Now retired, McCandless said she wants to lean on her experience to help improve Orem from the mayoral position.

“My passion is helping communities strive,” she said. “Why are people in the communities? What are their needs? What do they love? What is it that they need to thrive in their communities?”

McCandless sat down with the Daily Herald to discuss the different issues she believes Orem faces and her plans if she were elected mayor. This is the first of two stories recapping the conversation and addresses housing and infrastructure challenges within the city.

McCandless said a priority of hers is to listen to the residents, and that when she is knocking doors during her campaign and learning their needs, one of two issues they bring up the most is housing.

She said many she spoke with fear Orem is going to have more high-density rentals in the city — which she said she does not support — while others worry about housing affordability.

“Right now, a single-family house in Orem costs too much for first-time homebuyers to qualify for the number of first-time homebuyer assistance programs the state has,” McCandless said.

She acknowledged Orem is built out, is in an older stage of its life cycle compared to nearby Utah County cities and does not have space to build a lot of new neighborhoods. 

McCandless’ solution is to improve the “missing middle” and have different housing types available in existing Orem neighborhoods, including townhouses, twin homes and smaller single-family home lots. She proposed building lots smaller than 8,000 square-feet and looking into land trusts.

“I’m not interested in building high-rises,” she said. “I’m not interested in building thousands more apartments or hundreds more apartments, because we’re almost built out. What I’m interested in is how can we make our neighborhoods stronger, and how can we bring more people into neighborhoods that are going to be living there?”

McCandless said she is also concerned with how many rentals in neighborhoods are owned by investors that do not live nearby and wants to look into how to have more owner-occupied housing in those spaces.

“Being a renter is not inherently bad, but it is an issue when you don’t have the property owner nearby to regulate (the property),” she said.

The second issue McCandless said residents bring up is traffic, which she considers a unique challenge for Orem due to its geographic location between Utah Lake and the mountains. She said she is not a traffic engineer, but if elected, she would make it a priority to examine factors that contribute to traffic and work to reduce them. 

More than 32,000 people leave Orem daily to go to work, according to McCandless, and a similar number commute into Orem for work. She said Utah Transit Authority officials are particularly concerned about what the commutes do to traffic queuing on State Street.

She said she is not interested in bus rapid transit on State Street, because it would require more high-density housing to support it and would take out existing commuter lanes, but she wants to work with UDOT on other solutions, such as signal optimization.

“I want to focus on increasing efficiency with what we have right now, rather than bring something else in,” McCandless said. “Because if we did bus rapid transit, that would take out at least two lanes, and that would just make our traffic problem worse.”

On a holistic level, McCandless said addressing infrastructure issues — whether it be traffic, aging neighborhoods or too many rentals — requires the city to have an active role in listening to residents.

She said she wants to be a “champion” of the city’s neighborhoods and businesses and be on the forefront of supporting the community. This includes building a strong relationship with regional committees, such as Mountainland Association of Governments, which federal and state funding runs through.

“As a mayor, you represent the whole city and need to be extremely aware and just as passionate about what’s happening to the neighbors in other neighborhoods as in your own neighborhood, and having that keen awareness of what those individual needs are,” she said. “You take those different pieces, those different neighborhoods, and bring them together, and then bring it into the regional sphere.”