Connor Goodpaster has filed petitions with the Board of Elections and is running in the Democratic Primary to represent Bowling Green’s First Ward on the City Council.
Goodpaster has lived in Bowling Green for five years and moved into the first ward in 2017. He is a two-time graduate of BGSU, earning a bachelor’s degree in education and a master’s degree in public administration. As a graduate student at BGSU, Goodpaster gained admission into a program that is heavily focused on providing hands-on experience for their students and helping their students to directly improve our community. In this program, he worked on non-profit fundraising in Lucas County, helped perform an educational needs assessment in Wood County, and was part of a team that assisted the Wood County Continuum of Care in assessing perceptions of homelessness and bringing awareness to Wood County’s homelessness and poverty problems through community forums.
If elected to the council, Goodpaster said he would work with the council to address issues that impact both the university student population and the year-round residents. He believes that these do not have to be
conflicting objectives. Connor has lived both as a university student and as a family as he and his wife look forward to raising their first child (due any day now) in this city.
More specifically, Goodpaster said he would like to advocate for the following actions:
- Working with economic development officials to diversify the city’s jobs portfolio. If we truly want to retain university graduates and continue to grow as a city, we need to ensure that we
have jobs available that will pay fair wages and fit the skills of the workers we have. - Ensure that our city’s rental homes are up to code and safe. Landlords should be required to submit to fire safety inspections to ensure that all dwellings are up to code and safe for the residents. There should also be a formal mechanism that would allow residents to levy complaints about the conditions of rentals and allow city officials to act to remedy such complaints.
- Provide incentive programs that make it easier for homeowners to make their homes more energy efficient.
- Work closely with governmental and non-profit organizations in the area to meet the needs of those in this city that experience housing insecurity.
- Adopt regulations that help to ensure the safety of our residents who choose to ride their bikes as a primary means to navigate town. This would include; adding bike lanes where possible, adding sharrows where we can, and expanding/repairing our sidewalks.
- Adopt election day as a paid holiday for city employees. Access to voting is a crucial part of a functioning democracy. We should do everything we can to help people get to the polls. Bowling Green currently uses 10 paid holidays. Cities such as Sandusky have 15. We have plenty of room to add election day.
- Maintain a fiscally sound budget with provides for the services that our citizens need and allows us to continue to improve on our service provision.
