In his bid for the Redmond City Council position 2 seat, Osama Hamdan said he will apply his knowledge of working at Microsoft to tackling problems facing the city.

Hamdan has worked for the corporation for 20 years and said he felt it was time to get involved.

“It’s just having been in the community for a while, I feel like I benefit a lot from the community and I just want to give back,” he said.

One of the main challenges the candidate sees is complications from undertaking multiple projects simultaneously.

This applies particularly to traffic and road construction downtown, which he said has made it harder for residents to drive around.

“It’s an accumulation of lots of people moving to the city, lots of people driving through the city” coupled with building construction, he said.

While he said many of the projects will likely provide real benefits, the organization and implementation are causing headaches.

If elected, he hopes to set up a system of checks and balances to make sure project stacking doesn’t occur in the future.

Dealing with a lack of affordable housing is also important to him, and he would examine if large corporations that benefit from an influx of new residents and employees are offsetting the impacts they are causing in regards to housing.

“We don’t seem to have any direction in where we want to go in terms of affordable housing,” he said.

Redmond should also examine building codes to see if there’s any areas that they could reduce costs to entice developers to build more units.

Finally, he wants to continue to develop community parks and trails, creating new ones and maintaining and improving existing ones and account for continued population growth.

“How do we account for more people?” he asked.