I am a wife, mother, local business owner (real estate brokerage), Veteran, gardener, and neighbor who cares deeply about our community and its interests. We aren’t from here, so you may not have heard of me. My husband and I joke that we came to New York for the cold weather and taxes, but the real reason is that we wanted a better quality of life and fell in love with this valley and our village community.

My current involvement in our community, besides serving real estate needs, includes being a member of Valatie’s Planning Board, Secretary Director of the Columbia Greene Board of Realtors, and member of the Valatie Rescue Squad Board of Directors, among other things. If elected mayor I will reallocate my time towards serving our citizens and village. 

So, where did we come from? I am a many generational Floridan whose ancestors came to America with Andrew Turnbull in 1768 founding the colony of New Smyrna with a group of 1,400 colonists. Most of them were like my family, indentured servants brought to grow hemp, sugarcane, and indigo. I grew up near the beaches in Pinellas county in the middle of the west coast. I watched our area which was rich with community and had an ecosystem of forests, fields, rivers, springs, and a wide variety of animal life, mixed with a dash of tourism and exposure to cultures worldwide, evolve into concrete, subdivisions, strip malls, and the biggest melting pot of citizens in the US who didn’t care about our history and community. It was no longer a place I considered to have a good quality of life. 

Once my husband, originally a farm boy from southeastern Wisconsin and an engineer with GE Healthcare for the last 41 years, had the opportunity to work remotely we began planning how and where we wanted to raise our children and spend the rest of our lives. He and I agreed that we wanted to live in a smaller, close-knit community in the countryside that still had agriculture and abundant natural spaces. After much consideration and a brief stop in Chicago for an educational opportunity, we moved to Valatie Village eight years ago, purchasing Sparkie and Carol Phillip’s “pink house” on New Street, and have been smitten with this area and our community ever since. 

Before moving here, I was an organizational business consultant in the tech industry helping medium to large construction, engineering, and architectural companies in the southeastern US integrate emerging technologies into their businesses with a concentration in financial management. This required me to inventory the company’s processes in great detail through purposeful communication with all levels of management and employees. With that knowledge, I would create a needs assessment with everyone’s input to streamline processes and establish goals through strategic planning, then match that to custom software solutions that helped them achieve those goals. While the underlying mission was job-based financial management, a benefit for the companies was gaining a more in-depth understanding of their organization resulting in not only fiscal responsibility but contributing to company cultures that embraced everyone’s best interest. People thrive best when their voices and interests are not only heard but are respected and contribute towards a productive organizational structure, whether it be a business, municipality, or even in our own homes and families. A municipality should be a reflection of all its citizens, but the responsibility to make that happen comes from the leaders of that municipality.