Guest: A focused platform race for city commission

Ron Berben
St Augustine, FL

Instead of a general, all-encompassing broad brush platform approach, I am focusing on specific issues and concerns of every section of the City of St Augustine, its residents and businesses, from infrastructure and basic services to culture and historic preservation, incorporating many into each leg of his three-point platform.

I am doing the real work, asking voters from every segment of our city what they need and want as my ongoing campaign of listening and learning progresses. Based on this, I have developed a common sense and confident platform on which voters can elect me. Fiscal transparency, public safety and transportation are the most important and crucial issues that need to be addressed. My strategy is to incorporate the specifics under one of the three major top tier legs of my platform.

I believe that understanding all sides of an issue, and then taking a stand, is the way to gain the support of each voter based on what matters to them. Here are just a few examples:

North Davis Shores and my ability to focus the public safety plank of my platform to the specific concern of the current joint fire station proposal with the county and the Fire/EMS response time issue facing the residents there and elsewhere.

Lincolnville and focusing the fiscal transparency plank of my platform to the specific concern of the ongoing Community Redevelopment Act (CRA) plan and how it will impact the people there. Providing input on matters from rezoning to entice more business to improving services for all residents there. Asking the tough questions about who will be making the spending decisions, community members or a panel of bureaucrats?

North City and focusing on the transportation plank to address the perpetual struggles with automobile congestion and parking that affect so many residents. Working with top members of all companies involved, studying the viability of how a now mostly privately funded passenger rail service that is already underway in our state could offer an opportunity to our city that the repeatedly failed publicly funded rail studies and schemes never could. As commissioner, using my skills, contacts and over forty-years-experience in all forms of mass transit, I can lay the groundwork when the opportunity presents itself for St. Augustine to take advantage of this asset in a positive way, increasing pedestrian and cyclists friendly tourism, while decreasing automobiles and space to park them.

I am the candidate that makes the effort to listen to the concerns of ALL voters and understand what is important to all of them and not important to the candidate or a few special interests.

For more information on the campaign visit http://www.ronberben.com

Ron Berben, non-partisan candidate for City of St Augustine Commission, Seat 4, has approved this message.