legacy leadership continues to burn absurdly large amounts of capital on 'upgrades' that prioritize paint over progress, your Auditor presents a real-world, architecturally beautiful solution. The current renovation of SW Canyon Rd from SW Hall Blvd to SW Cedar Hills Blvd—a $4.8M project that remains incomplete and over-budget—is a failure in foresight on a magnitude nearly unforgivable in proportion. They've traded fifty-year-old cottonwoods and a functional corridor for redundant, overpriced crosswalks and ADA curbs that disrupt traffic flow—both vehicular and the adjacent small businesses' customers—on an already unpleasant stretch of Oregon Route 8. It's a significant lapse in reason for amateurs in suits to tamper with things that are out of their element, as seen with this major artery fiasco. Instead of sinking $4.8M into a 'shamble of a mess' that provides near-zero to negative utility to The 24-Hour City, your Auditor looks to the Davenport, Iowa's Skybridge model. For approximately $7M—a difference in cost which competent leaders would easily clear—Davenport built its iconic, ≈50-foot tall, ≈1,000-foot long pedestrian skybridge. A similar feat would serve as Beaverton's regional capstone, increasing the local economy.. (wait, never mind, let's not project how much these structural changes to Canyon Rd could bolster our local economy, we may get too upset to continue outlining this Idea!)

As a safe, high-volume overpass, this design allows for the direct crossing of Oregon Routes 8 and 10 (SW Canyon Rd and SW Farmington Rd) and the active Portland and Western Railroad tracks, eliminating nearly all need for pedestrian travel on SW Watson Ave and SW Cedar Hills Blvd—still a notoriously treacherous walk despite the legacy guard's tired strategy of performing 'safety theater'. (This 'theater' usually involves:

- Posting ineffective black-on-white speed limit mandates.
- Deploying awareness signage ('Your Speed is X' / 'Slow Down') that careless and reckless drivers simply ignore.
- Painting decorative asphalt that offers zero physical protection.
- Relying on the hope that a speed limit sign regulates a driver's intent.)

While Beaverton's skybridge need would put the project nearer to a span 1.5x longer than Davenport's, even at $10.5M-$14M, under the guidance of Pillar 1, The Beaverton Blueprint, for a project of this immense splendor and positive long-term impact, the difference in cost clears under rigorous logistical auditing. With The Pirog Project in hand, a solution on this scale demands a proposal integrating all four Pillars for a skybridge-esque structure connecting the Civic Center (just south of The Round and City Hall) directly to Downtown (just north of Beaverton City Library and Beaverton's Famous Saturday Farmer's Market lot). True to Pillar 4, The 24-Hour City, this framework establishes a safe, elevated, and weather-resilient 24/7 corridor that connects our two primary hubs without interfering with vehicle logistics on the ground. Pillar 2, The Neighborhood Heart, grows by leaps and bounds. This is not 'just a walkway'; it is a structural statement that leaves Philip H. Knight Campus jealous while changing Beaverton's skyline for decades, replacing foolish bureaucratic spending with a permanent city landmark (a huge win for Pillar 3, Power to the People). Pillar 1, The Beaverton Blueprint, sees this in the light that they spent our $4.8M to stain Oregon Route 8 on its pass through Beaverton from SW Hall Blvd to SW Cedar Hills Blvd, while this platform outlines the path to match—and exceed—Davenport's $7M baseline to build a multi-purpose city asset.

Yes, sadly, 'Hindsight is 20/20'; the cottonwoods are gone and the money's spent. However, one bit of good news is that we don't have to keep repeating the same systemic errors. We don't want more 'brochures for crosswalks'—those performative, surface-level safety suggestions like redundant paint and signs that cost millions but offer no concrete, physical protection. We want the structurally sound Four Pillar heartbeat of a modern city.