Salem candidates talk about HopeTree, infrastructure and transparency before the election

Cardinal News is hosting a candidate forum for the Salem City Council election on October 29th. It’s free, but registration is required. Read more about the candidates in Roanoke and across the Southwest and Southside in our voter guide.

Improvements in infrastructure, economic development and government transparency are top of mind for the four candidates hoping to win one of three seats on the ballot in the 2022 Salem City Council election.

Two – Mayor Renee Turk and Vice Mayor Jim Wallace – are incumbents. Also on the ballot are former City Councilman John Saunders and Anne Marie Green, who finished behind Hunter Holliday and former Mayor Randy Foley in the November 2022 race for two seats.

Bill Jones, who was elected for the fourth consecutive time in 2020, decided not to run again.

Three of the four candidates are running for a second term and therefore know how much work it is to work on a council with new faces.

“Trying to make change is like turning around an aircraft carrier,” said Wallace, who is completing his first term on the council. “It’s all very slow.”

Wallace, who had never run for public office before being elected to the City Council in 2020, said he was encouraged to throw his hat in the ring by his wife four years ago because she was tired of listening to him as he complained about the situation in the city.

“She said I had to stop complaining and do something about it,” he said. “Then I had a secretary who had been encouraging me to run for a long time. Then I had another friend who did the same thing. So I decided to see what would happen between the three of them.”

Turk said one of the reasons she ran in 2020 was because the only woman on the council at the time, Jane Johnson, resigned after four terms and no other women had entered the race. Not only was she the top vote-getter that year, but she also became the first female mayor in the city’s history. She did not take this appointment lightly.

“Part of what I’ve told people is that I’ve been there a lot [meetings and events]” she said. “I am lucky because I am retired and can achieve many things. There used to be mayors who weren’t retired who could do that, and I understand.

“But I think it’s important for Salem to be represented on regional boards, and thank God most people on our council agree with that. But I tried to be very, very active.”

This is the second local election since the date was postponed from May to November. Turk and Wallace were among the last candidates running for election in May.

The date change also attracted more voters. All four candidates running in 2022 received more than 3,000 votes, a significant difference from 2020 when Turk was the frontrunner with 1,886 votes.

It also resulted in the closest municipal election this century, with a recount conducted before Foley was confirmed to have defeated Saunders for the second council spot by just eight votes. Green finished fourth in 2022, nearly 200 votes behind Foley.

Both Wallace and Saunders, who ran as independents in previous elections, are running as Republicans this time, a designation Holliday first used in an unsuccessful bid for City Council in 2020. Before Holliday, another candidate this century, Margaret Newman, ran as a Republican in 2014. During the same period, no one ran as a Democrat.

Turk and Green are running as independents.

Wallace said he believes he has managed to make progress on the issues he championed four years ago, including advocating for changes in the school system, changing the city’s approach to economic development and creating of more government transparency. This time, his main issues include revising what he believes are outdated city regulations in areas such as combating dilapidated properties and further revitalizing the city center.

“We need businesses that are destinations that drive traffic from the highway to downtown,” he said.

Turk said she believes her four years as mayor have been successful because she took the time to listen to both her constituents and her fellow council members before voting on anything.

She said she is a proponent of building a cash reserve that the city can draw on in the event of an economic emergency and a capital reserve fund that the city can now access for smaller infrastructure projects.

As she runs for a second term, Turk said her focus will be on upgrading city facilities such as the city’s fire station dormitories and ensuring that the last two school buildings still in need of upgrades – West Salem and East Salem elementary schools – to be renovated. and leverage the city’s strong credit rating to take on larger projects, such as major improvements to the community center. She also believes the city would benefit from having more of its departments based in offices in other parts of the city outside of City Hall.

For the challengers, their platforms have not changed significantly compared to their 2022 campaigns.

Saunders, a graduate of Salem High School and Roanoke College, worked for the city for 33 years, much of that time as part of the Salem Civic Center management group. He began his first term on the city council in 2018, shortly after his retirement. He said his professional experience makes him a valuable council member and noted the results he has achieved during his term.

“It’s the same platform I had in 2018,” Saunders said. “Our facilities are deteriorating. We had the opportunity to fix the problem [the Moyer Sports Complex]and we had money set aside for the civic center facilities, but some of that work still needs to be done.”

Saunders said he would also like to see the city become more assertive about road improvements.

“Roads are kind of a sign of the prosperity of the city you’re in,” he said. “I’m old, but I don’t think I’m the only one who gets tired driving over potholes.”

He also said the council he served on made it a priority to increase the amount of financial reserves, which he said grew from about six weeks to more than six months during his previous term.

Green worked in various administrative positions for Roanoke County government agencies for more than 30 years and was married to the late Mac Green, who served as vice mayor of Salem from 1974 to 1994.

Green, who moved to Salem in 1989, said she believes the way the city does business needs to change. There is a need for more transparency in the decision-making process, and citizens who want to speak directly to the council should be given this opportunity without restrictions.

Currently, the public comment portion of a City Council meeting is limited to five people, each speaking for no more than 5 minutes.

“I always thought it was strange,” she said. “But they still limit the number of people who can speak at each meeting. I never understood why this was such a big deal. Some meetings only last 15 or 20 minutes. Let a few more people speak.”

Green pointed to the process used to approve the HopeTree rezoning application earlier this year as an example of how she believes the City Council and other involved committees need to overhaul the way the City Council and the public interact.

HopeTree, the 62-acre campus that originally served as an orphanage but has since evolved into a faith-based family services ministry, received approval from the council to convert the area from all single-family housing to a mixed-use concept that could include: Apartments, townhouses, single-family homes and some small businesses, including a hotel with up to 34 units.

The final vote was 3-2, with Wallace voting no and Holliday and Turk voting yes, while Foley and Jones voted.

Commenting on his decision, Wallace said he did not believe the council had been given enough details about the proposed development.

“As strange as it may sound, we didn’t know what we were voting for,” he said. “We basically voted for a vision that can be revised by the developer at any time and without any intervention.

“My philosophy is that we were elected to represent the point of view of our citizens, not to make difficult decisions for them. We should represent their point of view. There was an overwhelming majority of people – probably 20 to 1 – against probably everyone who voted for it.”

Turk disagreed with Wallace’s assessment and said she believed all necessary information was provided during the trial, which lasted nearly a year. She added that input from both council and the Planning Commission led to revisions to the plan, and she added that she believes the project meets a need that many people in the city have expressed to her: a source of additional housing and additional businesses.

“I voted for the renovation because I can guarantee you that I invested more time [looking into the project] than anyone else – be it our council or any other citizen,” Turk said. “I worked with community development leaders. I worked with the developer. I worked with the Planning Commission. … I invested more time in the 10 to 12 months to evaluate the situation and when I came to the decision, it was a logical decision.

“I’m not the only one who voted for it. But the most important thing was that I had to pay attention to what was best for all the citizens of Salem.”

Both Green and Saunders said they would have rejected the measure if they had voted.

Saunders said the development plan does not reflect the neighborhood’s infrastructure capacity.

Green agreed with Wallace that the developer was given too much autonomy.

“They’ve already approved it and we don’t know what it’s going to look like or where the buildings are going to be,” she said. “We don’t know the mix between apartments, terraced houses and single-family homes. … The city just approved a concept.”

Related stories