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QC Times: At-large candidates jockey for 2 seats on Davenport council, by Tory Brecht, 9/26/07
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Candidates running for Davenport’s two at-large city council positions aren’t sweating the Oct. 9 primary too much, as four of the five will move on to the general election ballot in November.
But they are trying to stake out their positions on issues of concern citywide, hoping to become the two aldermen elected to represent all 99,000 of the city’s residents.
Only one incumbent, Ian Frink, is seeking re-election. The challengers are LaMark Combs, Tina Gillispie-Clawson, Gene Meeker and Jennifer Olsen. Alderwoman Jamie Howard is leaving her at-large seat to run for mayor.
Three of the challengers — Olsen, Gillispie-Clawson and Combs — have run unsuccessfully for City Council in the past.
Frink said he hopes to build on successes from his first term. He strives to balance central-city and neighborhood issues with the need to provide the kind of amenities and quality-of-life projects that will attract new businesses and residents to town, he said.
“I believe that encouraging reinvestment in existing commercial corridors and in our older neighborhoods is important,” Frink, vice president at Crawford Co. in Moline, said. “We have to approach that in a multi-tiered approach. Not just incentives, but support of the police department and funding infrastructure improvements in capital budget. We have to strive to have a city we can live, work and play in.”
Frink counts his championing of the newly created 100 Homes program that aims to promote positive in-fill by offering low-interest home improvement loans to new homeowners in Davenport’s low-income neighborhoods and his support of new police funding as evidence he has citywide interests at heart.
“Being able to communicate well and compromise with others is a key to success.,” Frink said. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe we’ve been able to do that as a council as frequently as we should.”
Combs is running for an at-large position for a third time.
The former Scott County Jail corrections officer, who is now a minister at Higher Heights Missionary Baptist Church, said public service is his calling.
He would like to see more civility among Davenport’s elected officials.
“We are supposed to be facilitators on the city council and be able to take constructive criticism and treat each others the way we’d want to be treated ourselves,” Combs said. “You’ve got to be willing to compromise. I’ve learned over the years, you have to be a team player to get things done.”
Combs said his priorities if elected are ensuring budget accountability, getting police officers “out from behind desks and onto the street” and offers of economic incentives to new businesses that bring livable-wage jobs to Davenport.
“We shouldn’t be tapping into the pockets of Davenport citizens all the time with taxes and fees,” Combs said. “We need growth. We need to invest in things that return revenue.”
Gillispie-Clawson, a Department of Homeland Security officer at the Quad-City International Airport, said she’s running because the current city council doesn’t listen enough to citizens and is driven by too many personal agendas.
“I really believe we’re facing a lot of problems in our neighborhoods, and we need to stabilize them,” she said. “A lot of problems have stemmed from us working only either in the downtown or on 53rd Street. My thought is we need to have the whole city looked at as one and work to bring the whole city back up as a strong city.”
Things she would like to see addressed immediately include increasing the number of police officers and finding funding for the west-side sewer diversion tunnel.
“I think we’re short-changing a lot of neighborhoods in Davenport because we do concentrate on a few areas rather than the whole city,” she said. “That’s my big gripe.”
Meeker, who recently retired as DavenportOne’s downtown development director, believes that as downtown goes, so goes the rest of the city.
“Downtown has the highest concentration of businesses in the Quad-Cities,” he said. “It represents the largest segment of the community’s tax base. Whether you go downtown or not, it’s important for it to be healthy and vibrant.”
Although he’s passionate about the center of the city, Meeker said he knows that neighborhood improvement and a plan to improve commercial corridors like Brady and Harrison streets need attention.
Meeker said the portrayal of being on either the “basic services” or “amenities” side is over-simplification. The truth is, both are needed, he said.
“We can have basic services and still provide some of the amenities people want and enjoy,” he said. “It’s a matter of priorities and of sitting down and dealing with our limited resources. It’s not a matter of either-or.”
Olsen, a private practice attorney who flirted with the idea of joining the city’s legal team part time to try to get a handle on nuisance-abatement issues, said strengthening neighborhoods is her priority.
She lives in the challenging Taylor Heights school area and knows first-hand the difficulties being a property owner in the central city can bring.
“I think we need to create a sustainable growth plan that encompasses the whole city of Davenport,” she said. “I think the city is prime and aching for a sustainable growth plan.”
That mean re-energizing existing commercial and residential areas and practicing smart-growth strategies where new construction is going up, Olsen said. Too often, she said, the current staff and elected officials have tried to “improve” central-city areas by putting in more low-income housing.
Olsen has been an outspoken critic of City Administrator Craig Malin. She is in favor of seeing immediate changes in policy or finding a replacement for Malin.
“I’m not a big fan of some of the policies that have come out of that office,” she said. “We have serious problems with implementation of our policies in this city. Either he remedies that problem, or we need to find someone who can.”
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