By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph voters face a crowded field for at-large city councilmember on the February primary ballot next week, with the very real possibility only one candidate will be eliminated next week.
This is the first of our two-part series on the field.
Incumbent Kent “Spanky” O’Dell is seeking his third term and says he has one reason to run for re-election.
“I love the town. The only reason why I’m doing this is because I love the city and I love the citizens,” O’Dell says during his time on the KFEQ Hotline. “That’s why I’m doing this. There’s virtually no money or anything out of this. It’s strenuous. It’s stressful.”
O’Dell calls the council’s success a work in progress, pointing specifically to improvements to the city’s streets and its parks system. He says there doesn’t need to be a change, insisting the city needs simply to keep going in the direction set by the council.
But St. Joseph School Board member, Kenneth Reeder, says he wants to see a council overhaul.
“Thank goodness that we do have where we can flip everybody over at the same time,” Reeder says on the Hotline. “That’s the only way you can really institute change quickly. And that’s why we’ve been in the quagmire for so much of the time over at the school district, because it takes so long to have a change, to have a change, new opinions.”
Reeder says he has the time and energy to be both a council member and a school board member.
Businessman Jeff Schomburg says he wants to bring his business experience to the council, which he says made mistakes during the COVID pandemic.
“I know they tried to do the money to give to the businesses and recover, but it’s just not enough,” Schomburg says during his time on the Hotline. “My business, if we’re down for a week, that really hurts us and trying to get back up and pay the bills, it’s hard to do in a small business atmosphere.”
Schomburg says he wants to be a voice for the people and says he can bring productivity and efficiency to the council.
Downtown business owner Andy Montee says if the council focuses on what people need, the businesses will follow.
“More people will move down there,” Montee says on the Hotline about downtown’s development. “There’s been a lot of housing that has opened up recently and more to come. But I think you really have to take this balanced approach with it. You can’t only have kind of one, niche way of filling downtown.”
Montee says St. Joseph needs to take a more diverse approach to development to turn its population loss around.
Electrician Carl Jennings says each council member must work with the others to promote the city as a whole.
“You can’t go into this with a single thing on your agenda,” Jennings tells the Hotline. “It’s a four-year term. There’s way bigger things out there than one person’s single agenda.”
Jennings wants to improve the look of the city and add sidewalks at the locations of elementary schools.
Click here to read our story on the other at-large candidates.