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City council candidates highlight local issues
For two hours last week the three candidates for the two open seats on the Mountain Home city council answered questions from a near capacity crowd at the city library meeting room.
All three had at one time served together and all stressed their ability to work with each other and find consensus and compromise.
Incumbents Alain Isaac and Rich Urquidi were joined by former councilman Geoff Schroeder for the evening Q&A sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce.
Moderator Lauri Erickson asked what the three thought the relationship should be between the city and the Chamber.
Isaac, who stressed throughout the evening her credentials as a businesswoman, said it was "a marriage. We both want what is best for Mountain Home."
Schroeder said the council should be good stewards of the taxpayer's dollars and encourage economic growth by creating clean, easy to understand city ordinances "and then stay out of business' way."
Urquidi focused on the need to be proactive in trying to draw new businesses to the community.
He said one of the keys to doing that has been the continuing efforts by the council over the years to improve the community's infrastructure.
"That encourages growth," Issac added. "I think we're a hidden gem (in the state). We can attract good paying jobs to Mountain Home."
Schroeder, who left the council to return to college and complete his degree, has been working with a law firm to rewrite the city's impact fees, which he said needed to be more realistic and with a lot less red tape. He also said protecting property rights with good zoning laws was fundamental to building a strong community.
When asked what the top issue was affecting small business, Isaac said it was important for the city to be involved in making the city physically attractive to new businesses, from sweeping the streets to clearing out weeds to spending money on beautification projects.
Schroder said the biggest problem was over-regulation. It's silly, he said, to make someone have to make half a dozen trips to the city building department to get all the permits necessary for a project, when the city should be able to create a "one stop" checklist that would speed the process.
"Unnecessary and confusing regulations get in the way," he said, adding that often those problems actually start at the legislative level. "We need to be there and testify," when the legislature starts imposing regulations on city governments. "We need to let them know what the impacts of their decisions are at the local level." He pointed out that he had time while attending BSU to "slip over" and testify on several occasions on behalf of the city.
Urquidi said the city needed to offer more help, such as through its economic development office, for businesses trying to get started in Mountain Home. "We need to use our economic development office more than we have," he said.
He also said he thought the city had done a good job in a tough economy to encourage new businesses. "A number of businesses have come in (during just the last year, alone)," he said, "and most of them have stayed (in business)."
The three were questioned from the audience about the three biggest challenges facing the city.
Schroeder said it would be keeping the airbase open, making sure the city had adequate water for the future, and "making sure the legislature doesn't keep dismantling local government. They do it every day. The want to move things to the state level and they're not very good at it."
Urquidi said the greatest difficulty was setting priorities within a shrinking budget, maintaining the streets and "keeping business in town and keeping this as a place where people like to live."
Isaac, who has served as chairman of the Chamber's Military Affairs Committee, said continuing to support the personnel at the airbase and helping ensure the base remained one of the premier bases in the nation was important.
But she also stressed the need for the city to do a better job communicating with the public, "especially in this age of social media."
"We need to get our message out," she said.
Several questions from the audience had to do with subjects over which the council has little or no say in the ultimate decision-making, such as the proposed Simplot slaughterhouse near the city and the progress of the Western Elmore County Recreation District.
The three candidates also were questioned about the details of some ongoing city projects, such as street improvements and expanding the city's water supply. In each case, they all offered technical responses that tended to mirror each other, since all three, even Schroeder who hasn't served in four years, were generally well-versed on the details of those projects.
The city bus system got lukewarm support -- at best -- from the candidates, all of whom questioned its effectiveness for all but a tiny handful of people. The city's subsidy for the service has been consistently falling. Isaac said she'd consistently voted against the subsidy, Schroeder indicated he felt the company running the service could find other money to keep it running, and Urquidi stressed the need to monitor its use closely and explore possible other alternatives. Yet, all three noted that it was important for some economic development checklists to attract new business, and whenever council seemed to be threatening its existence significant crowds would show up at city council meetings to demand it be maintained.
Each of the candidates had similar opinions on many issues, but each also stressed different aspects of the job.
Isaac, for example, often mentioned her business background and the fact that it kept her in contact with everyday citizens as one of her strengths.
She also stressed that her business knowledge, budgeting expertise and hard work ethic made her "different" than the other candidates, adding that "different is good. It helps create conversation" that brings competing ideas together.
For Urquidi, his general theme was to maintain and expand the quality of life of the community, noting that he had grown up here and wanted his children to also grow up here, enjoying that same quality of life, which the city could enhance with its beautification and recreation programs. He pointed out that in his job as a high school teacher he felt he had a better perspective on the needs and attitudes of younger voters and members of the community. He also stressed his 12 years of experience on the council as valuable institutional knowledge.
For Schroeder, his basic theme for the evening was making the government more efficient, easier for the average citizen to access and use, and using tax dollar wisely. He described himself as deliberative and someone who paid attention to details. He said his schooling, in which he studied municipal law, could help a lot in cleaning up city ordinances and "getting rid of ordinances we really don't need."
Yet, despite trying to indicate their differences, all three said they had no specific agenda for the next four years and all agreed that they had been able to work together in the past and expected to be able to do so in the future.
The three are running for two at-large seats on the city council in the Nov. 5 election.