LAWTON — After making it through the primary election in September, Mark Malone and Kelly Harris will square off again Tuesday, Nov. 9.
The two men are competing for the right to represent Ward 2 on the Lawton City Council for the next three years. The winner will replace outgoing Councilman Keith Jackson.
The Southwest Ledger recently interviewed Malone and Harris about the skills that would make them effective council members and other topics. Here are questions and answers from those interviews, edited for clarity and length.
Mark Malone
Q: What skills would you bring to the council if elected?
A: I think the biggest thing that I have is my logistical background. I’ve got over 35 years of logistical background, and that’s what I did with the Army – moving goods, tracking budgets, those types of things.
Currently, I’m overseeing the maintenance contract for the post. It’s about a $20 million contract. So very familiar with tracking budgets and staying within compliance.
Q: Please name one area where you think the city could do a better job. Do you have specific ideas for improving the city’s performance in that area?
A: I think that the city needs to utilize its resources better as budgetary constraints. I’ll give you an example.
The park plan that the city sent out. That’s an over $300,000 contract that they leased out to a company out of Texas to come up with a master park plan.
And then they went back, I want to say two council meetings later, and they decided that they wanted to have a master plan for the two lakes that the city owns. And that was another over $100,000.
So that’s half a million dollars that we spent to have a company do something when our own master plans division has seven master planners. And so, I don’t understand why one of those seven couldn’t do that and save the half a million dollars.
That’s an example, I just think, of misuse of money. I’d like to see that better done.
Q: How would you rate the city’s efforts to communicate with residents? If elected, what steps would you favor to improve communication?
A: I think the city has done very well by utilizing and adding to the city website, where people can now go on the city app and file issues that the city can follow up. And I’ve even done it myself, whether it’s a street or it’s an abatement. And they’re very good at getting to that, rather than just calling neighborhood services and it goes into a pile.
But there are some people – and I’m talking about Ward 2 residents that I’m more familiar with – that don’t have internet, or they don’t have access where they can get to the city website.
Again, the city is posting now where they are on the CIPs (capital improvement plans), which I think is great. I watched the Rogers Lane one, and so I’m able to see where that project is in its planning.
But if those people cannot see that … I don’t know if posting it in the paper quarterly or monthly or semi-annually – some other way that residents can just see this is where we are going forward.
Q: Do you think the city is a good steward of taxpayer dollars? If not, what measures would you support to make the city a better steward?
A: I think they do fairly well, yes. But I do believe that like anything, there are issues that can be worked on.
I have two examples. Example number one is in the budget, the city manager’s office currently has one admin assistant, and now they’ve added two assistant city managers.
So, in the past city budget, which was passed, now we’re going to add two additional admin assistants. And I’m assuming their pay would be somewhere around $50 (thousand) to $60,000 a year.
But yet, we cannot get any pay raises for the general employees that are on the ground, that are doing the day-to-day tasks that the city has to do. So again, I think that’s just not thinking it through and utilizing the funds that are available to the best of their ability.
And again, I go back to the master plans. That’s a half a million dollars that we spent to have another company do that.
That may be something that we could buy another trash truck, or we could buy another bulk trash truck to better fix that system, which the bulk trash system is not working currently.
I just think it needs to be better thought out.
When it comes to the budget, I’d like to see the department chiefs – not just the city manager – come and explain, “This is my budget for the next year, and this is why.” And explain that to the council.
They very quickly pass a budget that they receive on Thursday and vote on Tuesday, and it’s over 300 pages long. I just don’t understand how they can decipher 300 pages of a budget and comprehend and understand all that without any questions.
So, I’d like to see that better done.
Q: What would you like to see the city accomplish in the next three years? What do you think the city should do to achieve that goal?
A: Two things. One that they did very well by using the tax dollars from medical marijuana sales, set aside strictly for sidewalks. What is the plan?
Last year, the mayor came to my Neighborhood Watch meeting and said we collected over $400,000 in taxes. That’s great. So what sidewalks are we replacing, and what’s the timeline?
I may be wrong, but I think it would be fairly easy to come up with a master plan for sidewalks and be able to publish that where citizens would know, all over the city, “This is what we’re doing. We’re doing schools.” or “We’re doing here,” or “We’re doing wherever,” and be able to communicate that back to the general public. That’s not happened.
The other one: The CIP money is doing the arterial roads, and like I said, it’s on the city website. And that’s great on where the CIP money is being spent.
Something I’d like to see done in the next three years, when I’m elected, is to use all the neighborhood streets. Let’s rank (in) order all of the neighborhood streets by virtue of their current condition, one through 500 or one through 1,000. However many streets there are.
What is the plan to get at that? It should be a three- to 10-year plan, I’m assuming. It would take at least 10 years to get that done.
I think it needs to be laid out. You set your goal, and then you strive to get to that goal.
Kelly Harris
Q: What skills would you bring to the council if elected?
A: I think the number one skill that’s necessary is common sense. A lot of things we look at need to be looked at from multiple angles to decide what’s best for the whole community, and not necessarily just one section of the community.
As a businessman, I understand budgets. I understand personnel matters. I understand a lot of the intricacies that go on at City Hall.
And also as a businessman, I think that I’m able to communicate with the citizenry about their issues. I’ve had a fun time out knocking on doors and hearing what their concerns are, as we’ve been throughout the community.
Q: Please name one area where you think the city could do a better job. Do you have specific ideas for improving the city’s performance in that area?
A: This is just my personal experience over the last 30 years is that maybe we don’t, as a city, -- as a City Hall – communicate well enough with the citizens and explain things that are not common knowledge, like budgets and manpower and how city departments get staffed. How the CIP (community improvement plan) works, things like that.
I think it’s a simple communications issue – and obviously, you understand that – that we need to do better with the Ledger, with the Constitution, with Channel 7 and say, “Here’s some of the things that are going on. Here’s the information involved,” so that everyone can have a better understanding of how things work.
And maybe there should be a website that allows people to get information more freely about city services.
Q: How would you rate the city’s efforts to communicate with residents? If elected, what steps would you favor to improve communication?
A: I think communication has improved recently with – I believe the mayor goes out and makes a lot of speeches and talks to people. I think the city manager’s out there quite a bit. It has room for improvement.
As I said before, I’d like it to be not only a website, but I think we can work in many different areas through the media, maybe through Cameron, maybe a speakers bureau. To go out and speak to citizens groups and be a little more engaging with the constituents.
I would love to start going to all of the Neighborhood Watch meetings and whatever other meetings there are and just showing up and saying, “What questions do you have?”
If I’m elected, I would like to, at least once a quarter, have some sort of event where people would come talk to me. And I can tell you A, either “Here’s what I know,” or B, “Give me your number and I will get you in touch with whoever does know.”
Q: Do you think the city is a good steward of taxpayer dollars? If not, what measures would you support to improve that?
A: Having not been elected, I don’t have inside knowledge of the budget and exactly where it goes.
I think in any large organization, you have room for better stewardship. But overall, given the restraints that we faced in the last year and a half with COVID and how it’s affected our sales tax collections, I think they’re doing the best they can.
I believe the city manager’s doing a good job trying to conserve resources and not wasting what precious dollars we do have.
It will be interesting, this next year and probably for a few years after that – assuming that the infrastructure bill gets passed – we already have money coming from the American Rescue Plan Act. And then if the second bill gets passed, there should be lots of money available for improvement of communities. It will be interesting because everyone will want to get their finger in that pie.
With the ARPA money, we can do some improvements.
Specifically, there are about six different areas we can spend that money. One of those is sewer rehab and some other public works projects.
Just driving over here today, I saw another broken pipe, water leaking out in the street. And I had a conversation with the city manager yesterday, and he said, “We got a lot of rain, then we didn’t have rain, then we got a lot more rain. And the ground just expands and contracts, and it’s causing all these pipes to break.”
And streets are being torn up all over town. So hopefully, we can use some of that infrastructure money to make those repairs and bring us a little further in.
Q: What would you like to see the city accomplish in the next three years? What do you think the city should do to achieve that goal?
A: I think one of the biggest issues that all towns are facing, and especially ours, is improvements in broadband technology.
The one thing COVID has taught us is that it is possible for large numbers of people to work from home, but it’s not possible if they don’t have good broadband connections. And so, with the money that will be coming with the infrastructure bill, then we need to massively improve – within the city and within the county – the ability of all people to have higher-speed broadband.
I think the city is already working with the providers that are there to make tower construction easier. I think that’s important. And then whatever we can do, either to assist with funding or to incentivize Hilliary (Communications), for example, to provide these services. I think that’s going to be important.
Obviously, the things that we talked about the first time – streets, trash. The streets need to be fixed.
I’m in favor of – for those that need it – a second garbage collection container, seeing as how it appears that we cannot go back to twice-a-week collection at this time. I believe the simplest solution is to just give everybody a second can.