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Improvements in infrastructure, economic development and government transparency are on the minds of the four candidates hoping to land one of three at-large seats up for vote in the 2022 Salem City Council election.
Two — Mayor Renee Turk and Vice Mayor Jim Wallace — are incumbents. Also on the ballot are former councilman John Saunders and Anne Marie Green, who in the November 2022 race for two seats finished behind Hunter Holliday and former mayor Randy Foley.
Bill Jones, who was elected for a fourth consecutive term in 2020, chose not to run again.
Three of the four candidates are running for second terms, so they also know how much work it is to serve on a council that has new faces.
“When you are trying to bring change, it’s like turning around an aircraft carrier,” said Wallace, who is wrapping up his first term on the council. “It’s all very slow.”
Wallace, who had never run for public office before being elected to the council in 2020, said he was encouraged by his wife to throw his hat into the ring four years ago because she had grown tired of listening to him grumble about how the city was managed.
“She said I needed to stop complaining and do something about it,” he said. “Then I had a secretary who had encouraged me to run for a long time. Then I had another friend who did the same. So, between the three of them, I decided to see what would happen.”
Turk said among the reasons she ran in 2020 was that the lone woman on the council at the time, Jane Johnson, was stepping down after serving four terms, and no other women had entered the race. Not only was she the top vote-getter that year, but she became the first female mayor in the city’s history. She did not take that appointment lightly.
“Part of what I’ve told people is that I’ve attended a lot of [meetings and events],” she said. “I’m lucky, since I’m retired, and I can get to a lot of things. There were mayors in the past, who weren’t retired and could do that, and I get it.
“But I think it’s important for Salem to be represented on regional boards, and thank goodness most people agree with that on our council. But I’ve tried to be very, very active.”
This is the second council election since the date was moved from May to November. Turk and Wallace were part of the last slate of candidates to run for a May election.
The date change also attracted more voters. All four candidates who ran in 2022 received more than 3,000 votes, quite a difference from 2020, when Turk was the top vote-getter with 1,886.
It also led to the closest municipal election in this century, when a recount was conducted before it was certified that Foley defeated Saunders for the second council spot by just eight votes. Green finished fourth in 2022, just under 200 votes behind Foley.
Both Wallace and Saunders, who ran as independents in previous elections, are running this time as Republicans, a designation first used by Holliday in an unsuccessful city council bid in 2020. Before Holliday, one other candidate in this century, Margaret Newman in 2014, had run as a Republican. During that same period, no one has run as a Democrat.
Turk and Green are running as independents.
Wallace said he believes he was successful in making progress on the issues he campaigned on four years ago, including advocating for changes in the school system, changing the city’s approach to economic development and providing more government transparency. This time around, his top issues include revising what he believes to be outdated city code in areas such as combating blighted properties and continuing downtown revitalization.
“We need businesses that are destination points that will draw traffic off the interstate and to the downtown area,” he said.
Turk said she believes her four years as mayor have been successful because of the time she has taken to listen to both her constituents and fellow council members before voting on anything.
She said she was a proponent of building up a reserve of money the city can dip into in case of an economic emergency, and a capital reserve fund that the city now has access to for smaller infrastructure projects.
In running for a second term, Turk said her focus will be on upgrading city facilities such as the sleeping quarters at the city’s firehouses, making sure the last two school buildings still in need of upgrades — West Salem and East Salem elementaries — are renovated, and taking advantage of the city’s strong bond rating to tackle larger projects, such as making major improvements to the civic center. She also believes that the city would benefit if more of its departments located in offices in other parts of town were based out of city hall.
For the challengers, their platforms have not changed significantly from their 2022 campaigns.
Saunders, a graduate of both Salem High School and Roanoke College, spent 33 years working for the city, much of that time as part of the management group at the Salem Civic Center. He began his first term on the city council in 2018, shortly after his retirement. He said his career experience makes him a valuable council member, and he refers to the results he helped deliver during his term.
“It’s the same platform I had in 2018,” Saunders said. “Our facilities are deteriorating. We had the ability to fix [the Moyer Sports Complex], and we had set aside money for the facilities at the civic center, but some of that work still needs to be done.”
Saunders said he also would like to see the city more assertive when it comes to street improvements.
“Roads are kind of the sign of the prosperity of the city that you’re in,” he said. “I’m old, but I don’t think I’m alone with being tired driving over potholes.”
He also said that the council he was part of made it a priority to increase the amount in financial reserves, which he said grew from about six weeks to more than six months during his previous term.
Green spent more than 30 years working in various administrative positions for Roanoke County’s government services and was married to the late Mac Green, who was Salem’s vice mayor from 1974 to 1994.
Green, who moved to Salem in 1989, said she believes the way the city does business needs to be changed. More transparency is needed in the decision-making process, she said, and citizens who want to speak directly to the council should be given that opportunity without restrictions.
Currently, the public comment portion of a city council meeting is limited to five individuals speaking for no more than 5 minutes each.
“I’ve always thought that was odd,” she said. “But they are still limiting the number of people who can speak at any meeting. I’ve never understood why that’s such a big deal. Some of the meetings only last 15 or 20 minutes. Let a few more people speak.”
Green referred to the process used earlier this year to approve the HopeTree rezoning application as an example of where she believed the city council and other committees involved need to revise how the council and public interact.
HopeTree, the 62-acre campus that originally served as an orphanage but has since evolved into a faith-based family services ministry, received approval from the council to rezone the area from strictly single-family homes to a mixed-use concept that may include apartments, townhouses, single-family homes and some small businesses, including a hotel with up to 34 units.
The final vote was 3-2, with Wallace voting no, and Holliday and Turk voting yes with Foley and Jones.
On his decision, Wallace said he did not believe that the council was given enough details about the proposed development.
“As strange as this may sound, we didn’t know what we were voting for,” he said. “We were voting basically for a vision that would be subject to revision at any time by the developer without any input.
“My philosophy is we’re elected to represent the viewpoint of our citizens, not to make tough decisions for them. We’re supposed to represent their viewpoint. There was an overwhelming number of people — probably 20 to 1 — against probably anybody voting in support of it.”
Turk disagreed with Wallace’s assessment and said she believes that all the necessary information had been provided during the process, which lasted nearly a year. She added that input from both the council and the planning commission led to revisions in the plan, and she added that she believed the project was consistent with a need that many people in the city have expressed to her: a source of additional housing and businesses.
“I voted in favor of the redevelopment because I can guarantee you that I spent more time [looking into the project] than anybody — whether it’s our council or another citizen,” Turk said. “I worked with community development staff leaders. I worked with the developer. I worked with the planning commission. … I put more time into the 10 to 12 months of evaluating the situation, so when I came to the decision, it was a logical decision.
“I’m not the only one who voted in favor of it. But the biggest thing about it is I had to look at what was best for all of the citizens of Salem.”
Both Green and Saunders said that they would have opposed the measure if they had been voting.
Saunders said that the zoning plan does not match the infrastructure capacity of the neighborhood.
Green agreed with Wallace that too much autonomy has been given to the developer.
“They have already approved it, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like or where the buildings will be,” she said. “We don’t know the mix between apartments, townhouses and single-family homes. … The city just approved a concept.”