April 8, 2025 • 14 mins
Marion Mayor Bill Collins, Marion County Commissioner Kevin Davidson and James Walker from The Regional Planning Commision were the featured presenters for the 2025 Strongest Town's Contest Championship LiveStream on Monday afternoon. The three presented to the worldwide audience the accolades of the Marion area, and why they should vote for us to be the Champions of the long standing annual contest. This podcast features their points from the LiveStream.
Voting is open to anyone with an email address, until 1pm EDT, on Thursday, April 10, 2025.
CLICK HERE TO VOTE for The Strongest Town Championship!
Voting is open to anyone with an email address, until 1pm EDT, on Thursday, April 10, 2025.
CLICK HERE TO VOTE for The Strongest Town Championship!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. And
you already introduced to James, and of course, James, let's
talk for a minute or two about why you decided
to get involved and nominate Marion for this honor.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Yeah, that's a great question. So I've been a member
of Strong Towns for a while and it's really kind
of guided me to where I am today, to leave
active duty Army and then to come home and just
pursue finding out what I could do to contribute to
the place that I love. And so last year I
went to the Strongest Town's National Excuity, the strong Town's
(00:36):
National gathering. That was my first time going, and that
year the winner of the Strongest Town contest last year
was Mamee Ohio and I got to meet them some
of their city council and their city manager and everything,
and I got to hear their story and it was just,
you know, really great. So a lot of the things
that they were doing. But then as I'm living in Marion,
(00:58):
working in Marion, working along the county and the city,
doing all sorts of just really awesome grassroots things, just
seeing who's doing what and trying to help them do more.
I kind of realized, like, man, I feel like Marian's
doing twice as much as Ma and me, and we're
doing it with you know, a little bit less of
a budget. I'll be honest about that. And I just
(01:21):
am you know. I kind of left thinking that I
needed to come to Marion to bring strong towns concepts
wherever I could to Marion. But then when I actually
get on the ground, I find a lot of people
doing the work already that I could just kind of
come alongside of and learn from. And it's been a
wonderful ride.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
That's fantastic. We're also joined on our panel by Mayor
Bill Collins and County Commissioner Kevin Davidson. And Mayor Collins
talk a little bit about some of the things that
you think highlight Marian as being one of the strongest towns.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
You know, I think, first of all, I gotta thank
James because James came into my office a couple of
months ago and said, may Or, what do you think
about me, you know, going for this strong town. I said, James,
go for it. He can be over the top sometimes,
but James just has a very strong personality and that
is certainly what we needed. You know, I had no
(02:13):
idea that it was going to take off like it
did when James started this venture. And it actually for
a city like ours, it's very easy for us to
build on the momentum that we've already started with our
Love Your City campaign. And you know, our Love Your
City campaign was basically a rebranding of our city. You know,
(02:33):
it's putting a fresh coat of pain on things so
so people see and have a pride and a sense
of pride in their community. And we have built that
over the last year and a half to the point
where when we join this at this venture, it was
a lot. It was really easy for us just to
hop on board and and people were already doing it.
(02:55):
So we're just continuing to do what we've been doing
for the last year and a half. After two years.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Well, it's interesting because Mayor Collins and Commissioner Davidson, we're
both in law enforcement, city police, Sheriff's Department. And over
the last thirty five forty years of you guys being
in those positions, you've seen Marion change, You've seen it adapt,
you've seen bad things, you've seen wonderful things. And right
now and Kevin, you can talk about this for a minute.
(03:23):
Things are really doing really really well, especially in our
downtown area.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Correct, Paul, thank you and reiterate what Bill said. And
James has been a great cheerleader for all this to
come into our office too to the same thing. Hey,
let's do this, and we're trying to create a new
many communities. People know this how your county seat or
your cities and your counties fight with each other, they're
not really on board. Well, when I ran for office
a year ago, Bill had already been in office. This
(03:48):
is what I want to do. I want to get
us to work together and move forward in one harmonious way,
even though we do things differently, but we're still going
to be working together. And we've grown and will grow
stronger from the downtown out and that's what we're trying
to do and help promote that.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
And Mayor Collins, you've seen that, Like we said, on
both sides, what are some of the things that you
would like to highlight that really make Marion stand out
as being a strong city.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Paul, Like Kevin just mentioned, we look at Marion as marrying.
We don't view it as the city and the county.
If there are things programs. I think what separates us
from a lot of other places is we chose not
to become stagnant, and that's where we were at, and
we have really made the effort through our collaborations within
(04:37):
the community, whether it's a religious organization or a five
oh one C three or government, we know that together
we can do things much stronger than we did. A
really quick example of that is many years ago, ten
to twelve years ago, when the economy went bad, we
lost our recreation department and we had a place that
(04:59):
was the rect Center and I knew, Kevin knew, we
all knew we had to get that back open for
the inner city people that live. You know, we have
a YMCA, but it's way out on the south end
of town, and we needed somewhere focalize centrally located in
the city of Marion so kids could get there. And
we collaborated with the YMCA, the Marion City Schools, O
(05:21):
s u M Marion, all these partners that were tripping
over each other to get on board with this program.
And now we have it up and running. It's opened
five days a week. Right now we're looking at expanding that,
but but it's a great place for kids to not
only go and have physical activity, but to learn life skills, counseling, tutoring, mentoring,
(05:45):
all of that is going on at this facility. So
that is one of the highlights of our community right
now that we're all looking.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
At and go ahead ahead, you know, I remember when
you were, you know, talking about that reopening first time event,
so you're like, oh, and by the way, Ohio State
Marian after hearing about it, wanted to get involved too.
And this coming week I'm going back to school at
Ohio State Marion right now, and my physics professor is
going to be there at the rec center teaching physics
(06:14):
to six graders. And I'm really excited to just see
how just everyone's pulled their resources to just make this
wonderful thing happen for the community.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
And Kevin Davidson, as a Marion County Commissioner, kep talk
for a minute about something else that I think makes
your community is strong, and that is economic development and
infrastructure and things like that. Obviously, we've got a lot
of things moving and shaken right now.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
We do.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
We do. We have many projects coming and they're slow.
People like to see it fast, but you know, it's
like any other development. It takes a little time to
get industry business, you know, to move on, and we
have to get sewers and sidewalks and roads and bridges
and all these things, and electricity has to go out
these ways first before these companies will come here. They
they wanted to be ready for them for when you
(06:57):
say shovel ready, that's what chovel ready means. Or the water,
the electricity, the gas, it's all right there for and
to tap into. So we just keep promoting it, promoting
it and say, hey, this is what we've got, you know,
as Jean's regional planning, that's what he's doing. Hey, come
to our Maria. This is a great place to bring
your business.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I think one of the things that's really pushed our
sites to the lead in central Ohio is that we
picked areas that are already where infrastructure is, are immediately
adjacent to where infrastructure is, as opposed to just continually
sprawling out into green fields, like we're looking at places
by the current industrial Park. We're looking at places by
(07:32):
the current depot to.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
A prime example of that, Paul is just recently we
just had a ride aid you know, a lot of
the ride aids and across the nation have closed and
they were looking at a way to repurpose these buildings,
and it just so happened for us. We had one
hundred and twenty five year old fire station that we
needed to replace, and the voters in our city a
couple of years ago pasted a levy to do that,
(07:56):
and we saw this ride aid location as the diamond
and the rough. It was a perfect location for us.
It already has a building on site that we can
add on to, and I'm happy to say and proud
to say that we just closed on that building last
week and now we're beginning to move forward with the
restructuring and the reconstruction down there to make that our
(08:16):
number one firehouse in the city.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And centrally located everybody, centrally located right in the middle of town.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
And rather than that becoming a blighted brownfield place, it's
going to have new life breathed into it for another
one hundred and twenty five years here in the city
of Marion. But we are really proud of that.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Well, entertainment, restaurants, recreation. We've got a lot of good
things going on to presidential city. Talk a little bit
about some of that stuff, guys.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I'll touch on that real quick. So we knew from
private investors that Marion was a great place to start
a business. We have a lot of shopping boutiques, food
and beverage, a winery, a brewery, a craft cocktail place,
a barbershop that we're sitting in today, and Nathan, the owner,
and I have known each other for a lot of
(09:04):
years and that is what brings this excitement downtown. And
we saw we try to expand our transit system, so
we developed a bus that was called the Night Move
Buffs so the people on the outskirts of the city,
out of the hotels, could get into the city to
come and visit all of these shops and businesses that
(09:25):
we have. We have found that to be very successful,
and we're continuing. We want to add transit county wide,
so Kevin and I are working together to try to
make that happen throughout the entire county.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
We're getting closer on that. It's getting closer. It just
takes a little bit of time, like everything takes it.
We want to get east, west, north and south to
get this bus thing going for people to get to
work so they can pay taxes, get people to go
to shopping centers, you buy stuff, pay taxes. So it
grows from that. And that's what I think grows from
and Bill saying all these local boutiques and restaurants, almost
all of them are locally owned, and that's even better
(09:57):
for our community.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
I think, I think, I think, you know, from my
perspective at the you know, the low level, ground level
kind of thing is just what I see is people
in the community are are moving in a direction because
they want to see positive change in the community. And
then what what what happens is instead of you know,
you guys as leaders saying, well, we need to make
(10:19):
positive change happens, so here's our program, You're look, you're
looking down at the ground level saying what's already done.
You're like, oh, man, look at all the revitalization that
that people have done in the downtown. Let's get more
people to go downtown. We can, we can just we
got to buy a new bus. Anyway, let's make it
the Night Moves Bus.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
I think what makes us stand out, Paul, from a
lot of other cities is we don't go with the
concept of that's how we've always done it. We're not
afraid to think outside the box. And if you go
outside the box and that doesn't work, what have you lost?
You know, you try something different.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Series.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
We're not afraid to take those adventurous steps to do
something new, even though we get pushedback sometimes from people
saying what the heck are you doing? But you know
what you learn from.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
That and just to continue on. Obviously, the future has
to be bright to be a strong town as well.
You guys have a lot of things in planning. Obviously, James,
you're in the regional planning, so you work with that
as well. We'll start with you, mayor what are some
of the things down the road that are going to
make us even stronger than we are today.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
You know, right now we have we have five sites
in the in the County of Marion that have all
been or will be authenticated to be premier sites for
development for for industry and small scale business. So we
are trying very hard to make that happen. We need
more residential development. Somebody mentioned World War two and what
(11:37):
happened after that, you know, all of these neighborhoods were built.
We unfortunately for us, a lot of those haven't been
we haven't had any new ones built since that time,
so we need we need new residential development. We need
more senior housing. We're looking at an outside box thought
right now of putting in a little neighborhood of tiny
housing for seniors and we're working on that as we speak,
(12:01):
and we'll continue to work on that into the future.
We have a full time grant writer now at the
City of Marion, which we felt like we were leaving
a lot of money on the table, and we chose
to hire somebody to make sure we're not leaving money
on the table. We're going to go after every grant
we can get and make the most for our taxpayers
that we can.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I love just on you know, on the strong town
side of that, like we've you know, for the senior housing,
we've slashed parking requirements for that so we can get
more housing in for people that need it, for the
you know, other housing, you know, more than just you know,
developing a new neighborhood from scratch in the greenfield. I mean,
we've all been really active in trying to revive the
(12:43):
existing housing stock through whether it's land bank, whether it's
through local rehabbers, whatever it is. And I mean we've
we didn't have you know, these big national developers they
all left after two thousand and eight and they never
came back to a town like ours. We've had to
develop our developer. I know. That's something that in regional
planning and the land Bank, you know people, we've had
(13:04):
to essentially teach people how to go through the process,
how to how to build to a certain standard, and
and you know, but then as we do that, it
becomes it becomes a self building thing. Where where we're now,
we're getting to the point of so much momentum that
the land Bank's going to be partnering with Trirever's Career Center.
Those construction students out of Trivers Traver's Career Center are
(13:28):
going to have a small stock of land Bank houses
that they're going to be able to to continually work on.
So they'll always have work that they're able to do,
and we'll always have more and more houses existing in
the city.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Coming back online, Okay, guys, we're going to Kevin real
quick and we're going to wrap up.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
I just want to say exactly big thing about government
is we just we need to help and get out
of the way and let people. Let the developers do
what they're doing, and they know what they're doing. We
just got to make sure we don't get in their
way and make sure they do it right for everybody.
We don't want to just fly by night carpet baggers,
but we want to system and then get out of
their way.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
There you go, and once again I'll run down our panel.
Left to right, we have Mayor Bill Collins, we have
James Walker who's from Regional Planning, and we have Commissioner
Kevin Davidson, all from Marion, Ohio. And thank you guys
for your attention.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. And
you already introduced to James, and of course, James, let's
talk for a minute or two about why you decided
to get involved and nominate Marion for this honor.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Yeah, that's a great question. So I've been a member
of Strong Towns for a while and it's really kind
of guided me to where I am today, to leave
active duty Army and then to come home and just
pursue finding out what I could do to contribute to
the place that I love. And so last year I
went to the Strongest Town's National Excuity, the strong Town's
(00:36):
National gathering. That was my first time going, and that
year the winner of the Strongest Town contest last year
was Mamee Ohio and I got to meet them some
of their city council and their city manager and everything,
and I got to hear their story and it was just,
you know, really great. So a lot of the things
that they were doing. But then as I'm living in Marion,
(00:58):
working in Marion, working along the county and the city,
doing all sorts of just really awesome grassroots things, just
seeing who's doing what and trying to help them do more.
I kind of realized, like, man, I feel like Marian's
doing twice as much as Ma and me, and we're
doing it with you know, a little bit less of
a budget. I'll be honest about that. And I just
(01:21):
am you know. I kind of left thinking that I
needed to come to Marion to bring strong towns concepts
wherever I could to Marion. But then when I actually
get on the ground, I find a lot of people
doing the work already that I could just kind of
come alongside of and learn from. And it's been a
wonderful ride.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
That's fantastic. We're also joined on our panel by Mayor
Bill Collins and County Commissioner Kevin Davidson. And Mayor Collins
talk a little bit about some of the things that
you think highlight Marian as being one of the strongest towns.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
You know, I think, first of all, I gotta thank
James because James came into my office a couple of
months ago and said, may Or, what do you think
about me, you know, going for this strong town. I said, James,
go for it. He can be over the top sometimes,
but James just has a very strong personality and that
is certainly what we needed. You know, I had no
(02:13):
idea that it was going to take off like it
did when James started this venture. And it actually for
a city like ours, it's very easy for us to
build on the momentum that we've already started with our
Love Your City campaign. And you know, our Love Your
City campaign was basically a rebranding of our city. You know,
(02:33):
it's putting a fresh coat of pain on things so
so people see and have a pride and a sense
of pride in their community. And we have built that
over the last year and a half to the point
where when we join this at this venture, it was
a lot. It was really easy for us just to
hop on board and and people were already doing it.
(02:55):
So we're just continuing to do what we've been doing
for the last year and a half. After two years.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Well, it's interesting because Mayor Collins and Commissioner Davidson, we're
both in law enforcement, city police, Sheriff's Department. And over
the last thirty five forty years of you guys being
in those positions, you've seen Marion change, You've seen it adapt,
you've seen bad things, you've seen wonderful things. And right
now and Kevin, you can talk about this for a minute.
(03:23):
Things are really doing really really well, especially in our
downtown area.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Correct, Paul, thank you and reiterate what Bill said. And
James has been a great cheerleader for all this to
come into our office too to the same thing. Hey,
let's do this, and we're trying to create a new
many communities. People know this how your county seat or
your cities and your counties fight with each other, they're
not really on board. Well, when I ran for office
a year ago, Bill had already been in office. This
(03:48):
is what I want to do. I want to get
us to work together and move forward in one harmonious way,
even though we do things differently, but we're still going
to be working together. And we've grown and will grow
stronger from the downtown out and that's what we're trying
to do and help promote that.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
And Mayor Collins, you've seen that, Like we said, on
both sides, what are some of the things that you
would like to highlight that really make Marion stand out
as being a strong city.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Paul, Like Kevin just mentioned, we look at Marion as marrying.
We don't view it as the city and the county.
If there are things programs. I think what separates us
from a lot of other places is we chose not
to become stagnant, and that's where we were at, and
we have really made the effort through our collaborations within
(04:37):
the community, whether it's a religious organization or a five
oh one C three or government, we know that together
we can do things much stronger than we did. A
really quick example of that is many years ago, ten
to twelve years ago, when the economy went bad, we
lost our recreation department and we had a place that
(04:59):
was the rect Center and I knew, Kevin knew, we
all knew we had to get that back open for
the inner city people that live. You know, we have
a YMCA, but it's way out on the south end
of town, and we needed somewhere focalize centrally located in
the city of Marion so kids could get there. And
we collaborated with the YMCA, the Marion City Schools, O
(05:21):
s u M Marion, all these partners that were tripping
over each other to get on board with this program.
And now we have it up and running. It's opened
five days a week. Right now we're looking at expanding that,
but but it's a great place for kids to not
only go and have physical activity, but to learn life skills, counseling, tutoring, mentoring,
(05:45):
all of that is going on at this facility. So
that is one of the highlights of our community right
now that we're all looking.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
At and go ahead ahead, you know, I remember when
you were, you know, talking about that reopening first time event,
so you're like, oh, and by the way, Ohio State
Marian after hearing about it, wanted to get involved too.
And this coming week I'm going back to school at
Ohio State Marion right now, and my physics professor is
going to be there at the rec center teaching physics
(06:14):
to six graders. And I'm really excited to just see
how just everyone's pulled their resources to just make this
wonderful thing happen for the community.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
And Kevin Davidson, as a Marion County Commissioner, kep talk
for a minute about something else that I think makes
your community is strong, and that is economic development and
infrastructure and things like that. Obviously, we've got a lot
of things moving and shaken right now.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
We do.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
We do. We have many projects coming and they're slow.
People like to see it fast, but you know, it's
like any other development. It takes a little time to
get industry business, you know, to move on, and we
have to get sewers and sidewalks and roads and bridges
and all these things, and electricity has to go out
these ways first before these companies will come here. They
they wanted to be ready for them for when you
(06:57):
say shovel ready, that's what chovel ready means. Or the water,
the electricity, the gas, it's all right there for and
to tap into. So we just keep promoting it, promoting
it and say, hey, this is what we've got, you know,
as Jean's regional planning, that's what he's doing. Hey, come
to our Maria. This is a great place to bring
your business.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
I think one of the things that's really pushed our
sites to the lead in central Ohio is that we
picked areas that are already where infrastructure is, are immediately
adjacent to where infrastructure is, as opposed to just continually
sprawling out into green fields, like we're looking at places
by the current industrial Park. We're looking at places by
(07:32):
the current depot to.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
A prime example of that, Paul is just recently we
just had a ride aid you know, a lot of
the ride aids and across the nation have closed and
they were looking at a way to repurpose these buildings,
and it just so happened for us. We had one
hundred and twenty five year old fire station that we
needed to replace, and the voters in our city a
couple of years ago pasted a levy to do that,
(07:56):
and we saw this ride aid location as the diamond
and the rough. It was a perfect location for us.
It already has a building on site that we can
add on to, and I'm happy to say and proud
to say that we just closed on that building last
week and now we're beginning to move forward with the
restructuring and the reconstruction down there to make that our
(08:16):
number one firehouse in the city.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And centrally located everybody, centrally located right in the middle of town.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
And rather than that becoming a blighted brownfield place, it's
going to have new life breathed into it for another
one hundred and twenty five years here in the city
of Marion. But we are really proud of that.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Well, entertainment, restaurants, recreation. We've got a lot of good
things going on to presidential city. Talk a little bit
about some of that stuff, guys.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I'll touch on that real quick. So we knew from
private investors that Marion was a great place to start
a business. We have a lot of shopping boutiques, food
and beverage, a winery, a brewery, a craft cocktail place,
a barbershop that we're sitting in today, and Nathan, the owner,
and I have known each other for a lot of
(09:04):
years and that is what brings this excitement downtown. And
we saw we try to expand our transit system, so
we developed a bus that was called the Night Move
Buffs so the people on the outskirts of the city,
out of the hotels, could get into the city to
come and visit all of these shops and businesses that
(09:25):
we have. We have found that to be very successful,
and we're continuing. We want to add transit county wide,
so Kevin and I are working together to try to
make that happen throughout the entire county.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
We're getting closer on that. It's getting closer. It just
takes a little bit of time, like everything takes it.
We want to get east, west, north and south to
get this bus thing going for people to get to
work so they can pay taxes, get people to go
to shopping centers, you buy stuff, pay taxes. So it
grows from that. And that's what I think grows from
and Bill saying all these local boutiques and restaurants, almost
all of them are locally owned, and that's even better
(09:57):
for our community.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
I think, I think, I think, you know, from my
perspective at the you know, the low level, ground level
kind of thing is just what I see is people
in the community are are moving in a direction because
they want to see positive change in the community. And
then what what what happens is instead of you know,
you guys as leaders saying, well, we need to make
(10:19):
positive change happens, so here's our program, You're look, you're
looking down at the ground level saying what's already done.
You're like, oh, man, look at all the revitalization that
that people have done in the downtown. Let's get more
people to go downtown. We can, we can just we
got to buy a new bus. Anyway, let's make it
the Night Moves Bus.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
I think what makes us stand out, Paul, from a
lot of other cities is we don't go with the
concept of that's how we've always done it. We're not
afraid to think outside the box. And if you go
outside the box and that doesn't work, what have you lost?
You know, you try something different.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
Series.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
We're not afraid to take those adventurous steps to do
something new, even though we get pushedback sometimes from people
saying what the heck are you doing? But you know
what you learn from.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
That and just to continue on. Obviously, the future has
to be bright to be a strong town as well.
You guys have a lot of things in planning. Obviously, James,
you're in the regional planning, so you work with that
as well. We'll start with you, mayor what are some
of the things down the road that are going to
make us even stronger than we are today.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
You know, right now we have we have five sites
in the in the County of Marion that have all
been or will be authenticated to be premier sites for
development for for industry and small scale business. So we
are trying very hard to make that happen. We need
more residential development. Somebody mentioned World War two and what
(11:37):
happened after that, you know, all of these neighborhoods were built.
We unfortunately for us, a lot of those haven't been
we haven't had any new ones built since that time,
so we need we need new residential development. We need
more senior housing. We're looking at an outside box thought
right now of putting in a little neighborhood of tiny
housing for seniors and we're working on that as we speak,
(12:01):
and we'll continue to work on that into the future.
We have a full time grant writer now at the
City of Marion, which we felt like we were leaving
a lot of money on the table, and we chose
to hire somebody to make sure we're not leaving money
on the table. We're going to go after every grant
we can get and make the most for our taxpayers
that we can.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I love just on you know, on the strong town
side of that, like we've you know, for the senior housing,
we've slashed parking requirements for that so we can get
more housing in for people that need it, for the
you know, other housing, you know, more than just you know,
developing a new neighborhood from scratch in the greenfield. I mean,
we've all been really active in trying to revive the
(12:43):
existing housing stock through whether it's land bank, whether it's
through local rehabbers, whatever it is. And I mean we've
we didn't have you know, these big national developers they
all left after two thousand and eight and they never
came back to a town like ours. We've had to
develop our developer. I know. That's something that in regional
planning and the land Bank, you know people, we've had
(13:04):
to essentially teach people how to go through the process,
how to how to build to a certain standard, and
and you know, but then as we do that, it
becomes it becomes a self building thing. Where where we're now,
we're getting to the point of so much momentum that
the land Bank's going to be partnering with Trirever's Career Center.
Those construction students out of Trivers Traver's Career Center are
(13:28):
going to have a small stock of land Bank houses
that they're going to be able to to continually work on.
So they'll always have work that they're able to do,
and we'll always have more and more houses existing in
the city.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Coming back online, Okay, guys, we're going to Kevin real
quick and we're going to wrap up.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
I just want to say exactly big thing about government
is we just we need to help and get out
of the way and let people. Let the developers do
what they're doing, and they know what they're doing. We
just got to make sure we don't get in their
way and make sure they do it right for everybody.
We don't want to just fly by night carpet baggers,
but we want to system and then get out of
their way.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
There you go, and once again I'll run down our panel.
Left to right, we have Mayor Bill Collins, we have
James Walker who's from Regional Planning, and we have Commissioner
Kevin Davidson, all from Marion, Ohio. And thank you guys
for your attention.
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