Sean Davis for Astoria

The other day, I met with a candidate for county commissioner at Pier 39 in Astoria. My goal was simple: listen, learn, and keep doing the work of talking to people who care about this community. I believe that if you want to lead well, you need to speak with as many community leaders, neighbors, business owners, veterans, and everyday citizens as possible. That is how you learn what matters to people, what has already been tried, and what solutions might still be possible.

While we were there, a man stopped us. He is someone many people would describe as conservative and opinionated. What he said really hit me. He sincerely asked both of us to do our best to bring people together. He said this country is so divided now that we are too busy fighting each other to get anything done.

It stayed with me.

I am not running as a Democrat or a Republican. I am running for a nonpartisan office on purpose. I believe local leadership should be about people, not party labels. Potholes, slides, looming emergencies, they don’t care about ideology. Public safety does not care about red or blue. Neither does economic growth, housing, addiction, or the future of our kids.

My whole life has been shaped by service. In the military, I was trained to lead by example. That meant showing up first, working hard, making decisions under pressure, and putting the mission and the team ahead of your own comfort. I spent years building teams to help communities in difficult places and tough moments: Haiti in 1995, Iraq in 2004, and New Orleans after this country’s largest natural disaster in 2006, the Holiday Farm Fire that took my town in 2020. In those places, no one had the luxury of endless political theater. People needed leadership. They needed practical solutions. They needed people willing to sit at the table, work through differences, and act.

That is one of the biggest problems with politics today. Too many people now act like compromise is weakness. In my experience, compromise is often the goal in difficult situations. It is how serious people solve serious problems. It is not surrender. It is not betrayal. It is how you bring different perspectives together and move forward.

Good leaders understand that making sound and timely decisions is part of the job, even when those decisions may upset a small group of people. Leadership is not about waiting until every single voice agrees. Good leadership means listening carefully, gathering the right information, and using studies, consultants, and public input to move toward action, not to keep us from taking it. There is a place for listening. There is a place for learning. But there also comes a time to make hard decisions and act. If all we do is delay, we are not solving problems. We are just kicking them further down the road.

I want to help change that.