John Sebastian
Name: John Sebastian
Email: [email protected]
Campaign Phone:
Campaign Website: sebastianformayor.com
Twitter handle:
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/people/Sebastian-for-Woodbury/61590811863052/
Candidate Bio
I've called Woodbury home for over 25 years. My wife and I built our life here, and we love what makes this city special — the green spaces, the amenities, and the people that live here.
I began my career as an auditor. I earned an accounting degree, my Certified Internal Auditor certification, and passed the CPA exam, then spent nearly a decade digging into the numbers and asking hard questions to find waste and fraud before they get expensive. My MBA then brought me to 3M, where I spent over two decades in strategy and operations leadership, setting direction and working to make things work more efficiently and effectively. This unique combination of skills is what I will bring to City Hall as Mayor.
Outside my career, I served five years as Board President of the History Theatre, guiding it through the pandemic and a major leadership transition, and continue to serve on its board today.
I'm running for Mayor because after eight years under the same leadership, Woodbury deserves a fresh perspective that follows the money and asks hard questions. I'll bring new energy and discipline to keep Woodbury strong, safe, and affordable for the next generation.
What style of leadership would you bring to this position?
I'm running because I believe Woodbury needs a leader willing to question the status quo — to ask whether the way we've always done things is still the best way, and to change it when it isn't. But that instinct is tempered by a habit from my auditor training: ask why before assuming you know better. When something doesn't quite make sense to me, I don't start by tearing it down — I find out what I might be missing first, then push for change once I understand the full picture.
That means genuinely listening, not just to whoever is loudest or already has a seat at the table. At the History Theatre, our board had debated adding handrails for months, tabling it due to cost. Instead of debating it again in a conference room, I started ushering during live shows so I could hear directly from patrons — and once I heard how strongly they felt, I helped move us to act. I did something similar by working alongside our stage manager during performances to see firsthand where our equipment fell short, so I could weigh capital requests with real understanding instead of secondhand summaries.
That's the approach I'll bring to City Hall: dig into the details myself, listen before deciding, lead decisively once I have, and collaborate rather than dictate. On funding, I'll start by building strong working relationships with our county and state officials to make sure Woodbury gets its fair share — and won't hesitate to fight for it, if that's what it takes.
What are your top three priorities if elected, and how might they be affected by growing uncertainty around state and federal funding?
My top three priorities all come back to one idea: growth and spending decisions in Woodbury should put residents first, not developers.
First, growth that puts residents first. Woodbury's green spaces, trails, and everyday convenience are why people choose to live here, and the 2050 Comprehensive Plan should protect that, not trade it away for whatever a developer proposes next. That includes water security. Last year, two new data centers came online in Woodbury pursuing the kind of water-intensive cooling that, nationally, can use as much water as a small city. While we're spending $330 million to protect our drinking water from PFAS, we should be asking harder questions before approving development that adds new strains on that water.
Second, real fiscal accountability. That means going beyond a responsible budget process to ask a simple question after we spend: did it work? As someone trained as an auditor, I want the city tracking performance metrics on major projects, not just budgeting responsibly on paper, so residents can see for themselves whether their money actually delivered results.
Third, staying a proactive partner with our county, state, and federal representatives to secure Woodbury's fair share of outside funding, without ever treating it as guaranteed. We secured $3.4 million in congressionally-directed federal funding for public safety and roads, on top of the roughly $375,000 a year Woodbury already draws down through HUD programs. Our water treatment plant is roughly 93% funded by the state-administered 3M settlement. None of it will last forever, so I'll keep fighting for what Woodbury needs while planning now for when it runs out.
What is the biggest challenge facing Woodbury right now, and where do you see the greatest opportunity?
The biggest challenge facing Woodbury is growth — not growth itself, but making sure it happens on terms that serve residents rather than just developers. Like many neighbors, I hear real concern that the city we fell in love with has been developing faster than our infrastructure and public services can comfortably absorb, and that decisions often get made before residents have a real say.
Water security is where this challenge is sharpest. We are in the middle of a $330 million investment to remove PFAS from our drinking water, the largest capital project in city history. Every new large-scale water user we approve, whether housing or something like the data centers now operating here, either respects that investment or quietly draws it down. Growth decisions from here forward need to treat water capacity as a real constraint, the same way we already weigh roads and schools.
The opportunity is that Woodbury isn't finished being built, and the 2050 Comprehensive Plan is the real chance to set the terms while we still can. I want that to mean more than good intentions on paper. That means setting real standards for what growth has to deliver: housing that works at every stage of life, and having large commercial water users funding their own supply and proving out their impact rather than drawing on a system residents already paid to protect. All of this measured against results, not promises. Get this right, and Woodbury does not just keep growing, it grows in a way that earns the investment residents have already made to be here.
How would you characterize the business climate in Woodbury, and what role should city government play in partnering with the business community to attract jobs, develop the workforce, and address shared challenges?
Woodbury's business climate is strong — nearly 2,000 establishments, steady growth, and real recruiting wins. But most of that success has come the easy way: finding open land for large-scale development, without always weighing what it costs us elsewhere — water capacity we're still paying to protect, or the added truck traffic wearing down roads faster than our maintenance budget plans for. That's real growth, but it isn't the same as a durable relationship with the businesses already here.
Earlier in my career at 3M, I managed bids for library modernization projects with cities and counties across the country. As those projects grew more complex, 3M couldn't supply a complete solution alone, and I learned the partnerships that worked were the ones where we treated other companies as genuine partners with something to offer, not as junior players there to be told what to do. That lesson applies directly to City Hall: the city's job is to understand what existing businesses actually need to grow here, then build real partnerships around that.
I'd also start a formal business retention and expansion program with staff conducting regular visits to existing Woodbury employers, not just when there's a problem, to catch friction and expansion plans early. It's a familiar idea from business — it's almost always more efficient to grow with the customers you already have than to chase new ones — and nationally, existing businesses generate 60 to 80 percent of new local jobs. Nearby Roseville already runs a program like this. I'd pair that with a small business incubator, ideally using vacant commercial space rather than new construction, and a real partnership with Century College to build training pipelines matched to Woodbury's actual employers: health care, logistics, and skilled trades.
And if the city needs to use tax incentives to attract needed development, residents deserve to see what those incentives actually deliver in jobs and wages, not just a groundbreaking photo. Growing the business community and putting residents first do not have to be in opposition to each other. Done well, development can make Woodbury a better place for people who live, work, and shop here.
What do you view as the most pressing public safety challenges in your community, and how would you address them?
The most pressing public safety challenge is capacity: our police, fire, and EMS teams need to grow as Woodbury grows, without pricing city services out of reach for taxpayers or running straight into the national police recruiting shortage.
During my career at 3M, I saw this: highly trained employees such as marketing managers, spending much of their day on low-value tasks instead of the strategic work we actually needed from them. Rather than hiring more marketing managers, the better solution was often to shift these tasks to others – freeing the marketers to spend more time on what they were trained to do. Woodbury already applies a version of this through its Community Service Officer (CSO) program, and it works: roughly 40 percent of our current sworn officers started as CSOs. I want to build on this foundation by reviewing which tasks — things like paperwork, records management, or evidence handling — don't require a sworn officer and could reasonably shift to a larger CSO or civilian team. Done right, that controls costs and grows our own officer pipeline, rather than just competing for talent that is scarce everywhere.
On the fire side, the data tells its own story: fires rose nearly 30 percent over the past year, driven in part by lithium-ion battery devices and chargers. Rather than wait for another incident, I would build public education directly into the fire inspector role Woodbury is already planning to add by 2027, with outreach aimed at multifamily buildings, where one charging fire puts the most people at risk. And I would time this to events like Fire Prevention Week, which this year focuses on battery safety.
None of this works without trust. Residents rate Woodbury police highly overall, but the resident survey shows real gaps in how safe residents of different backgrounds feel, and that gap deserves the same attention as response times or staffing ratios.
What ideas do you have to address housing shortages and affordability, and how do you view the role of rent control policies in that process?
Housing in Woodbury isn't one problem, it's several, depending on where you are in life: young professionals and first-time buyers priced out of a starter home, growing families needing room to expand, workers who keep this city running but can't afford to live here, and longtime residents who want to downsize or age in place without leaving the community. Solving for all of them starts in the same place: supply. Woodbury needs more of the housing types we've historically restricted — smaller-scale multifamily near existing commercial areas, accessory dwelling units, and faster permitting specifically for affordable and senior housing, where delay adds to the cost.
Rent control is well intentioned, and I understand why it appeals to people worried about being priced out. But I'm skeptical of it as an ongoing policy, mainly because of what happened when Saint Paul tried it. St. Paul capped rent increases at 3% in 2021, right after its biggest apartment construction boom. Within a year, permits for new apartment construction fell by nearly half, and stayed there through 2023. St. Paul ended up exempting new construction from rent control to fix it. If Woodbury is serious about affordability, we can't adopt a policy that discourages the very supply we need more of. I wouldn't rule out a narrow, short-term measure in a genuine emergency, but as an ongoing policy, rent control tends to work against the goal it's meant to serve.
What I would use is the tool Minnesota already built for this: Local Affordable Housing Aid, a dedicated state funding stream Woodbury already qualifies for. Rather than let it sit as a line item, I want it deployed deliberately, and tracked publicly against results, toward housing that actually works at every stage of life.
How would you improve transportation infrastructure and safety for drivers, transit riders, cyclists, and pedestrians in your community?
Every city has to decide which streets get repaired and when. Woodbury already uses a system called pavement management to make that call: essentially an inventory that scores every street's condition so repairs happen at the right time, before a cheap fix turns into an expensive reconstruction. It's a good tool. The problem is that pavement repair is still the lowest-rated city service in Woodbury's own resident survey, by a wide margin. I'd publish our actual street-by-street condition scores from this tool and repair timeline, not just a general promise to "fix the roads," so residents can see the plan and hold us to it.
As we decide what to approve next, we need a more honest accounting of how new development affects our roads, not just the potential tax revenue or jobs it brings, but the day-to-day wear and congestion it creates. Two examples make the case. Our light industrial growth has brought a steady stream of semi-trucks through Woodbury, and heavy trucks put far more strain on pavement than passenger vehicles ever do, so every warehouse we welcome adds real, ongoing cost to our road budget that isn't fully priced into the deal we struck to bring it here. And anyone who has tried to get across Woodbury on a weekend knows our retail success pulls in plenty of traffic from outside the city as well. Going forward, I'd require traffic studies for large developments before we approve them, and make sure projects that generate heavy vehicle traffic help pay for the roads they wear down, rather than leaving that cost for every residential taxpayer to absorb.
Beyond roads, I want Woodbury to keep building toward a community where getting around doesn't always require a car: safer pedestrian crossings, connected trails, and new development designed with people in mind, not just traffic flow. That includes taking e-bike and e-scooter safety seriously, especially for younger riders, with rules grounded in real data and paired with education rather than just penalties. And it means being a strong partner with Washington County and the state on the roads and transit dollars that are beyond the city's reach alone, so Woodbury isn't left covering costs that should be a shared regional responsibility.
Residential property owners across the region are feeling significant strain from rising property tax bills. How would you approach balancing fiscal responsibility with the demand for services when setting the city levy?
The city's levy went up 9.7% for 2026, the largest increase in years, and residents felt it. At the same time, when the city surveys residents, parks, trails, police, fire and EMS all rate among the very best of anything Woodbury does. Both of those things are true, and my approach to the levy starts there: the services people value are worth protecting, and the way to protect them long-term is to make sure every dollar behind them is earning its keep, not to assume they're untouchable.
Woodbury's budget, like most cities', tends to grow from what was spent last year rather than from what's actually needed. I'd move the city toward priority-based budgeting: start each cycle from what revenue is actually available and what residents' priorities are, then fund programs based on the results they deliver, not on the fact that they were funded last year. I would then pair this with real performance tracking, results measured against spending, giving residents a budget they can evaluate for themselves rather than one they're just asked to trust.
I'd also review how we hire outside professional services. Minnesota law doesn't require competitive bidding for professional services like engineering, legal, and other consultants. So, it's easy for a city to lean on the same familiar firms indefinitely, sometimes for years, without anyone testing whether that's still the best value. I want Woodbury to put these contracts out to bid and widely publicize these opportunities to attract new bidders, and then to publish what we're spending by firm, so residents, not just City Hall, can judge whether we're getting real value.
What are the two or three issues where you believe city government is best positioned to lead — and why the city rather than the state or county?
Three areas belong to the city and nobody else: land use and zoning, infrastructure like roads and water, and public safety operations. Washington County runs human services, the jail, and county roads. The state sets education funding and runs the highways. But Woodbury's own zoning map, our own streets, our own water system, and our own police, fire, and EMS departments are decisions nobody else makes for us. If we get those wrong, there is no one else to blame, and no one else who can fix them either.
I'd point to what residents themselves are telling us here. Pavement repair is the lowest-rated city service in our own survey, and water quality ties as residents' single biggest concern, right alongside taxes. Both are squarely city responsibilities, decided by our council and funded mostly by our levy, which means we own the outcome either way. But owning the outcome doesn't mean going it alone on the bill. Under Minnesota's state-aid system, no more than 20 percent of a city's streets can ever qualify for state aid funding, and I want to take a hard look at whether Woodbury is capturing its full, fair share of county and state road dollars for the streets that do qualify, rather than quietly absorbing costs onto local taxpayers that stronger advocacy might shift elsewhere. On the other side, residents rate police, fire, and EMS among the very best things Woodbury does, which tells me local control of public safety, answerable directly to the people who live here, is working and worth protecting as growth continues to test it.
Housing gets called a "city issue" a lot, and zoning genuinely is ours to control. But the money behind affordable housing mostly comes from the county and the state, so I'd rather be honest that housing is a partnership than claim credit or blame that isn't only the city's to own.
What does real taxpayer transparency look like to you, and what specific steps would you take to achieve it — both in terms of financial reporting and public engagement?
Real transparency means residents can verify what we're doing, not just be told to trust us. On financial reporting, I want three concrete things: a searchable, vendor-level spending database, so anyone can see exactly what the city paid and to whom, not just budget totals by department; a genuine plain-language budget summary alongside the full technical document, the kind of thing national finance associations recognize as a real professional standard, not just a marketing brochure; and a public results dashboard tracking the same things I've talked about throughout this campaign, road condition, spending against outcomes, response times, so residents can check the numbers themselves rather than take our word for it.
Public engagement is where Woodbury falls short in a way that isn't obvious until you actually try it. Open Forum gives residents three minutes each, and the Council generally doesn't respond, which can feel like talking to a wall. Items that manage to get on the City Council’s agenda work differently: real time, real back-and-forth with the Council, and it works for developers, whose requests routinely get on the agenda. I know the gap between those two tracks firsthand: when I tried to get a resolution placed on the agenda myself, it was turned down without any explanation of what rule stopped it, and that is not an experience any resident should have to navigate just to be heard. If developers get real access to City Hall as a matter of course, residents deserve rules for getting on the agenda that are published, consistent, and applied the same way to everyone.
I'd also start holding regular meetings with residents by precinct, which serve as a natural stand-in for neighborhoods, rather than always meeting citywide, and make council meeting summaries clearer about which precincts a given vote actually affects. Woodbury elects its Council entirely at-large, with no wards, so there's no built-in structure for one part of the city's concerns to reach City Hall the way a citywide issue does. Precinct meetings wouldn't require redrawing anything or waiting on a ward debate, and residents still deserve that larger conversation about whether some form of ward representation would serve them better going forward.
Email: [email protected]
Campaign Phone:
Campaign Website: sebastianformayor.com
Twitter handle:
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/people/Sebastian-for-Woodbury/61590811863052/
Candidate Bio
I've called Woodbury home for over 25 years. My wife and I built our life here, and we love what makes this city special — the green spaces, the amenities, and the people that live here.
I began my career as an auditor. I earned an accounting degree, my Certified Internal Auditor certification, and passed the CPA exam, then spent nearly a decade digging into the numbers and asking hard questions to find waste and fraud before they get expensive. My MBA then brought me to 3M, where I spent over two decades in strategy and operations leadership, setting direction and working to make things work more efficiently and effectively. This unique combination of skills is what I will bring to City Hall as Mayor.
Outside my career, I served five years as Board President of the History Theatre, guiding it through the pandemic and a major leadership transition, and continue to serve on its board today.
I'm running for Mayor because after eight years under the same leadership, Woodbury deserves a fresh perspective that follows the money and asks hard questions. I'll bring new energy and discipline to keep Woodbury strong, safe, and affordable for the next generation.
What style of leadership would you bring to this position?
I'm running because I believe Woodbury needs a leader willing to question the status quo — to ask whether the way we've always done things is still the best way, and to change it when it isn't. But that instinct is tempered by a habit from my auditor training: ask why before assuming you know better. When something doesn't quite make sense to me, I don't start by tearing it down — I find out what I might be missing first, then push for change once I understand the full picture.
That means genuinely listening, not just to whoever is loudest or already has a seat at the table. At the History Theatre, our board had debated adding handrails for months, tabling it due to cost. Instead of debating it again in a conference room, I started ushering during live shows so I could hear directly from patrons — and once I heard how strongly they felt, I helped move us to act. I did something similar by working alongside our stage manager during performances to see firsthand where our equipment fell short, so I could weigh capital requests with real understanding instead of secondhand summaries.
That's the approach I'll bring to City Hall: dig into the details myself, listen before deciding, lead decisively once I have, and collaborate rather than dictate. On funding, I'll start by building strong working relationships with our county and state officials to make sure Woodbury gets its fair share — and won't hesitate to fight for it, if that's what it takes.
What are your top three priorities if elected, and how might they be affected by growing uncertainty around state and federal funding?
My top three priorities all come back to one idea: growth and spending decisions in Woodbury should put residents first, not developers.
First, growth that puts residents first. Woodbury's green spaces, trails, and everyday convenience are why people choose to live here, and the 2050 Comprehensive Plan should protect that, not trade it away for whatever a developer proposes next. That includes water security. Last year, two new data centers came online in Woodbury pursuing the kind of water-intensive cooling that, nationally, can use as much water as a small city. While we're spending $330 million to protect our drinking water from PFAS, we should be asking harder questions before approving development that adds new strains on that water.
Second, real fiscal accountability. That means going beyond a responsible budget process to ask a simple question after we spend: did it work? As someone trained as an auditor, I want the city tracking performance metrics on major projects, not just budgeting responsibly on paper, so residents can see for themselves whether their money actually delivered results.
Third, staying a proactive partner with our county, state, and federal representatives to secure Woodbury's fair share of outside funding, without ever treating it as guaranteed. We secured $3.4 million in congressionally-directed federal funding for public safety and roads, on top of the roughly $375,000 a year Woodbury already draws down through HUD programs. Our water treatment plant is roughly 93% funded by the state-administered 3M settlement. None of it will last forever, so I'll keep fighting for what Woodbury needs while planning now for when it runs out.
What is the biggest challenge facing Woodbury right now, and where do you see the greatest opportunity?
The biggest challenge facing Woodbury is growth — not growth itself, but making sure it happens on terms that serve residents rather than just developers. Like many neighbors, I hear real concern that the city we fell in love with has been developing faster than our infrastructure and public services can comfortably absorb, and that decisions often get made before residents have a real say.
Water security is where this challenge is sharpest. We are in the middle of a $330 million investment to remove PFAS from our drinking water, the largest capital project in city history. Every new large-scale water user we approve, whether housing or something like the data centers now operating here, either respects that investment or quietly draws it down. Growth decisions from here forward need to treat water capacity as a real constraint, the same way we already weigh roads and schools.
The opportunity is that Woodbury isn't finished being built, and the 2050 Comprehensive Plan is the real chance to set the terms while we still can. I want that to mean more than good intentions on paper. That means setting real standards for what growth has to deliver: housing that works at every stage of life, and having large commercial water users funding their own supply and proving out their impact rather than drawing on a system residents already paid to protect. All of this measured against results, not promises. Get this right, and Woodbury does not just keep growing, it grows in a way that earns the investment residents have already made to be here.
How would you characterize the business climate in Woodbury, and what role should city government play in partnering with the business community to attract jobs, develop the workforce, and address shared challenges?
Woodbury's business climate is strong — nearly 2,000 establishments, steady growth, and real recruiting wins. But most of that success has come the easy way: finding open land for large-scale development, without always weighing what it costs us elsewhere — water capacity we're still paying to protect, or the added truck traffic wearing down roads faster than our maintenance budget plans for. That's real growth, but it isn't the same as a durable relationship with the businesses already here.
Earlier in my career at 3M, I managed bids for library modernization projects with cities and counties across the country. As those projects grew more complex, 3M couldn't supply a complete solution alone, and I learned the partnerships that worked were the ones where we treated other companies as genuine partners with something to offer, not as junior players there to be told what to do. That lesson applies directly to City Hall: the city's job is to understand what existing businesses actually need to grow here, then build real partnerships around that.
I'd also start a formal business retention and expansion program with staff conducting regular visits to existing Woodbury employers, not just when there's a problem, to catch friction and expansion plans early. It's a familiar idea from business — it's almost always more efficient to grow with the customers you already have than to chase new ones — and nationally, existing businesses generate 60 to 80 percent of new local jobs. Nearby Roseville already runs a program like this. I'd pair that with a small business incubator, ideally using vacant commercial space rather than new construction, and a real partnership with Century College to build training pipelines matched to Woodbury's actual employers: health care, logistics, and skilled trades.
And if the city needs to use tax incentives to attract needed development, residents deserve to see what those incentives actually deliver in jobs and wages, not just a groundbreaking photo. Growing the business community and putting residents first do not have to be in opposition to each other. Done well, development can make Woodbury a better place for people who live, work, and shop here.
What do you view as the most pressing public safety challenges in your community, and how would you address them?
The most pressing public safety challenge is capacity: our police, fire, and EMS teams need to grow as Woodbury grows, without pricing city services out of reach for taxpayers or running straight into the national police recruiting shortage.
During my career at 3M, I saw this: highly trained employees such as marketing managers, spending much of their day on low-value tasks instead of the strategic work we actually needed from them. Rather than hiring more marketing managers, the better solution was often to shift these tasks to others – freeing the marketers to spend more time on what they were trained to do. Woodbury already applies a version of this through its Community Service Officer (CSO) program, and it works: roughly 40 percent of our current sworn officers started as CSOs. I want to build on this foundation by reviewing which tasks — things like paperwork, records management, or evidence handling — don't require a sworn officer and could reasonably shift to a larger CSO or civilian team. Done right, that controls costs and grows our own officer pipeline, rather than just competing for talent that is scarce everywhere.
On the fire side, the data tells its own story: fires rose nearly 30 percent over the past year, driven in part by lithium-ion battery devices and chargers. Rather than wait for another incident, I would build public education directly into the fire inspector role Woodbury is already planning to add by 2027, with outreach aimed at multifamily buildings, where one charging fire puts the most people at risk. And I would time this to events like Fire Prevention Week, which this year focuses on battery safety.
None of this works without trust. Residents rate Woodbury police highly overall, but the resident survey shows real gaps in how safe residents of different backgrounds feel, and that gap deserves the same attention as response times or staffing ratios.
What ideas do you have to address housing shortages and affordability, and how do you view the role of rent control policies in that process?
Housing in Woodbury isn't one problem, it's several, depending on where you are in life: young professionals and first-time buyers priced out of a starter home, growing families needing room to expand, workers who keep this city running but can't afford to live here, and longtime residents who want to downsize or age in place without leaving the community. Solving for all of them starts in the same place: supply. Woodbury needs more of the housing types we've historically restricted — smaller-scale multifamily near existing commercial areas, accessory dwelling units, and faster permitting specifically for affordable and senior housing, where delay adds to the cost.
Rent control is well intentioned, and I understand why it appeals to people worried about being priced out. But I'm skeptical of it as an ongoing policy, mainly because of what happened when Saint Paul tried it. St. Paul capped rent increases at 3% in 2021, right after its biggest apartment construction boom. Within a year, permits for new apartment construction fell by nearly half, and stayed there through 2023. St. Paul ended up exempting new construction from rent control to fix it. If Woodbury is serious about affordability, we can't adopt a policy that discourages the very supply we need more of. I wouldn't rule out a narrow, short-term measure in a genuine emergency, but as an ongoing policy, rent control tends to work against the goal it's meant to serve.
What I would use is the tool Minnesota already built for this: Local Affordable Housing Aid, a dedicated state funding stream Woodbury already qualifies for. Rather than let it sit as a line item, I want it deployed deliberately, and tracked publicly against results, toward housing that actually works at every stage of life.
How would you improve transportation infrastructure and safety for drivers, transit riders, cyclists, and pedestrians in your community?
Every city has to decide which streets get repaired and when. Woodbury already uses a system called pavement management to make that call: essentially an inventory that scores every street's condition so repairs happen at the right time, before a cheap fix turns into an expensive reconstruction. It's a good tool. The problem is that pavement repair is still the lowest-rated city service in Woodbury's own resident survey, by a wide margin. I'd publish our actual street-by-street condition scores from this tool and repair timeline, not just a general promise to "fix the roads," so residents can see the plan and hold us to it.
As we decide what to approve next, we need a more honest accounting of how new development affects our roads, not just the potential tax revenue or jobs it brings, but the day-to-day wear and congestion it creates. Two examples make the case. Our light industrial growth has brought a steady stream of semi-trucks through Woodbury, and heavy trucks put far more strain on pavement than passenger vehicles ever do, so every warehouse we welcome adds real, ongoing cost to our road budget that isn't fully priced into the deal we struck to bring it here. And anyone who has tried to get across Woodbury on a weekend knows our retail success pulls in plenty of traffic from outside the city as well. Going forward, I'd require traffic studies for large developments before we approve them, and make sure projects that generate heavy vehicle traffic help pay for the roads they wear down, rather than leaving that cost for every residential taxpayer to absorb.
Beyond roads, I want Woodbury to keep building toward a community where getting around doesn't always require a car: safer pedestrian crossings, connected trails, and new development designed with people in mind, not just traffic flow. That includes taking e-bike and e-scooter safety seriously, especially for younger riders, with rules grounded in real data and paired with education rather than just penalties. And it means being a strong partner with Washington County and the state on the roads and transit dollars that are beyond the city's reach alone, so Woodbury isn't left covering costs that should be a shared regional responsibility.
Residential property owners across the region are feeling significant strain from rising property tax bills. How would you approach balancing fiscal responsibility with the demand for services when setting the city levy?
The city's levy went up 9.7% for 2026, the largest increase in years, and residents felt it. At the same time, when the city surveys residents, parks, trails, police, fire and EMS all rate among the very best of anything Woodbury does. Both of those things are true, and my approach to the levy starts there: the services people value are worth protecting, and the way to protect them long-term is to make sure every dollar behind them is earning its keep, not to assume they're untouchable.
Woodbury's budget, like most cities', tends to grow from what was spent last year rather than from what's actually needed. I'd move the city toward priority-based budgeting: start each cycle from what revenue is actually available and what residents' priorities are, then fund programs based on the results they deliver, not on the fact that they were funded last year. I would then pair this with real performance tracking, results measured against spending, giving residents a budget they can evaluate for themselves rather than one they're just asked to trust.
I'd also review how we hire outside professional services. Minnesota law doesn't require competitive bidding for professional services like engineering, legal, and other consultants. So, it's easy for a city to lean on the same familiar firms indefinitely, sometimes for years, without anyone testing whether that's still the best value. I want Woodbury to put these contracts out to bid and widely publicize these opportunities to attract new bidders, and then to publish what we're spending by firm, so residents, not just City Hall, can judge whether we're getting real value.
What are the two or three issues where you believe city government is best positioned to lead — and why the city rather than the state or county?
Three areas belong to the city and nobody else: land use and zoning, infrastructure like roads and water, and public safety operations. Washington County runs human services, the jail, and county roads. The state sets education funding and runs the highways. But Woodbury's own zoning map, our own streets, our own water system, and our own police, fire, and EMS departments are decisions nobody else makes for us. If we get those wrong, there is no one else to blame, and no one else who can fix them either.
I'd point to what residents themselves are telling us here. Pavement repair is the lowest-rated city service in our own survey, and water quality ties as residents' single biggest concern, right alongside taxes. Both are squarely city responsibilities, decided by our council and funded mostly by our levy, which means we own the outcome either way. But owning the outcome doesn't mean going it alone on the bill. Under Minnesota's state-aid system, no more than 20 percent of a city's streets can ever qualify for state aid funding, and I want to take a hard look at whether Woodbury is capturing its full, fair share of county and state road dollars for the streets that do qualify, rather than quietly absorbing costs onto local taxpayers that stronger advocacy might shift elsewhere. On the other side, residents rate police, fire, and EMS among the very best things Woodbury does, which tells me local control of public safety, answerable directly to the people who live here, is working and worth protecting as growth continues to test it.
Housing gets called a "city issue" a lot, and zoning genuinely is ours to control. But the money behind affordable housing mostly comes from the county and the state, so I'd rather be honest that housing is a partnership than claim credit or blame that isn't only the city's to own.
What does real taxpayer transparency look like to you, and what specific steps would you take to achieve it — both in terms of financial reporting and public engagement?
Real transparency means residents can verify what we're doing, not just be told to trust us. On financial reporting, I want three concrete things: a searchable, vendor-level spending database, so anyone can see exactly what the city paid and to whom, not just budget totals by department; a genuine plain-language budget summary alongside the full technical document, the kind of thing national finance associations recognize as a real professional standard, not just a marketing brochure; and a public results dashboard tracking the same things I've talked about throughout this campaign, road condition, spending against outcomes, response times, so residents can check the numbers themselves rather than take our word for it.
Public engagement is where Woodbury falls short in a way that isn't obvious until you actually try it. Open Forum gives residents three minutes each, and the Council generally doesn't respond, which can feel like talking to a wall. Items that manage to get on the City Council’s agenda work differently: real time, real back-and-forth with the Council, and it works for developers, whose requests routinely get on the agenda. I know the gap between those two tracks firsthand: when I tried to get a resolution placed on the agenda myself, it was turned down without any explanation of what rule stopped it, and that is not an experience any resident should have to navigate just to be heard. If developers get real access to City Hall as a matter of course, residents deserve rules for getting on the agenda that are published, consistent, and applied the same way to everyone.
I'd also start holding regular meetings with residents by precinct, which serve as a natural stand-in for neighborhoods, rather than always meeting citywide, and make council meeting summaries clearer about which precincts a given vote actually affects. Woodbury elects its Council entirely at-large, with no wards, so there's no built-in structure for one part of the city's concerns to reach City Hall the way a citywide issue does. Precinct meetings wouldn't require redrawing anything or waiting on a ward debate, and residents still deserve that larger conversation about whether some form of ward representation would serve them better going forward.