For thousands of our families, Monticello is a bedroom community. We live here, educate our children here, go to church here, but work in the cities or in St Cloud. 

Not only is Monticello located conveniently between the two population centers, but it also happens to be a pretty cost-effective place to call home! 

Our taxes are low, our schools are strong, our parks are almost too-numerous, and our local businesses are expanding. 

But none of these great amenities are without cost. Each require careful decades-in-advance planning, and diligent focus on vision coupled with healthy respect for our history and tradition to preserve them.  We cannot take any of them for granted.

A hard but honest truth is that baked into the formula of maintaining the city we love at the low cost we pay for it is an assumption that the Xcel nuclear generating plant will remain on our tax base forever. (This isn’t only a challenge for Monticello, but for Wright County also.)

We can hope that Xcel will always be here, but must plan as if it will not. This means smart, cautious, methodical planning and process to establish sustainable growth in the tax base (the number of taxpayers), while keeping what each of us pay as low as humanly possible. Here too, I aim to lend the analytical mind, and a listening, servant’s heart of a professional family wealth advisor to the service of our city as your Councilman. 

I’m the proud product of a high quality Public Education from Monticello Public Schools and had the great fortune to attend an excellent university on the east coast. The education this community gave me here prepared me well to go toe-to-toe with peers from the finest private high schools in the nation. But mine is not the best or only path, nor can we take our local innovation (like the outdoor program) and success for granted.

We must constantly innovate. In pursuit of stronger access and education in the highly-skilled and technical trades, it’s an achievable dream of mine to help lay the groundwork – from the Council – to expand and establish greater public-private partnerships between our city, our school district, and our many high-quality private manufacturing businesses that call Monticello home.  This effort could catalyze a symbiotic partnership between our families, our schools, and our local businesses that can set more of our students up for zero-debt, high-paying careers, and tailor-trained jobs after graduation right here in Monticello! 

Today, too many graduates leave never to return, only to become saddled with inescapable debts, and separated by great distances from the support network and care of their families. Monticello is uniquely positioned to provide for another option. 

For any who doubt this dream, you need only look somewhat west of here, to Hutchinson, where they successfully launched a similar program to the great mutual benefit of the schools, students, businesses, families, and the city. Planning and partnership makes dreams reality. 

We need to keep nuclear in Monticello, and expand “New Nuclear” both here and across the state. The implications of energy independence are national, but they are felt and experienced most pointedly here in our local community.

Part of my small business experience – both as a consultant and an owner – has afforded me deep ties in local, state, and federal government, especially around policy development, regulation, and a deep understanding of process.

These relationships matter. This experience matters.

When my friends asked me to run, one of the reasons most cited is to serve as a strong advocate-voice to the state lawmakers and regulatory rule-makers who need to hear more vocally from representatives of Monticello – as the host community for one of two nuclear generation sites in this state. 

On the Council, I aim to serve as a bridge that protects the community financially – and with safety. 

Growing up here, I rode the bus, went to school, and played football with the children of our local entrepreneurs, and the children of their many employees. People who have never lived in a community like Monticello will never understand how truly special that is, and how special it is that in the three decades since, we still weave the fabric of our community so tightly around our local private businesses, our schools, our churches, and our neighbors. 

Monticello continues to attract new entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses. We are ideally located at a rare river-crossing between two nationally-enviable corridors of commerce, and smartly, and correctly continue to provide strong incentives for more and more growing businesses to move or expand to Monticello. This is a good thing, and few cities are so well positioned! 

We must continue to support the businesses that call Monticello home to the greatest degree possible, while aggressively attracting new companies, and with them, thousands more skilled, high paying jobs. 

This virtuous cycle alone will prepare us with the tax base necessary to successfully navigate the next decades of growth, fiscal uncertainty, and expansion that will be the certain reality of Monticello as the city on the edge of the bigger city along the most highly traveled freeway and rail corridor in our state. 

We are at a singularly critical moment in our last 100 years for prudent, cautious, and confident planning for that growth. This is especially important given the national political environment with respect to energy policy and the simultaneously uncertain regulatory future for our nuclear generation plant. 

Alongside that small business growth, which is so crucial for the sustainability of Monticello’s unparalleled low-cost of living and high quality of life, we need to remain a premiere destination for young couples to grow and raise their families.

If we get the small business side of the equation right, it will keep our community filled with a strong supply of high-paying, long-career jobs, and we need to balance that with strategic growth in our home-stock to provide the necessary workforce housing to support those jobs. For the foreseeable future, Monticello will remain an attractive bedroom community, and as the work-from-home trend in the service industry continues to subside, the demand for single-family homes in our region will recover. 

The expansion of multifamily development in Monticello over the last decade reflects the raw economic realities of where our city’s undeveloped land could provide the greatest return on investment for developers in that time period. We welcome the hundreds of new families that have joined our community in calling Monticello home over the last few short years, and together with them, we must continue positioning for a future that likely will require significant expansion of development in single-family and executive homes, especially as interest rates recover over the coming decade. The chock-a-block development of Dayton, Otsego, St. Michael, and Albertville is not yet at our doorstep, but make no mistake, it is coming. We need to establish guidelines that anticipate that development and make clear all meaningful planning procedures necessary to absorb that and other necessary economic realities we face over the coming decades.

We must do all this while providing the greatest potential for economic opportunity for our families and school district without sacrificing one iota of the critical elements of community, culture, history, and tradition that make our still-somewhat-sleepy riverside city so uniquely special.  

That, as I see it, is the critical internal planning and growth conflict we face over the coming decades. We need not sacrifice who and what we are to the inevitability of what is coming. If we fail to plan, we will lose who we are, but if we cautiously, courageously, and diligently plan and establish clear processes for growth, everything will be alright, Monticello will thrive, and we will shine more brightly than most ever imagined. 

For all the division and damage the last four years have wrought, some good things have come from it. In the decade leading up to the pandemic years our nation saw a strong trend toward greater social isolation and deeper dependence on technology for communication with our friends and neighbors. Social clubs and churches struggled with declining memberships and attendance, and communities across the country struggled to find meaningful ways to encourage greater civic participation and opportunities for togetherness. 

While none of these areas of social connectedness have seen full recovery to levels we’d known nationally in decades past, Monticello has anecdotally recovered better than most. Much of this has been a result of intentionality on the part of Mayor Hilgart, an intentionality I aim to support! 

During the lockdown, we came to know painfully what we were missing, what we had been slowly losing for quite some time. It has been a great point of pride to see neighborhood picnics and BBQs pop up organically around Monticello. While recovery has surely been slow, organizations like MontiArts, the Lions, Rotary, (to name a few), and other more ad-hoc associations have taken significant steps. Community events like Let’s Chalk, Brewfest, and countless local-business sponsored live music offerings around town are a great start!

It has also been a significant blessing to see so many new, young families flocking to our local churches – especially in my home parish of St. Henry Catholic Church. Singing for Mass, reading the Scriptures, and participating in small groups, which form the fabric of our community, are the highlight of each week for me. Everyone in our community has been pulling hard to extend the hand of neighborliness and that doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it has relied upon intentional leadership from our social, religious, and civic organizations and has been a personal point of great pride to witness. 

However, not all is gumdrops and roses. The Wright County Sheriff’s department has seen a significant uptick in calls for service from Monticello over the last handful of years, warranting  greater contracted service hours with the City. Furthermore, with the blessings of three-lane interstate all the way to Monticello has come a significant increase in the calls to severe crashes requiring the service of our Volunteer Fire Department. We must continue to fully fund these critical institutions, thank them, and support them. But support isn’t only about dollars and cents. 

When we know our neighbors, we look out for our neighbors. With growth in our city comes the potential for lessened connectedness in our city and neighborhoods, we should fight against this with heightened intentionality. 

A rapidly growing city certainly cannot impose neighborliness and a greater sense of community, but it can incentivize it, and, alongside our informal community partners, must. In the inner-ring suburbs, where neighbors are disconnected from neighbors, isolation while surrounded by a great many neighbors you never see can be the norm. In Monticello, we here all learned it in an even more starkly abrupt and hard way. With light-handed, intentional leadership we can strive to never experience or perpetuate that isolation again, and can far surpass what we even knew a few short years ago was possible. 

If Monticello unifies our vision, our unique opportunities, and our history along the lines of the policy objectives identified above, I think Monticello can remain the Gateway to Greater for many decades to come. 

If we acknowledge and take advantage of our role as the Gateway to Greater Minnesota, and if we fight for, defend and grow each of these other “Greaters” our growing city’s best days lie ahead.

As I see it, that’s the pathway to a Greater Future that I was asked to step up and defend. That’s what I’m here to fight for. This is why I’m running to represent you on the Monticello City Council. I humbly ask for your vote.