As you may have heard, I am strongly considering running for Supervisor in District 3 against Diane Dillon and whoever else may choose to run. I am not saying 100% for sure because I am not sure what my chances are and I do not feel like spending all that time and other people's money on a lost cause.
Having said that, I would love to have the job and hope that you will consider voting for me.
What I am doing is meeting with different groups and individuals trying to get a feel for my chances and what the issues are, and soon I am going to take a poll to see what that may tell me. So far the results have been encouraging and I hope to make a final decision by the end of September.
This is the web site for the Taxpayers Alliance, everything on it was written by me so I will leave it up for those who wander by to get a sense of my thinking. I stopped updating it several years ago because few people read it, and I found that it was better to just send out emails. However, since my run for Supervisor started I have found that people are searching for information about me so I am going to start using this site for that until I officially declare, at which time I will make an entirely new site.
The number one issue I am concerned about right now is the county budget. We have entered a difficult economic period, and the budget problems that I and many others have predicted arising for years have arrived.
In a nutshell, we have overpaid a lot of employees for about the last ten years, and the pensions are even more out of hand. I have written and spoken about this repeatedly, here is one article I wrote for my Napablogger column at the Register for further info:
The second issue which will take more discussion than I want to put here, is land use. My general position is that I support the status quo. We will never build a whole lot of housing, nor should we, in the unincorporated county.
The problem is that housing, especially for average workers, is the biggest unmet need that we have in the county, and therefore a source of constant contention.
Napa has gone through a long period of contentious debate about development, and I believe a gradual consensus has emerged. If not, we need to reach one and end the land use wars. I see my role in that as a consensus builder, we need a strong sense of community to ensure the optimal future for ourselves and our children.
Right now we are reaching a point where I feel that for the most part the county is built out. I look at available development opportunities from that perspective. Available land for anything is a rapidly diminishing resource, and that applies to the cities as well as the county. Do you really think we can jam a lot more housing into American Canyon? Traffic busy enough for you yet?
Therefore, we need to look at the few opportunities we have left as the end game on housing here and support them. That means I support some housing development, particularly affordable or workforce housing. More mansions on the ridge lines are not something I support.
To that end, I support the Eco Village at PUC, for a lot of reasons, but that is basically the only place in the upper valley that putting housing makes any sense.
I also support Napa Pipe but I think the amount of housing is still too large, and I am hopeful that it will eventually be annexed into the City of Napa because that makes a lot more sense.
Both of those projects will take many years to fully develop, and I look at it as the last two places we will be able to build for probably 20-25 years. We need to do it right, we need to make them as much as possible for the average person's income and they need to be environmentally sustainable. Not much more than this is probably ever going to be built in the County.
Please email me if you have any questions or to get on my email list. I am looking for supporters willing to help me with my campaign.
thanks, Michael Haley
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