By the numbers

At a recent event someone told me that I should report on all I do for the city, not just for the city council, so as to encourage people to vote for me. I’m sure I do some things because I’m on the city council, and some I do because it is the right thing to do. It’s probably all conflated a bit so I don’t know what to say about which would have happened anyway, but here are some numbers I came up with.

I bought a Chromebook to do all my “city” business before I joined the council. I looked at the folder I download meeting materials into, and found 1.8 Gigabytes of files had been downloaded there since January of 2022. AI estimates for formatted documents, this might be about 18,000 pages. Maybe? Regardless, I am known as the researcher and reader of most of the material we receive, and I often provide feedback to staff which gets cleaned up before the meetings. Suffice is to say, it is a lot of work.

138 lbs, is actually a combination of 13 pounds of black beans, and 125 pounds of squash donated from our community garden (our being my wife’s and mine), to the Golden Thrift and Pantry. We had a neighbor drop out of the garden this year and I used some old irrigation set up, beans from Natural Grocers, and squash seeds from a seed exchange, to grow food for the pantry that they helped pick. It wasn’t too much work, maybe 6 hours over the season, but with a pretty high return.

Just some of the squash we grew

9.2% is what you get when you divide 50 by 541. But what is that? Through a Colorado Open Records Act request, I found that I had submitted 50 Fix-It requests out of the total 541 requests that had been made from when the system started in early 2024, until mid-September when I asked for the data. I also found that the next two most active people making submissions had made 32 and 27 respectively (I don’t know who they are, I didn’t ask). So just three people, across the entire city, accounted for 20% of the fix-it requests. Did they make an impact? Sure, in ways mostly subtle, like trash or blocked sidewalks or lights out, but also code violations for water, weeds, and illegal outside storage. I can safely say I’ll probably continue to make these reports whether I’m on the city council or not.

Paint peeling on Tucker Gulch, reported to Fix-It

160 people - The people who attended either Golden High School, or Mines events around the movie Feel it All and the associated keynote speech and Q&A from Drew Petersen. Based on the people gathered around the speaker, the unsolicited hugs amongst attendees, the questions asked, and the rapt attention provided, I feel really good about making this event happen. Through my efforts mostly (with an assist from Ron Benioff of Golden United), I raised over $10K in grants, worked with; Mines to get a venue, a graphic designer for a poster, Golden High School for a venue and attendees, Jefferson Center for support. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. While I provide the link to the 32 minute movie above, I will say without the associated talk and community building, it may not be impactful to you. Here is a quote from one of the attendees, “When I got home from your talk my daughter was much more willing to discuss the subject than she was before I saw your talk. Common ground open doors! The biggest take away going forwards, I think, will be her promise to not bottle up any of her own feelings AND to watch out for friends, to always try to give them a way to open up. So, thank you again. That is huge.”

I am one of the founding members of Up2UsGolden. The picture above is the concise summary of what we’re about, but you can read more at here. What does founding mean? Investing time and money. Website costs, design costs, signs, email addresses, registering with the secretary of state. (BTW, we are not registered with the IRS as advocacy, charitable, or other, simply a non-profit business with a community education focus). Lots of administration issues. I’m proud of our efforts so far and I hope we can do more community building and support for residents impacted by unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration. I also started with a few others the Golden Home Fund. The premise was that we would obtain free land (donated), build factory modular homes for sale at 80% of AMI. But interest increases, building cost increases, and just the shear challenge of creating affordable for-sale units was too hard, and we closed it down. I was also a founding member of the still ongoing Bike Walk Golden group. In 2024 I was very active in helping create the communication campaign for courtesy on the trails. That was both a creative endeavor and a passion project which was satisfying. We had our signs posted all along clear creek, in the city’s weekly update, and at pop-up events.

So, hopefully you’ve seen some of the impacts I’ve made on Golden. Of course I also hope you think their relatively positive impacts that you’d like to see continue.