Shorr, Kealiher square off for city’s 2nd District

Metro Wire Staff

Voters head to the polls on April 5 to decide the outcome of several races including the Stevens Point Common Council, also known as the City Council. Six of the Council’s 11 seats are up for grabs, all even-numbered District seats as well as District 1, which was filled by appointment due to a resignation. All contests have two competitors except for District 6, which has one candidate running unopposed.

The spring election is on April 5. Voters can register, and check their registration status, at myvote.wi.gov.

In Stevens Point District 2, incumbent David Shorr is being challenged by Corey Kealiher.

Questions by the Stevens Point Area League of Women Voters. Verbatim answers from both candidates follow:

Corey Kealiher

What life experiences have you had that make you the better candidate for City Council?

Having been a part of this community and culture for over 20 years gives me a much better insight into the people that make Stevens Point unique. I am friends and acquaintances with so many amazing individuals who do all of these great things for our community—from business owners to those who organize some of the best events, to people who just want to have some drinks together. I understand that every person is a unique individual with their own successes, struggles, beliefs, and goals. I understand that people are not tools to be used and directed for ideological purposes. I am not running for city council for some political win, or to remake Stevens Point in my own image of what I think it “should” be. I’m running to allow us all to have a place here, and protect the uniqueness of our community.

David Shorr

My career background is connected with public sector decision-making, and so is my grad school training. But after three terms on Council, I’m running on my colleagues’ and my record of success. We’ve worked to keep Stevens Point thriving as a vibrant community and local economy, and you can see it from all the projects being built around town. All told, the city’s seen $214 million in net new construction in the last four years. This Council also softened the blow of the pandemic by keeping the Kmart and Lullaby site projects on track, grants to help small businesses make rent, loosening tax deadlines, and enabling taverns to serve more customers outdoors.

Examples, where I’ve been especially involved, include lifting the ban on overnight on-street parking, boosting salaries of city staff at the lowest pay grades, making sure the City helps Edgewater Manor residents find new homes, and pushing for the city’s purchase of the laundromat on Division to open a walkway connection to the campus.

What would you like to accomplish as a member of the City Council this term?

Corey Kealiher

The biggest complaint I’ve heard from members of District 2 is a feeling of being unheard and unrepresented. The single most important thing that I want to accomplish in my term is to listen and to represent the people of District 2. We don’t need to keep repeating the Business 51 faux pas over and over, we just need council members who are willing to hear their neighbors, understand their concerns, and actually work with them—we don’t need to be so viciously divided on every single little issue. But that starts with listening to people, and not just trying to ram a particular policy down everyone’s throats —even if it’s a policy I agree with.

David Shorr

This council’s strategy for growth is about mixed-use commercial and residential development to create vibrant areas where people can live, work, and shop. But it’s especially vital to keep increasing the supply of housing, particularly affordable housing. Good examples are the Berkshire and plans for the Sisters of St. Joseph convent, which both set aside a number of units to be affordably priced.

And we need stronger small neighborhood commercial districts. We’re doing well in growing the overall tax base by focusing on Downtown and North Division, but neighborhoods need local shops and restaurants too. In District 2, that mostly means around the intersections of Stanley and Minnesota and Michigan and Main.

How will you inform your district’s residents about important issues and upcoming votes before they are voted on?

Corey Kealiher

It’s important to understand that most people are disconnected from local politics/government because we don’t really have anything that allows people to be passively informed on any issue in the same way that mass media allows with radio and television. We require people to take action in some way – visit the city website, watch city meetings, read emails, etc, and the overwhelming majority of people are simply not going to do that. We have to understand that people have any number of issues competing for their time, and asking them to “be involved” (especially when there’s no reason to think their council rep is going to listen, anyway) is asking a lot. It’s really only when a particular issue blows up in their Facebook feed do people take notice, start to form opinions, and get involved.

I have personally tried to solve this issue by doing a Facebook stream every week, in which I distill the content from hours of government meetings into 45ish minutes in an attempt to keep people informed. I will continue to do so as a council member. This way, someone need only be scrolling through Facebook (which they’re doing anyway) to run across the stream, and can choose to watch or not. This is just one way I’ve tried to solve the information issue, but when it comes to issues that directly affect the people of my district, I will also go door-to-door, letting them know what is happening, and getting feedback.

David Shorr

I believe in the importance of engagement, responsiveness, and letting the people I represent know how I approach the issues. I’ve been steadily building a constituent email list to send updates, and I cross-post all the updates on Facebook. Equally important, I get back to everyone who calls or writes me and follow through on issues with the City that anyone raises with me. Those aren’t the high-profile issues the Council votes on, but they often lead to action on residents’ concerns.

When the electorate is strongly divided on an issue, what decision-making process will you employ to help you decide how you will vote?

Corey Kealiher

I personally think that most of the divisiveness is manufactured by the partisan politics of Portage County, and social media. This could be solved by simply understanding another person’s point of view, and I am very good at doing just that. The people I want to hear from first on any issue (whether divisive or not), are the people who are most directly impacted by that issue. It is with these people that my decision-making process will rely heavily upon. I understand that this community is a home for all of us, and to trample on the concerns of anyone is the worst possible thing a council member could do.

David Shorr

Like my Council colleagues, I make the best decisions I can for our community and its future. Sometimes those decisions involve a lot of factors and tough choices. But for me it mainly comes down to three priorities: growing the local economy, good quality of life, and sustainable finances.

The Council has many different sources of input: advice from city staff, statements by community members at our meetings, and emails and phone calls from people within and outside the districts we represent. Hearing different viewpoints in our meetings from members of the public is important, and this Council has always made a point of welcoming them. Knowing how many late nights we’ve spent in order to hear everyone who wants to speak—often till 11 p.m. or later—our critics’ gripe about the Council not listening just doesn’t square with our actual record.

I also want to mention the ordinance that’s in the works on accessory dwelling/commercial units as a positive example of a really constructive community discussion. While the topic started out as highly controversial, meetings with the city’s community development director in each council district led to a pretty broad consensus and workable solutions to the concerns raised.

What is your stance on the proposal to require a binding referendum on all municipally financed (in whole or in part) public roadway or transportation projects requiring a city capital expenditure of $1,000,000 or more?

Corey Kealiher

I understand the process and history that birthed this referendum, and I understand why it was done. My stance on this has little to do with the referendum itself, but on why this referendum exists in the first place. This is a direct response to a city council that refused to consider the concerns of the southside business community who felt they had no choice left but to use whatever tool was available to them. That tool was this referendum. The unresponsive council is the issue here—not the referendum. That unresponsive council is a big reason as to why I’m running. I want to be a responsive council member. Let’s learn from this, rather than dig in deeper on it.

David Shorr

This initiative was sparked by opponents of the Business 51 plan, yet the referendum has widened out to encompass projects costing a small fraction of that project. A more accurate name would be the ‘budget item referendum.’ I hope the community votes “No” because it would handcuff city government and keep us from carrying out our basic responsibilities—paving the streets and luring businesses to the community. This would affect neighborhoods whose streets need to be redone. The streets we reconstruct every year should be chosen based on what condition they’re in, not by opening each project to a public vote. And what’ll we tell a business that wants to move into our business park but needs infrastructure, that they should wait to see what happens at the polls?

How do you see the role of the Affirmative Action/Fair Housing committee fitting with your vision of Stevens Point in the next 5 years?

Corey Kealiher

While I’m “Shorr ” my opponent will have a very nice political answer to this, the truth is that neither he nor I have any idea what will come out of this committee as far as future policy suggestions. I am not even sure as to when the last time this committee met, but it’s been a long time. Because of that, I cannot possibly give a truthful response here. My hope is that this committee has truly wonderful ideas come out of it, but that will remain to be seen.

David Shorr

There’s what the Council can do in a five-year time span, and there’s the big picture backdrop. As part of the country’s overall reckoning with racism, the comparatively low property ownership by black Americans has come to light. While the Council’s not in a position to fix that injustice, our decisions and the City’s work with other stakeholders can help make sure there are good lower- and middle-income housing options and that laws against housing discrimination are taken seriously. I already mentioned the Berkshire and convent site projects as examples of affordable housing and look forward to seeing what the Housing Task Force recommends.