He is running against Gordon Poulson for the open seat.

Simonsen is a principal in the architecture firm of Cooper Roberts Simonsen Associates, and his expertise should be an asset to the City Council as it wrestles with urban growth and planning issues, from traffic in neighborhoods to how best to guide development in the city's northwest quadrant and redevelopment of the downtown.

When asked about traffic, for example, he said, "As long as people drive cars, we'll have traffic problems." He then asked whether we were concerned more about speeding or traffic volume, and made some sensible observations:

The city's wide streets encourage people to drive too fast because drivers figure they can travel at freeway speeds. Narrow streets actually are safer because people intuitively tend to slow down. Yet the city continues to build expensive wide streets when it doesn't need to.

Speed bumps are a quick fix which don't work. Stop signs will do more to slow traffic at less cost.

Mass transit, by contrast, is a long-term strategy, and government should invest in it in proportion to the one-third of the population (children, the elderly and others) who do not drive cars. Simonsen would expand bicycle and trail networks. These strategies also will help to reduce air pollution.

In economic development, the capital city's policies should support entrepreneurship and small businesses, because they create high quality jobs that stay put.

Simonsen works to build sustainable places. We believe the City Council would benefit from that kind of thinking.