Where I'll start.
Critical infrastructure
Roads, water, and power fail slowly. Every year maintenance gets put off, they get a little worse, and by the time everyone agrees it is a crisis, fixing them costs far more than keeping them up ever would have.
The city grades every street on a scale of 0 to 100. Our biggest, busiest streets, the arterials and collectors, average a 71.5. The streets most of us live on average a 54, and they are still sliding.
Here is the gap, in the city's own numbers. Albany spends about $2.5 million a year on its arterials and collectors and about $500,000 a year on local streets, mostly with a thin slurry seal. To hold all of those arterials and collectors at a passing grade would cost $4 million a year. To rebuild the local streets already in poor shape would cost another $8.3 million a year. We are spending about $3 million a year against a need of more than twelve million (Albany Public Works).
We rethink the whole approach. Fund what we already own before we buy what we don't. Plan the upkeep of every new street, pipe, and line from the first drawing, so we stop paying twice for the same repair. And explore whether a street operation run well enough could stop being only a cost. That last one is an idea to investigate in the open, with real numbers.
Streets that hold up. Water that is clean coming in and clean going out. Power that stays on through a hot summer and a hard storm.
Emergency services
Between July 2025 and February 2026, Albany's fire department had five calls running at the same moment 513 times.
Our firefighters and medics handled it, the way they handle a hospital that ties up their ambulance for one to three hours with a single patient, and a Life Safety division running three people where the work calls for about seven.
And our police delivered the lowest overall crime rate since 2019 while funding about 1.16 officers for every thousand residents, against a national average closer to 2.4 (Public Safety Commission minutes and APD's 2025 annual report). That is roughly half the staffing, and the numbers still came down.
That is not a story about a department that needs to try harder. It is a story about people who are already performing, with less, for longer than anyone should ask.
I want Albany's police, fire, and medical services to be among the best in the country. That means chasing outside funding like it is the job, learning from the strongest departments in the country wherever they are, partnering with other agencies to share what none of us can afford alone, and growing the quiet programs that stop a call before it ever comes in.
We ask our first responders to carry the burden of stability in the face of any and all threats to our safety, security and way of life. In exchange, we, the people they are sworn to serve, must work to ensure a supportive and compassionate community that holds itself accountable for what it says and does. We must tackle societal issues as a community. It begins with being honest about what our true problems and what is just noise meant to confuse and divide us.
An ambulance that is in service when you need it. A response time we stop missing. A fire marshal's office at full strength. Officers who are not the last line and the only line at the same time.
Uniting Albany
The most difficult problem I am signing up to tackle is healing the heart of our societal division. Much of the first 250 years of the American story were about building through taking. What if we make the next 250 years about building and giving? What if the Great American Reunion is just waiting for one city to be stubborn enough to not give into the hate and to begin taking steps back towards hope, towards family, towards freedom? I have lived in many communities across the country, Albany is special. There is a stubborn resilience about Albany that is needed to quiet the national voices, the online rhetoric, and constant denigrating of fellow Americans. It takes a community willing to look inward for healing, outward to demand the resources needed, and to each other to bring a vision of a better American to life. I am not scared of this. I am terrified of not trying.
What do we do next?
If you turn on your television, if you look at your phone, if you listen to the loudest voices in the room, you will be sold a very specific story from a very specific point of view. We are told, incessantly, that we are a fractured people. That the distance between our coasts is nothing compared to the distance between our hearts. We are told that the great American experiment, the most audacious political endeavor in the history of human civilization, is finally buckling under the weight of our own profound cynicism. We are told that your neighbor is not your fellow citizen, but your enemy.
I refuse to buy it. And I am asking you to refuse it, too.
Because the people selling you that division? They are profiting from your anger. It is a booming industry, this commodification of outrage. But it is built on a lie. It is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what this country actually is.
Do not mistake the noise for the truth. The truth is much quieter, and it is much harder.
Look back at the tapestry of our history. Do you think the men freezing in the snows of Valley Forge agreed on every point of theology or commerce? Do you think the abolitionists and the suffragettes were met with polite applause? Do you think Abraham Lincoln looked out at a nation quite literally bleeding into its own soil and thought, Well, the differences are just too vast?
We didn't survive a civil war, defeat fascism on two fronts, and put footprints on the ashes of the moon by pointing fingers at each other in the dark. We did it by reaching out a hand. We did it by deciding that the things binding us together were infinitely more important than the petty grievances driving us apart.
We are not a collection of warring tribes. We are not a demographic to be sliced, diced, and sold back to ourselves by pollsters and pundits. We are a nation of ideas. And the most revolutionary, the most dangerous, the most beautiful of those ideas is carved into the very seal of our republic: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.
Out of many, one.
It is extraordinarily easy to shout. Any fool can strike a match and burn something down. But it takes immense courage to listen. It takes courage to look at your neighbor, especially the neighbor who votes differently, prays differently, or loves differently than you do, and see a fellow American rather than a caricature. It takes profound strength to offer grace in a culture that rewards cruelty.
Our democracy is a marathon. It requires sweat, and compromise, and the stubborn belief that we are in this boat together, whether the water is calm or the storm is raging.
We have allowed small minds to divide a great nation, and I say we are done with it. We are done apologizing for believing in the essential goodness of the American people. We are done letting the cynics write the story of our future. We are done.
Look around you. This is your country. These are your people. We are the heirs of titans of history, men and women who stared down kings and dictators, who bridged continents, who cured diseases, and who fought for freedoms they knew they themselves might never live to see. They did not hand us this republic so we could tear it apart over a disagreement. They handed it to us so we could make it better.
It is time we remember who we are. It is time we stand up, brush off the dust of our own petty arguments, look out at the horizon together, and ask the only question that has ever mattered in the American story:
What do we do next?
I am fully aware of the limitations of this office. But I refuse to allow the size of the office to dictate how big I can dream for this city.
I wrote about how we get there at length, topic by topic.