Flagstaff City Council Candidate Khara House
Khara House’s Responses to the Flagstaff City Council Candidate Questionnaire 2026
Regulatory Relief: Flagstaff’s building codes and zoning processes can add significant time and expense to commercial projects. What specific zoning reforms or streamlining measures will you champion to reduce these burdens for local businesses?
KH: I’d like to see Flagstaff’s development process become even more predictable, efficient, and easier to navigate without sacrificing the standards that protect our community. I would champion zoning reforms that remove unnecessary barriers to adaptive reuse and infill and work to ensure our codes reflect the realities of operating in a high-cost community. I also support continued improvements to the review process, including clearer requirements at the outset, continuing efforts across City departments to improve coordination, greater use of concurrent reviews as appropriate, and transparent timelines. For local and small businesses, in particular, time and uncertainty can be extremely costly. My goal is to support a process that maintains our community values while also being consistent, understanding, responsive, and proportionate to the scale of the projects hoping to grow and strengthen our local economy.
Regional Plan Realities: With the city implementing the voter-approved Flagstaff Regional Land Use Plan, how will you balance strict environmental and smart-growth goals with the pressing need for affordable workforce housing and commercial expansion?
KH: I have always seen environmental stewardship, smart growth, housing, and economic opportunity as complimentary, not competing, goals. In a community with limited land, high housing costs, and real environmental constraints, the Regional Plan should help us make smart choices about where and how we grow. I support directing growth toward areas with existing infrastructure, encouraging infill and redevelopment, expanding housing choices near jobs and local transit, and making more efficient use of land already within our urban footprint. These actions help to reduce infrastructure costs, protect open space, and create more opportunities for workforce housing and appropriately located commercial development. At the same time, we should regularly examine whether our codes, fees, development incentives, and processes are actually advancing the goals laid out in our Plan or unintentionally making necessary projects unnecessarily harder to deliver. Sustainable growth must include economic sustainability, housing affordability, and an active vision of being a community where people can both work and live.
Employer-Assisted Housing: Would you support city incentives or public-private partnerships that make it easier for local employers to develop or subsidize housing for their own workforce?
KH: Absolutely, yes. Employer-assisted housing is an innovative move towards advancing Flagstaff’s strategic goals for addressing workforce housing through public-private partnerships and other creative efforts. Especially in a community where housing costs impact recruitment, retention, and the ability of essential workers to live where they work, I support exploring city incentives, land partnerships, financing tools, and other public-private approaches that can help employers create or subsidize housing while ensuring those partnerships provide clear community benefit. I’ve seen this approach be especially valuable when employers, housing providers, nonprofits, educational institutions, and government work together to create solutions at a scale we know no single partner can achieve alone. Employer-assisted housing is part of, not a replacement for, broader housing policy; it has an important role to play in a diverse, practical strategy to keep Flagstaff’s workforce able to live and thrive in Flagstaff.
Minimum Wage Trajectory: Flagstaff's local minimum wage significantly exceeds the state standard, impacting low-margin industries like retail, hospitality, and dining. How do you plan to support small businesses navigating these high labor costs?
KH: Flagstaff voters have repeatedly affirmed our local minimum wage, and I respect that decision. At the same time, I believe it’s possible and necessary to recognize the pressure that high labor, housing, utility, insurance, and other commercial costs collectively place on small businesses. I’d like to bring the City, Chamber, and small-business leaders together to identify ways we can reduce these pressures and focus on costs and barriers we can help address. That could include streamlined permitting and reduced administrative burdens, targeted small-business grants or financing, enhanced workforce training partnerships, energy-efficiency assistance, stronger business navigation services, and strategies that support affordable commercial space. I’m also interested in strengthening local procurement opportunities, as much as we can within Arizona regulations, to allow more City dollars to circulate through local businesses. Some additional considerations would include looking at the bigger picture of our economic drivers, such as partnerships for transit benefits mirroring communities like Seattle’s commuter-benefit approach, expanded childcare partnerships, small-business capital access, the creation of employer-assisted housing initiatives, shared services or purchasing cooperatives, and other means of reducing other business expenses.
Tourism & Economic Diversity: While tourism initiatives drive significant revenue, economic volatility remains a concern. What concrete strategies will you pursue to attract high-wage, non-tourism industries (e.g., biotech, clean energy) to the region?
KH: I believe our economic resilience and vibrancy require us to deliberately grow high-wage industries where we already see advantages in Flagstaff, through three specific strategies. We can strengthen the pipeline from NAU research and graduates into local companies by expanding partnerships between NAU, Moonshot, existing employers, and the City. This particularly applies to bioscience, clean energy, medical technology, advanced manufacturing, and research and development, as Flagstaff already has a high level of infrastructure and expertise to build on. I would also pursue evaluating whether our existing business incentives are competitive and targeted enough toward companies creating significant numbers of high-wage, low-impact jobs; this can also look like growing support for the expansion of successful local companies rather than focusing solely on recruitment. Third, I’d like to see us expand our work with NAU, CCC, workforce partners, and employers to create sector-specific training and career pipelines tied to actual local hiring needs. While these ideas don’t necessarily fall within the purview of Council, I believe we have the opportunity to enhance and support partnerships that consider these high-level visions for our future economic vitality.
Commercial Property Tax & Utilities: High commercial utility rates and property valuations strain local operations. What is your strategy for keeping city-controlled fees and taxes predictable for business owners?
KH: Some of the pressures businesses face through property valuations and taxation are outside the City’s direct control, but I don’t believe that means that Council should be passive about their impacts. We have had serious conversations about both utility rates and the cumulative cost of doing business in Flagstaff, and I believe predictability has to be a part of those discussions. My strategy would focus on early, transparent engagement before major fee or rate decisions are made, and engaging impacted parties as, not after, decisions are made. I would like to see us engage in clear multi-year forecasting where possible, to anticipate future impacts beyond immediate needs, and regularly reviewing City-controlled fees to ensure they are tied to actual service costs, applied consistently, and not creating unintended barriers.
Public Safety Ballot Measures: Local businesses rely heavily on a safe, accessible environment for both customers and staff. What is your position on upcoming public safety infrastructure bonds, and how will you ensure transparent use of tax funds?
KH: I wish we had other options for addressing these longstanding public safety infrastructure and staffing needs, but I support the direction we’re taking with an expansive understanding of public safety and serving community needs. The proposals headed to voters came from extensive discussions with a multitude of voices considering and compromising on a large slate of options and weighing priorities, costs, and community needs before arriving at the measures coming forward on the November ballot. If voters approve them, transparency is an absolute must. I would support clear, transparent public reporting that shows what was promised, what has been spent, project progress, timelines, and what ultimately is being delivered. I would also like to see regularly opportunities for Council to review updates, and a collective effort to share accessible updates that residents and businesses can understand without having to dig through lengthy and often confusing budget documents.
Transportation & Logistics: : Traffic congestion and winter road maintenance directly affect commercial logistics and customer access. How will you prioritize infrastructure spending to optimize traffic flow along major business corridors like Route 66 and Milton Road?
KH: I appreciate the measured approach our Public Works team, in collaboration with ADOT, public transit, and other agencies, take to considering and coordinating corridor improvements and navigating traffic flow and general road maintenance. I want businesses included early when corridor improvements are being planned to ensure that infrastructure decisions consider both long-term mobility benefits and construction impacts, access, deliveries, and other day-to-day realities of operating along these major corridors. I support prioritizing improvements that address known bottlenecks, improve signal coordination and intersection performance, maintain safe and predictable access along these corridors, and strengthen transit and multimodal options that can reduce vehicle demand over time. I think it’s important that we prioritize transportation investments that improve reliability, safety, and access, including looking at how all major corridors, transit, neighborhood streets, freight movement, pedestrian infrastructure, and winter operations function as an interconnected system. Again, I think it’s critical for us to take a bird’s-eye view of infrastructure and transit considerations in partnership and coordination with all city needs to ensure we don’t create new issues while attempting to solve others.