COLA LO Endorses Three Council Candidates

Core Values have made this community great. These values include fiscal responsibility, a focus on core city services, and a respect for personal property rights. There is widespread concern that the existing City Council refuses to recognize the burden increasing fees and taxes place on our community, and that they continue to leave critical issues unresolved while spending hard earned taxpayer funds on non-core projects.

Their focus today is on bigger government, more taxes, more fees, more regulation, and less transparency. This includes large visionary projects that will add to the debt load and fees citizens will pay in the future while other projects such as the WEB continue to linger unresolved and will also increase our fees/taxes.

COLA-LO interviewed City Council candidates individually to determine how their beliefs and values aligned with the Core Values. We made these interviews available to the entire community on TVCTV and on our blog. This was done to allow everyone in the community the time to view the candidates at their leisure. We hope this will provide for a more informed decision in November.

The interviews showed two distinct positions on local government and the need to grow local government (and your taxes and fees). The positions represented two radically different visions of our future:

• One position is to spend current resources, add to our debt load, and to significantly increase density to support larger local government with more fees-taxes.
• The other position is to restore the community to fiscal responsibility by listening to the needs of citizens, completing projects, advocating for lower fees-taxes, and accepting that Lake Oswego is a mature community.

We believe the latter position conforms to the core values of this community and will lead us into the future, which is why individually we endorse Jeff Gudman, Mike Kehoe, and Dan Williams. All are businessmen with private sector backgrounds and the overall experience, education, and knowledge to be excellent city councilors.

Please consider voting for all three.