La Crosse City Council District 10
Common CouncilThe Common Council is the legislative policy-making body of the City. Council members approve contracts, adopt regulatory ordinances and resolutions, approve the annual budget, determine the tax rate, provide direction to the Mayor, City Department Heads and other Council appointees, and provide a forum for active community participation in setting and achieving City policies, goals and objectives.
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Jennifer Trost
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What motivates you to run for a position on the Common Council?
Identify three important issues facing La Crosse that you would like to address/work on during your term as a member of the Common Council and briefly state your current thinking about each of them.
Aside from issues affecting the city, what specific concerns are important to the voters in your district?
How will you communicate with your district constituents and encourage their engagement with issues that affect our city?
Campaign Phone
608-360-2482
Facebook
facebook.com/JenniferTrostforCityCouncil/
Education
B.A., Southwestern University; M.S., Carnegie Mellon University; Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
Community Involvement
City Council Member, District 11
Council members have two equally important and satisfying jobs: serving their constituents and setting policy for the city. I’ve helped the residents and business owners in my district get stormwater upgrades, street safety improvements, enhanced lighting, necessary parking for their businesses, re-zoning, and accurate information from city staff. Regarding city policy, I’ve sponsored legislation to increase the affordability, availability and variety of housing, so that current and future residents can live in La Crosse. Finishing my first term, I now have first-hand experience with the process and challenges of city government and know there is much more to be done.
The three most important issues facing the city are housing availability, future budgets, and capacity to deal with extreme weather events. Even people who are secure in their housing are affected by the shortage because the budget relies heavily on property taxes to fund services. The good news is that we have space to add new housing by changing current regulations that limit the variety of needed construction. Tough budget decisions are coming as we face rising costs and flat revenue, constrained by legislative limitations and declining state support. Stormwater infrastructure is extremely expensive, takes decades to build and has to be approached as a network. We’ve made targeted upgrades with good planning, but we are playing catch-up.
Constituents regularly contact council members about traffic safety and street repairs. Some upcoming city projects in District 10 include safety improvements along 16th and 19th streets, pedestrian lighting and road construction along segments of Green Bay Street, and planning for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation construction along West Ave. Beyond how surprisingly expensive streets are, that’s one of the difficult things to understand about street construction and maintenance – that some of our streets are municipal, and some others are designed and built by the state and not fully under city control.
I will attend neighborhood association meetings and continue to educate anyone who asks about how to use the city’s Legistar website to follow along the legislative process. Legistar is a powerful tool to see when city meetings are happening, along with their agendas and actions, but it’s not really intuitive. I will also continue the practice of listening sessions. Public engagement will be essential as we spend the next year updating the zoning code. And I’m always happy to get phone calls from constituents; constituent service is my favorite part of the job as it’s often a specific project or problem that I can immediately go to work to solve.
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