“Albany is going towards a critical decision about its longer range-funding,” she said. O’Keefe argues that Albany needs development because the city’s general fund projections for this year and the next show expenditures growing faster than revenues. The city is losing money, she said, and needs “fiscal responsibility.”

Increasing parcel taxes is not efficient anymore, O’Keefe said, as the bond strategy she has endorsed for years is now stretched to the limit. O’Keefe’s recipe is to improve the climate for existing business on Solano and San Pablo Avenues, “without violating Albany’s original character,” while also finding new commercial centers. One valuable option for increasing the commercial tax base, according to O’Keefe, is to allow development on the Magna property at the Albany waterfront.

Along with Magna, the city of Albany owns some property on the waterfront. Albany owns the Neck, a strip of land stretching into the Bay from the western border of Magna’s property; Albany also owns the peninsula called the Bulb, a former dump today covered with weeds and bushes. The Neck and the Bulb, O’Keefe said, need development and upgrading as well.

“One of the park and recreation commissioners, the one whom I married, had a clever idea,” O’Keefe said. In East Albany some ball fields need maintenance. Their land will be scraped off, and Albany will have to pay to load the scraped land on trucks and bring it somewhere. “Why don’t we dump where it could do some good to Albany?” said O’Keefe. She said she will propose unloading the ball field debris onto the Bulb, where re-bars and concrete wreckage could be covered under a thick layer of earth. “I would like to enhance our publicly-owned waterfront land and shoreline to make the area more usable and accessible to all,” she wrote in her campaign literature.

“I am committed to working with other Council members on lingering issues including vacancies in police and fire services,” O’Keefe’s electoral flier reads. A mother of two who raised her children in Albany and educated them in Albany schools, O’Keefe said good schools are also very important for the future of Albany.