Ensuring mental health wellness is a top priority for Kate. Mental health was a crisis before COVID-19 and it has only gotten worse, especially for young people. Kate will:

• Work to ensure we tackle the immediate needs by expanding the number of mental health professionals in our communities and schools. To do this, we will need to put in loan forgiveness programs and partner with Montgomery College, University of Maryland, and other institutions of learning to address the shortage of mental health professionals.
• Push so we address the full spectrum of mental health and put in place programs and resources to ensure mental health promotion, crisis prevention, and treatment.
• Along with her continued work on reimagining public safety, Kate will continue to push for reforms so we stop asking police to handle situations that call for civilian intervention. Police are often the only resource available to confront mental health emergencies. Kate will push for more trained mental health professionals to handle these situations, reducing interactions with the police and getting those in crisis the help they need.

Climate change is an urgent threat to our community, our country, and the world. Kate has a track record of taking real, meaningful action to impact our environmental crisis, having the difficult conversations, and promoting innovative ideas.

Kate spearheaded efforts to finish converting all of the City’s streetlights to LED, substantially decreasing the City’s electricity use, reducing light pollution, and saving the City up to $100,000 a year. She stood up to PEPCO and ensured that Takoma Park was the first city in the area to complete this process.

Kate has been working tirelessly with other local officials throughout the state to push the Maryland General Assembly to enact the Community Choice Energy Bill. This critical legislation would enable municipalities like Takoma Park to set strong renewable energy goals and negotiate lower rates.

Kate opposes Governor Hogan's plan to widen the Beltway.

She led the adoption of an environmental framework that commits the City to cleaner energy and a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. All the while, Kate has never stopped fighting the many small battles on the ground that climate change demands of us. Under her leadership, the City of Takoma Park:

• Started installing wind-powered electric vehicle charging stations
• Improved bike and pedestrian access with city-wide sidewalk and road projects
• Finished 3rd in the nation at the Georgetown Energy Prize contest, which seeks to harness the ingenuity of towns and cities across America

Kate has been a constant advocate for including more youth voices in our local government, and local politics. In a political landscape that is dominated by a lot of the same old voices and ideas, Kate has a long record of pushing young people, especially young women, to get more involved and develop activist skills from an early age. Kate clearly practices what she preaches even in her campaign team, which has always been run primarily by young people.

Even before joining the City Council, Kate testified in favor of lowering the city’s voting age from 18 to 16 in 2015. She has continuously supported young voters, especially those who are 16 and 17 years old. In 2017, Kate, as mayor, established the Takoma Park Youth Council, bringing more young people into the conversation about city issues and broadening the city’s audience.

The Youth Council has enabled youth in Takoma Park to be represented in local government and provide a platform that hadn’t existed before. Kate has played a fundamental role in acting as a liaison between the Youth Council and the rest of the city government and is always open to listening to any ideas the Youth Council presents to her.

We need to make sure our students, educators, and school staff have the resources and support they need to recover from the past two plus years. We must help students regain academic skills and provide them with the support they need to ensure mental wellness. Kate supports the expansion of wellness centers in all County high schools and solutions to the shortage of mental health professionals, such as partnering with our local colleges to provide loan forgiveness or tuition support.

Long before COVID, we struggled to address the disparities in our educational system. We need to invest in students, mental health counselors, educators and programs we know will address these issues. For example, we need to expand affordable pre-k, address overcrowding in schools, and make after school programs more available.

Kate embraced the city’s efforts to confront and begin addressing the history of violence, especially police violence, toward Black and Brown people in our country.

As Mayor, Kate worked with her colleagues, Councilmembers Searcy and Seamens, to lead the City’s efforts on a Reimagine Public Safety Task Force and is working to ensure that the Task Force’s recommendations are fully implemented.

Takoma Park is fortunate to have a progressive Police Chief committed to change. And yet Takoma Park has had its challenges and Kate has confronted them openly:

• Ending the former police chief’s practice of photographing young Black men for little to no reason
• Stopping the use of tinted windows on police vehicles
• Fostering dialogue between police and young people

Kate is focused on prioritizing mental health services in the community as we reimigaine public safety.

From the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, Kate has been on the front lines, coordinating with City staff, meeting with state and county leaders, listening to residents and small business owners, and working for practical solutions that connect resources to those most in need.

Kate worked to bring the first mobile testing clinics in the County to New Hampshire Avenue because she knows that during this unprecented crisis, we can't afford to leave a single member of our community behind.

As Mayor, she led the Takoma Park City Council to establish a COVID Emergency Fund to help residents and small businesses impacted by the devastation of COVID-19, without raising the tax rate.

Along with State Delegate Lorig Charkoudian, Kate worked to establish guidance for renters and those living in multifamily buildings on issues such as basic needs, landlord obligations, social distancing, and what to do when testing positive for COVID-19. The information and resources they compiled were used by the County in the early days of the COVID crisis.

Affordable housing is a serious challenge in our area, particularly for young adults, seniors, those struggling to make ends meet, and people of color.

There are no easy answers, but Kate knows that solving our community's housing crisis will take a multi-pronged approach and is linked to our economic growth in the County. As Mayor, she rolled up her sleeves and took on these challenges.

When Kate first became Mayor, she started a dialogue with local and national housing experts and residents to look at every option to address this housing crisis

Then she turned those ideas into actions:

• Created a housing reserve fund to support affordable housing efforts and continued to assist residents with rent stabilization
• Worked to increase resources for tenant outreach, landlord-tenant mediation, and financial assistance
• Fought to establish regional targets with the Board of the Metropolitan Council of Governments to address this issue across the Washington D.C. area.
• Hired the City’s first Economic Development Manager, proving invaluable during COVID-19 to get resources and support to local businesses, and to obtain state grants to provide much needed façade improvements for the businesses along New Hampshire Avenue.

Kate recently led a conversation with local women in business and what the County can do better to support our small businesses. The key takeaways from that event are here

While Takoma Park is known for its activism around progressive issues, certain communities- such as immigrants, Black and Brown residents, and young people- face barriers to being heard.

Under Kate’s leadership, Takoma Park became one of the first cities in the country to adopt a racial equity framework for decision-making. This framework has put equity consideration front and center.

In addition to her work in Takoma Park, Kate serves on Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) Taskforce to Develop Racial Equity Trainings for Regional Leaders. She also served as co-chair for the National League of Cities Racial Equity And Leadership Council (REAL).

As Mayor, Kate showed her commitment by:

• Leading efforts to ensure Black and Brown young people’s voices were part of the selection of new Police Chief
• Supporting the Recreation Department’s before-school and after-school programs, and full-day academic summer camps, which primarily serve students of color
• Protected Takoma Park’s Sanctuary City status against threats from the Trump Administration