To the Editor:

I strongly support Michelle Pirone Lambros for Princeton Council, and know you will too, when you learn more about the skills, experience, and vision she will bring to the position. Our Council needs members with proven finance and leadership skills to make enlightened decisions for our town. Michelle’s background in public/private partnerships and finance, and her experience developing multiple businesses, mean she’s a creative doer with the know-how to innovate new solutions to old problems.

Michelle’s international experience in building public/private partnerships is exactly the professional background we want on Council. While living overseas, she developed the concept for a national festival in Kuwait that brought the government, private enterprise, hundreds of vendors, and diverse communities together to showcase cultural heritage. She managed the six-figure budget on time and at cost.

Her experience managing infrastructure contracts in the Middle East, and as a serial entrepreneur and small business owner, in both the U.S. and in Mexico, she’s got hard-won experience in profit and loss responsibility for multi-million dollar budgets. She’s honed her negotiating and management skills, which have made her into the collaborative leader we need. Michelle’s also bilingual, and works across languages and cultural differences to find solutions that bring together multiple stakeholders and finding common ground between competing agendas.

Michelle knows that one way to keep down property taxes is by shoring up the commercial tax base. She has innovative ideas to ensure that every storefront in Princeton is occupied. Her experience on the Zoning Board has provided her with an understanding of the ordinances we need to keep Princetonians aging in place, and increase the stock of middle-class housing. Her background in public/private projects has taught her the power of partnerships. She’ll be the voice we need to get a fair deal with the University, and identify innovative ways the municipality and the University can work together to solve social, infrastructure and energy challenges.

The Council needs people with a specific type of experience. Good intentions are not enough. At this critical time, we need leaders of a different kind. We need public servants with hard-won practical experience in the private and public sectors. We need officials who have the competence as well as the toughness to secure a fair deal for all of our neighborhoods and each of its citizens.

I support Michelle Pirone Lambros for Princeton Council, and I hope you will too.

Bill Hare
Jefferson Road