Issues familiar in commission races
Challengers push change, incumbents tout experience.
It could be a scene from the presidential election, with one side touting their experience and the other side charging that things are headed in the wrong direction.
The race for two seats on the Montgomery County Commission may lack the sizzle of the presidential contest, but some of the same issues are being debated: jobs, the economy, workforce development, early childhood education and addiction and poverty reduction.
The two incumbents, both Democrats — Judy Dodge and Debbie Lieberman — say they’ve made progress on these issues. The two Republican candidates — Gary Leitzell and Bob Matthews — say a course change is needed.
Leitzell is familiar to county voters as a former mayor of Dayton, while Matthews is less well-known. He has spent three years as a Miami Twp. trustee after a long career in business.
Leitzell is opposing Lieberman in the election, while Matthews faces off against Dodge. Lillie Wright, a former priority board member in Dayton, is a write-in candidate in the Lieberman race.
Montgomery County is largest local government in the region with nearly 4,400 employees and a total budget of $821.4 million. The general fund budget alone is about $148 million.
As part of our effort to provide information so that you can be a more informed voter, and keep track of your tax dollars, we are presenting the positions of each candidate here.
Debbie Lieberman
Lieberman was first elected to the commission in 2004 and says some of the issues most important to her are workforce development, expanding universal preschool countywide and focusing on ex-offender re-entry programs.
Building these essential parts of the workforce pipeline are essential to attracting new businesses and helping existing companies expand, she said.
“My motto is investing in people,” Lieberman said during an interview on WHIO Reports that airs today.
Much of the county’s job focus has been on small and minority companies, Lieberman said. The county has created a new business solutions center, micro-enterprise grant program and has hosted small business rallies to assist employers in critical stages of starting and growing their companies, she said.
The county merged its economic development and workforce development departments so they no longer operate in silos, said Lieberman, and the county has renovated the Job Center to be more user and customer friendly.
The county has also worked hard to identify best practices across the state and nation to combat heroin abuse, she said, and hasn’t approached it as an isolated problem. For example, she said, the county developed a collective-impact model for human services that brings all community stakeholders together to work toward the shared goals of reducing poverty, hunger and employment barriers.
“I’m not done,” she said. “I have a lot of work left to do.”
Both Lieberman and Dodge say the county’s initiatives have helped improve the local economy. As one measure, the county’s unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 percent in August from a high of 13.2 percent in January 2010, according to state data.
During that same period, the county added more than 12,000 jobs, the data shows.
Gary Leitzell
Leitzell paints a more grim picture, citing high poverty rates, a drug epidemic and a local employment picture in which companies can’t find the workers they need.
He is making his second bid for the commission after unsuccessfully running as an independent against incumbent Democratic Commissioner Dan Foley and challenger Mike Nolan in 2014. This year Leitzell is running as a Republican.
Montgomery County is a national leader in overdose deaths, has a poverty rate of 18.5 percent and is projected to lose 36,000 people in the next 15 years, Leitzell said. He added that the employers in the county have 22,000 job openings they have been unable to fill.
Leitzell said the county’s work on universal preschool could pay off 15 to 20 years down the line, but immediate action is needed to stem the tide of population loss and address the community problems associated with it. The county has lost more than 26,000 people since 2000.
Leitzell said the county needs to be more forward-thinking and creative with its problem-solving.
For example, he said, he’s proposed creating safe places to complement existing needle-exchanges where addicts can use drugs in presence of trained medical staff to prevent fatal overdoses. The staff at those exchange locations would try to connect them with drug treatment, he said.
He would help the county operate more efficiently and reduce costs, he told the audience at a recent UpDayton candidate forum, describing himself as a “calculated risk-taker” who doesn’t view a commission seat as a longterm career.
As Dayton’s mayor, Leitzell said he made the city’s bidding process more transparent by posting city contracts online so competitors could see the details of winning bids, which led to lower bids, saving the city money.
Leitzell said he will use his social media skills and marketing knowledge to help boost tourism and better promote the region to lure new people to fill the thousands of empty homes and unfilled jobs.
“This is a world-class city that we live in, and the more people who believe in it, the more people who don’t live here will believe in it, and we can turn this whole thing around,” he said.
Judy Dodge
Dodge said job creation, enhancing human services and improving the quality of life for residents remain her top priorities.
She’s worked in state and local government for 30 years, she said, and used that wealth of knowledge to lead the county through a tumultuous economic period that she maintains was made worse when the state reduced the county’s local government funding by about $30 million.
Financial challenges remain, said Dodge, that require skillful and seasoned decision-makers. Among those challenges: a potential $8 million annual loss to the county starting next year as the state stops collecting sales taxes from Medicaid managed-care groups, such as Dayton-based Care Source.
“It’s not fun ... but when we get cut, it’s when hard decisions have to be made, and I think you need someone who has weathered the storm before,” she said.
Dodge said the county has emphasized collaboration and joined forces with many community partners to expand the resources and assistance available to people looking for work or better jobs.
The county also has enhanced the community’s safety-net to help lift residents out of poverty and become more self-sufficient and prosperous, she said.
Dodge pointed to her work on improving food access in the region, which included establishing a fresh fruits and vegetable market at the Greater RTA bus hub.
Bob Matthews
Matthews, 67, said the county needs an experienced business leader — not a long-serving politician — to operate at maximum efficiency and tackle problems in innovative ways.
Matthews said his technical and business background from working more than 30 years in the information technology field, along with his three years as a Miami Twp. trustee, makes him uniquely qualified for county management.
“I have just enough information and experience to understand how government works, but I am not a professional politician,” Matthews said during his interview on WHIO Reports. “I think our county was better off when it was run by businessmen like John Patterson and Kettering.”
Matthews said he’s confident he will be able to identify ways to reduce the costs of government without sacrificing the quality of services, possibly through technology, reorganization, overhauling existing processes or regional resource-sharing.
He said he’s built databases and programming systems for various public entities and he wants to make county government processes and systems more innovative.
He said he won’t stand idle as a commissioner.
Miami Twp. is in much better shape today than it was several years ago because the newly elected trustees did not maintain the status quo, he said.