Getting Down to Business

The first item on my platform reads:

"Bringing new businesses and jobs to Nixa to boost our economy and infrastructure and balance taxation, while supporting local small businesses and helping them to thrive."

Like all residents of Nixa, we chose to live here, rather than Springfield, because my family loves the small-town feel, friendliness, great schools, and close-knit community. No one who lives in Nixa, myself included, wants to see it become something completely different - if we did, we wouldn't have chosen to live here!

Something else that most people can agree on is that no one loves paying high taxes. Here's where things get tricky. We love our small community and our local small businesses, but if we want to keep taxes under control, we have to find a way to balance supporting our small businesses while also bringing in new businesses and jobs to help support the tax burden.

Nixa is a "bedroom community" - some 75-80% of our working residents don't actually work in Nixa, but rather in Springfield or elsewhere in the region. This presents a unique problem. When residents work in Springfield, for example, that's where they spend a lot of their money - on lunch, coffee, shopping, etc. And when many residents are eating lunch and shopping in Springfield, that can make it harder for local business to do well. In addition, the relative lack of businesses in Nixa compared to the population serves to increase the tax burden on residents. Businesses pay higher taxes than residents (and the larger the business, the more tax it pays), and bringing businesses into a community can greatly ease the tax burden on residents. But when there aren't enough larger businesses in a community, that's when the residents end up bearing a greater part of the burden.

In order to bring more money into Nixa's economy and spread out the tax burden, it's imperative that we find ways to bring more businesses and jobs here, but this needs to be done in an intentional, careful way, because we also don't want to hurt our local small businesses that we love so much!

This tricky task is something that I hope to be a part of as a member of city council, and I feel that my way of analyzing all angles of a problem, paying attention to detail, and sometimes thinking outside of the box will lend itself very well to working on this issue.

For this reason and many others, I hope that you will consider giving me your vote for city council in district 1!