New Chester GOP leader aims for bipartisanship
CHESTER >> The new chairman of the Chester GOP said he is eschewing party loyalty in favor of expanding inclusiveness in a bid to form a more perfect representation of the city, pulling in independent voters as well as some Democrats.
“I think it’s an awaking group,” said retired Fire Commissioner James Johnson Friday. “It’s a group that recognizes that we can’t do business like we have in the past. I think we’re beyond the time when we stand on one side of the street and throw stones at the Democrats, and they stand on the other side and throw stones at us. That doesn’t get us anywhere.”
The move comes as Chester Republicans — who ruled the city for most of the last century — are completely frozen out of power. All elected city offices are now filled with Democrats.
Chester GOP spokeswoman and former councilwoman Marrea WalkerSmith noted the party is still backed by the Regular Republican Campaign Committee of Chester, but said the “new” Chester GOP has already been working with community organizers, religious leaders and other stakeholders for about a year to identify issues they want addressed.
“It’s a nontraditional political approach that I haven’t really seen and I’m hopeful that it remains grassroots,” she said. “Even though it’s political, it’s almost like something that runs like a community organization.”
Johnson, who served as fire commissioner from 2011 to 2015, described Chester as “a small city with bigcity problems,” chief among them gun violence and a faltering education system.
He also pointed to an audit last year that showed the city had a $16 million cumulative deficit for 2016 and a pension crisis for its police, fire and other employees as evidence that the city needs new stewardship.
Johnson said he is striving to gather the collective knowledge of all the city’s residents in a more bottomup model and make an investment in what he calls “human capital.”
“We’re not telling people what we’re going to do, we’re asking them, ‘What would you like to see happen?’” he said. “We have many people who think their civic duty stops when they go to a poll on elections. That’s where it starts.”
Moving forward, the party said it plans to implement new mentorship and enrichment programs for city youth; bring the city and school communities together into a single network by updating technology infrastructure; provide new jobs and training programs; and improve overall quality of life with an initiative on preventative health and violence prevention.
“The mission really is to believe in Chester and believe that Chester is a place where we have an improved quality of life and enrichment opportunities,” said Walker-Smith. “Those are the main goals of it, so it’s not really connected to any particular organization or ideology of the past or anything like that.”
Walker-Smith said the Chester GOP will flesh out how to meet those goals in the coming weeks as candidates are named and specific platforms are revealed. Johnson said there will also soon be a community listening session at party headquarters at 520 Avenue of the States, but has not yet set a date for that meeting.
Democratic Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland, a former longtime state representative who was elected to the seat in 2015, addressed some of Johnson’s points Monday. Kirkland said his administration inherited the deficit and pension issues, but is working with state officials to identify and eliminate waste, including massive overtime benefits, which should show dividends soon.
The city has meanwhile seen a revitalized downtown with new businesses and apartments, Kirkland said, and is poised to bring in additional tax revenue and jobs with a new hotel. As for the educational system, Kirkland said Johnson should “identify who made it crumble.”
“It has crumbled under the GOP,” said Kirkland. “Everybody knows that. Mr. Johnson knows that. Republican leaders have been in place to dismantle our educational system. It wasn’t Democratic leaders who destroyed our vocational program and got rid of it, it was Republicans. It wasn’t Democrats who started the process of overcrowding, it was Republicans. It wasn’t Democrats who started the process of closing our schools and selling our books and equipment to another state … it was Republicans.”
Chester Democratic Party Chair Livia Smith said Monday that inclusiveness has long been the mantra of the city’s Democratic Party, a tradition she plans to continue.
“We’ve always had that inclusiveness going on,” she said. “That’s how we’ve won, because we’ve been inclusive of everybody. …It’s not like we’re starting to work with everybody now, we’ve been doing that. I guess they took a page from our book on how to run a successful campaign.”
Smith added that there have been several Republicans heading the party in Chester while Democratic leadership “has been solid” under her direction for more than a decade. She said she plans to visit Johnson at Republican headquarters to congratulate him on his new appointment.