Daniel Burroughs

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A handful of things I want to accomplish in the next four years:

- Pass a government transparency ordinance to make all city spending records, contracts, bidding, council voting records, visitor lists and communication records readily catalogued and available on the city website.

-Pass an ordinance to standardize the NPU system, give teeth to NPU votes and provide for the video recording of all NPU and neighborhood association meetings.

-Submit and pass a plan to transition MARTA to 24/7 operation.

-Pass an Inclusionary Zoning ordinance in District 4 or citywide which will legally mandate large developers must create a certain percentage of affordable housing units within their developments.

-Build a group of citizen investigators to find the deed holders of all of the dilapidated homes throughout District 4 and bring legal action against them with the goal of tearing them down or having them rehabilitated. I would press the other council members to do the same for their districts.

-Help APS expand after school services by subsidizing after-hours instructor and facility costs.

-Pass an ordinance to put a voter registration form into the hands of every 18-year-old student's hand with the eventual goal of 100% Atlanta voter registration.

-Improve customer service aspect of city services.

-Various other low-hanging fruit such as speed bumps and sidewalks on some of District 4's residential streets.

That's a lot to begin with, but there's more in mind. We can accomplish a lot in four years, and most of what I've mentioned will be both passable and easy to implement.

Dan Burroughs for Atlanta City Councilman Official campaign website for Dan Burroughs for Atlanta City Councilman

Atlanta can't win the future without greatly improving its educational system.

Ensuring our kids are equipped with the ability to discern facts, think critically and creatively problem solve will be essential in a future set to be dominated by automation.

If we want Atlanta children to create the Fortune 500 companies of the future, if we want the industries of the future to choose Atlanta as their home, we must have one of the most mentally apt workforces in the world. Anything less and we doom ourselves to more decades of widespread poverty and income disparity.

As your city councilman I will foster a greater degree of cooperation with APS to apply best practices at all schools, broaden the availability of after school care, and implement a plan to have all APS students take extracurricular classes in coding, entrepreneurship, finance and/or community organizing.

I am a proud product of public schooling, and I strongly support our public schools. As such, I will never support anything that amounts to redirecting money from public schools to private and charter schools.

Of course, in the long run we must persistently address the issues in our city which contribute to poverty and its associated ills. We can't expect to be able to properly educate all children when they have to worry about what they will eat, or where they will be living next week, or when their parent(s) will be released from jail for petty crime.

So when you go to the polls November 7, remember to elect candidates who take the future of Atlanta's education seriously, and have a forward-thinking view on winning on how to improve it. I am that candidate for District 4, and as your councilman this is how I will fight for you.

Within the first 30 days of my term, I will propose the Full Transparency ordinance which will establish that:

-All city expenditures will be recorded in detail, catalogued by department and made easily available online.
-All bidding for city contracts and all procurement records with be made easily available online.
-All neighborhood association and NPU meetings, in addition to all City Council meetings and public hearings, will be videotaped and those videos will be made available online.
-All city council members must maintain a record of proposed legislation and their votes on their office's website, as well as send out a mailer summarizing their activity twice per year.
-All records for all city offices, including letters, emails and voice recordings, will automatically be made available on their respective websites 365 days from their creation.

The goal of setting the gold standard for government transparency is an ambitious one, but it's nothing we can't accomplish. When we begin to shine a light on everything, there remains no place to hide wrongdoing.