Here's something you won't often hear from a candidate: Albany's budget is in decent shape, and the people managing it have done careful work. Our two-year budget is balanced. That matters, and it deserves respect.
Now here's the rest, because you deserve the whole sentence: it's balanced the hard way. Savings assumed from jobs sitting vacant. Funds shifted so the pieces fit. Albany runs the entire city (police, fire, parks, streets, recreation) on about 118 full-time positions, with a handful of maintenance workers responsible for every park, plaza, and public building we own. There is no cushion, and no room for new programs without naming what we'll do less of. And everything costs more than it used to, for the city exactly like it does for your household.
I've spent my working life with budgets like this. Nearly twenty years running a small business in this community: meeting payroll, wanting to do ten things and being able to afford three, and leveling with people about which three. That experience doesn't make budget choices easy. It makes them honest.
And honesty is what the next few years demand, because the biggest number on Albany's horizon is the one we just talked about next door. A Golden Gate Fields transition puts roughly $1.3 million a year of city revenue at risk (about a fifth of the paramedic fund alone) right as costs keep climbing. That's not a crisis. It's a countdown. The cities that handle countdowns well start early, model the numbers openly, and bring residents into the choices before they're made.
So here's my approach, plainly. Core services come first: public safety, streets and sidewalks, parks, and the Senior Center get funded before anything new. The racetrack transition gets a real plan: year-by-year numbers, published in plain English. Reserves get used for what they're reserved for (replacing a fire engine, weathering a bad year), not to prop up a budget that doesn't balance on its own. And before this city ever asks residents for more, it shows the homework: what we tried, what it costs, what it buys. Albany voters are generous when the plan is trustworthy. They proved it by passing the sidewalk repair measure by more than 70% in 2024. That trust is earned with specifics, before the ask.
I'm not bringing a list of things to cut, and I'm not bringing a list of promises to spend. I'm bringing a habit: understand the numbers, listen to the people they affect, and decide in the open. That's how I've run a business for twenty years. It's how I'll treat your money.