2023 Columbus Candidates

Tim Fulton 00:10Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week, in anticipation of this fall's election, the Confluence Cast is endeavoring to introduce Columbus voters to the 12 council and two mayoral candidates in their own words. Today, as an introduction, I sat down with Columbus Underground to discuss the interviews, what listeners can expect, and offer a preview of the through lines for how candidates think about the future of Columbus. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theConfluenceCast.com. Enjoy the interview. Sitting down here with Walker Evans, the editor, CEO, and co-founder of Columbus Underground. Walker, how are you?

Walker Evans 01:08I'm good. How are you, Tim?

Tim Fulton 01:09Good. We are on the tail end of 15 — no, 14 — interviews.

Walker Evans 01:17All 12 city council candidates, the two mayoral candidates that will be on the ballot. And we're just basically here to do a "here's what's coming, here's what's coming down the pike." And when you say tail end, do you mean you just finished the last one? I finished five minutes ago. Mayor Ginther left eight minutes ago. Yes, he's just now getting into his car downstairs. We're all done. Nice. Congrats. I know. Oh, more work for you than it was for me. Well, thank you for the use of your office. Thank you for my brand-new sign.

Tim Fulton 01:51That your wife lovingly did. I say, could you please send me a receipt? We do indeed want to pay for that. Yes. So, what's coming now? All 14 of those interviews coming up over the course of the next month. Yes. So my thinking — and I've run this past you beforehand — is to, well, first of all, let's talk about how we conducted the interviews. So for the council candidates — so, of the 12 council candidates, there are six of them that are currently holding elected office. They're currently seated as Columbus City Council members. There are three that are attempting to be council members that are considered, quote-unquote, endorsed by the Democratic Party. There's some nuance there about the fact that they weren't actually endorsed by the party fully before they announced their candidacy. But that's a whole separate kit and caboodle. And then there are three folks who are additionally running for those nine seats. I realize that that's a little confusing. The only point there is that, in the interest of fairness, I drafted a slate of questions that I shared basic, high-level overviews with each of the candidates, and I asked them all the same questions. I asked them about their background and what brings them to their candidacy. I asked them what issues they felt Columbus faced. I asked them how they felt about the new districting process. And then I asked them why people should vote for them.

Walker Evans 03:33Nice. I haven't read through any of the transcripts yet. I didn't sit in with you on any of these interviews.

Tim Fulton 03:40Who's gonna win? No, no.

Walker Evans 03:43Were there themes that came about when you asked them, you know, what are the most important topics? Were they all kind of talking about the same things?

Tim Fulton 03:51All unified. Most of the common themes were around the second issue, "what is Columbus facing?" And that was, I think, 90% of the candidates all said some variation on growth.

Walker Evans 04:13I was gonna make a guess: housing. Housing as part of that growth, affordable housing specifically. Absolutely. Transportation infrastructure probably came up a lot. Policing and safety probably came up a lot.

Tim Fulton 04:23You'd be surprised from whom.

Walker Evans 04:26No, yeah, I just meant kind of broadly, in general. The big things.

Tim Fulton 04:32Yeah, absolutely. And so, I guess what I'm trying to impart to people is: these may be some of my most boring interviews I've ever done, in that I was trying to be not necessarily even equitable, but truly equal with each of the candidates. So people will hear you saying the same thing — they will hear me saying the same thing. And — don't get me wrong, I wasn't just sitting here quiet the whole time. But I did try to not challenge things that folks said, because the idea is to give them basically similar to what the Dispatch does, and just give folks a questionnaire. There's no back-and-forth there, right? And if this is the method for folks to learn about candidates in their individual district — sorry, they're all — everybody's voting at large. But to learn about the candidates in general, I wanted the candidates to have the opportunity to give it.

Walker Evans 05:37Yeah, I'm sure it's still an interesting listen, just to see what everyone had to say about things. Absolutely. Were there any little nuggets you remember? Because it's been going on for weeks now at this point. Sure, it's a little hazy, thinking back to the originals, the first couple. Were there any little moments that jumped out to you as surprising, like, "oh, I didn't think this person was going to talk about that"?

Tim Fulton 05:57I think the districting thing was the most surprising. And I encourage everyone to go back to our rant-slash-explanation of districting. But surprising how differently folks understood it — not so much the mechanics of how it's about to work, but how it will work going forward. And that specifically around constituent services, and whether folks will have additional sort of, like, accountability to their constituents within their district.

Walker Evans 06:39Is trash pickup going to vary district by district? Like, well — and, yeah, is that the levels of what you're talking about? That shouldn't, right? A big concern about that sort of thing?

Tim Fulton 06:51A concern about that sort of thing. I guess more like — we were just talking about my brother-in-law, that he wants speed bumps on the street. And who does he call for that? And my answer was, well, you could talk to your area commission, or you could call the mayor's 311 line. Sure. Is there going to be another, basically, line of defense — that, hey, I can call my district person? Or does it immediately fall on — whereas previously it would just fall on the committees?

Walker Evans 07:27Yeah, right. I would think there wouldn't be a lot changing. I mean, because services run under the sort of executive branch of the government. They'll continue to be run by the services, right? You wouldn't call up your city council person to let them know that, like, your yard waste didn't get picked up.

Tim Fulton 07:43My counter-example there is, I would call my congressperson if I needed something in Veterans Affairs. Like, that is literally the person you're supposed to go to, in order to, like, "hey, this isn't working out for me. How can I get something?"

Walker Evans 08:00Yeah, I mean, if it's something you needed, some — you should call Veterans —

Tim Fulton 08:05But the example I'm making is, if government isn't working for me, who do I call in order to hold accountable?

Walker Evans 08:13I would just argue that "I want a speed bump on my street" isn't government not working for me. It might be. It might just be, this isn't the kind of road for that. You don't get a speed bump anywhere you want one, just because you want one.

Tim Fulton 08:25Yeah, absolutely. So, that being said about the interview structure of the council candidates, one of them I treated a little bit differently. It was Shannon Hardin, council president Shannon Hardin, for, I think, a couple of reasons. One, he's running unopposed. Two, I interviewed him last year. So it's like — again, just to give you all the same questions.

Walker Evans 08:51Right. Background as the unopposed part.

Tim Fulton 08:54It's just sort of like, you don't need to make a pitch here.

Walker Evans 08:59Well, and just to recap — and we've said this before — but six of them are running unopposed.

Tim Fulton 09:05Yeah. And I think only one of the non-currently-seated ones is being challenged. It's Nancy Day-Achauer.

Walker Evans 09:16Right. Remy is running against someone new.

Tim Fulton 09:19No, sorry. So among Chris Wyche, Melissa Green, Nancy Day-Achauer — of the three, three non-sitting. Correct. I believe that's correct. Yeah, I'm almost positive, because —

Walker Evans 09:34The other two that are being challenged, that have an opponent for their district, are Remy and Bankston, who are both currently council.

Tim Fulton 09:42Correct. Yes, yes. We'll draw a map or something. I asked you for a graphic, but I just got this poster.

Walker Evans 09:49Was it on the budget?

Tim Fulton 09:52With Shannon and I — I told him all that before. I was like, "hey, everybody else, they all got the same questions. We just talked last year. Can we just talk?" And so we just talked, and it was, I think, a really fruitful conversation. Cool. Yeah. In terms of how we release these over the next couple of weeks, I'm gonna do Shannon first, and then just each other council member individually. Probably Monday, Wednesday, Friday, over the council candidates. Yeah. What did I say, council members? Each council candidate. And then, as a bonus at the end, we have the interviews with both Mayor Ginther and his challenger, Joe Motil. So those will be there. Maybe you and I will sit down over the course of this month and talk more, do a little recap. Sure. Because I don't want to reveal a whole lot of, like, "this person said this or this." Oh, yeah. And also, you weren't in the room, so I want you to be able to, like, challenge it a little bit. Yeah. But yeah, so that's what the Confluence Cast — the newly launched Confluence Cast — is going to look like over the next month or so. We do have some exciting interviews coming up after that throughout the rest of the year. But as always, I think folks should feel free to reach out, pitch their ideas, or just say, "what do you know about this?" You and I have talked about doing maybe a recurring news thing where — don't let you get a word in edgewise, too.

Walker Evans 11:33I'll interrupt. But, um, yeah, I think that could be fun.

Tim Fulton 11:38Yeah, I'd like — what folks — it's been easy to sort of create buckets that get filled, like, we have our arts bucket, our politics bucket, our development bucket.

Walker Evans 11:50I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that happens in passing that would not require a full episode to be devoted to that individual topic. But, like, on a Thursday or Friday, if we sit down and, like, "what happened the past week?" — yeah, there's a lot of things, a lot of, like, little nuggets and tidbits, and maybe five minutes on that topic and six minutes on that topic. And there's a lot to talk about. Absolutely. And sometimes it's, you know, what was the reaction to the thing? Yeah, I think it could be fun.

Tim Fulton 12:19Like the station — yes, nobody talked about the Greyhound station. So if you're waiting for that —

Walker Evans 12:25Yeah, I'm working on an opinion piece about what we should do with the old site, because it's been two years and there's been no movement. Okay. You know my heartache. Yeah, we should rebuild the Central Market exactly the way that it was.

Tim Fulton 12:42Oh, I hope you have historical photographs, too.

Walker Evans 12:45Sure, they could take up blueprints and all that sort of stuff. But, like, same materials, same, like — do it as perfectly as possible.

Tim Fulton 12:55Okay. I guess I don't know enough about the Central Market for that to be like — yeah, oh, that's interesting.

Walker Evans 13:03I mean, it's an old market. It was a brick building. It's a very unique-looking building. You look at it, you're like, "oh, yeah, that looks like an old-timey market building." Whereas the North Market — the building the North Market's in, it's only been in that building for, like, 30 years. Okay. The original market building — it's an old warehouse that it's in. This looks like a market that you would see in, like — oh, you go to downtown Pittsburgh, and they still have a market, you know? Yeah. Okay.

Tim Fulton 13:27So who owns the land?

Walker Evans 13:29COTA. Okay. Yeah, COTA bought it off of Greyhound two years ago. And they said they're gonna do something there. But also, like, the Central Market didn't take up the entire footprint of that block. And so they could do that plus — it could be a "yes, and." They could do that and then also build, like, a skyscraper next to it or whatever else they want to do. But I think, from, like, a historic preservation, restoration — like, when cities do weird, crazy stuff like that, like, "hey, we lost this history 60 years ago, we're gonna bring it back" — like, that's kind of cool, when it works. Yeah, it probably won't happen, but that's my — I like your heartache. Thanks. That's my opinion.

Tim Fulton 14:09Thank you for your time. Anything else you wanted to get off your chest?

Walker Evans 14:13No, no. Let's keep this going. I'm looking forward to listening to what all these folks had to tell you.

Tim Fulton 14:18It's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. All right. Thanks, Walker. No problem. Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theConfluenceCast.com. Please rate, subscribe, share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite historian. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info@theConfluenceCast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson. Our producer is Philip Cogley. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.