Dear New Albany,

I’d like to thank you for taking the time to visit our new webpage. It’s a very exciting time for us at City Hall, and I am excited to be able to have this mechanism available to communicate directly with you.

In the first month of office, I believe that we have assembled a great team to help New Albany moving forward. I strongly believe that we have the right combination of people on board to help New Albany become physically cleaner, financially stronger, and fundamentally better. We are not there yet, but we have covered a lot of ground and will continue to tweak the departments and the personnel in order to advance these important goals. I’m looking forward to a tough first year riddled with many challenges. As we prepare for our bicentennial celebration, there are a number of projects that the community wants to see move forward. However, as of right now, the funding is just not in place to make all of the projects happen. Over the next few months, my team and I will be working hard to see if we can come up with the funds to have the type of celebration that New Albany deserves, one we can all be proud of.

I plan to continue to help in any way I can to make our downtown the place that the people of New Albany want it to be; this is something that I cannot accomplish alone, and I will enlist the help and partnership of organizations such as Develop New Albany, One Southern Indiana, New Albany First, and the Urban Enterprise Zone, along with others.

One thing that I believe will help our downtown immensely is additional residency. We have a number of exciting things happening in our downtown district, such as restaurants, shops, and taverns, but we need the residency downtown in order to help support them. The next step, and probably the most vital step, is to build density in our downtown district in order to support the numerous growing businesses and commerce that New Albanians are beginning to enjoy. This will require a lot of heavy lifting from city government, and we are going to have to create big waves to give incentives to private developments if this is going to happen quickly.

I would also like to take a moment to commend our citizens’ perseverance through the bridge closure. I’m proud of the way New Albanians have faced this struggle, and I’m grateful for the people who have taken this opportunity to reconnect with our downtown and rediscover what New Albany has to offer.

I look forward to the challenges of my first year, and I’m excited by this opportunity to serve the citizens of New Albany.

Sincerely,