HARRISONBURG, VA (Rocktown Now) — The following is a transcription of an interview with Harrisonburg City Council candidate Laura Dent. To hear the full conversation and the interviews with other City Council Candidates Deanna Reed, Nasser Alsaadun, and Javier Calleja, click here. 

Question 1
Why do you believe you should be reelected to the Harrisonburg City Council?

Laura Dent: I would like to be reelected and ask for the community’s support to continue the good work I’ve started. I’ve been a champion for climate action and a consistent supporter of affordable housing in the city and housing in general because we have a housing crisis that we need to address at all levels. So, I’ve been working diligently. I’m a quick learner. I’ve gotten up on the learning curve and now want to continue that momentum and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from people really appreciating what I’ve been doing on council. So, I appreciate that support and ask for your continued support.

Question 2
You’ve got a term under your belt now. What’s the thing that you found out while working on the Council that you were honestly surprised that the Harrisonburg City Council has to deal with? I know there are a lot of these issues, growth, education, fire and safety that are dealt with, but something that kind of opened your eyes to say, this is something I didn’t anticipate when I ran for this position.

DENT: What surprised me the most is in the housing sector, how much developers are responsible for building the infrastructure of our city, the roads, the sidewalks, the water and utilities on their developments. Because I would have expected the city builds the streets well, it doesn’t turn out to be that way. So that helped me understand how hard it is, how expensive it is for housing to actually be built. So, it’s important to have that perspective as we have the need for housing, we need to work with the developers and the construction companies and so on to actually get the housing built. It’s a little frustrating how much housing we have approved on council and how little of that has been built. Now the developers will say, oh, interest rates, blah blah blah and I’m finally thinking all right, no more excuses. The interest rates have dropped. We need shovels in the ground.

Question 3
What would you prioritize or what do you believe is the biggest problem the city faces?

Speaker 2

Well, again, the housing crisis, the crisis is more acute. It’s more chronic, really, that housing has not been built to the needs that we have for the past decade or so. So, we have a huge backlog. And we keep hearing stories of people who got jobs or employers who need to hire employees who come to the city, can’t find housing, so they turn down the job, and that’s everything from college professors to hospitality workers. We need housing at all levels.

Question 4
There’s one thing that that I find interesting, when the housing issue comes up and I wasn’t aware of this until recently, you we may have even talked about it on the radio and that is that once these projects are approved, they can sit there for XYZ number of years and I’ve always wondered how do you balance what’s actually being completed and what’s on the books. So, it’s the basic question, how much is enough, but not too much.

DENT: Well, that’s a hard one because we don’t know until it’s actually built that a development will.

Question 4 (cont)
Right. There’s no sunset provision or anything on any of these projects, correct?

DENT: Right, when we rezone a property, that rezoning stays with the property even if the developer doesn’t get around to building it and sells it. So, the next developer can buy it and build whatever rezoned we rezoned it to, and we don’t know when that might happen. So, we have an enormous backlog, but it’s sort of anybody’s guess what will actually be built and when. Now I’ve also wondered, what if everybody built everything all at all at once? And that’s not really likely because we don’t really have the excess labor force to build everything at once. So, there’s a sort of natural pacing that could occur even once they start deciding to build with interest rates at the right level or whatever.

Question 5
I know climate change has been a big issue for your doing, your time on the City Council. Are you satisfied where the city is? And do you think it can continue to make more progress on this particular issue?

DENT: Well, I wouldn’t say satisfied because we haven’t stopped burning fossil fuels, yet. We don’t have solar panels everywhere, yet. Keyword is yet, so that’s a big reason I’m running again, because I’d like to see the fruition of the efforts I’ve put in so far. For example, on our Environmental committee, EPSAC, long acronym, Environmental Protection Standards Advisory committee. We voted unanimously that our favorite project to use a certain government grant for, I won’t bother with the acronym there, it was the solar panels on the Turner Pavilion, where the farmers market is. I want to see those panels go up on the pavilion and it’s not there yet. There’s, you know, backlogs of construction or whatever. So, I’d like to see the results of the actions that we’ve put in in place. Another example is the CPACE program. More acronyms, that’s Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy. That’s a financing mechanism that businesses and industries can use to fund solar and other renewable or energy efficiency measures that stay with the property instead of, you know, the business owner having to pay it if they sell the building. So anyway, that we’ve done a launch of that to my great delight came the initiative came from economic development. So that says to me that renewable energy now makes business sense. So, let’s see those panels on the roofs of the businesses and industries around town. So, I want to see the results of what I’ve done so far that I really advance the conversation with climate front and center and the policies to put it in place, now let’s move forward with actually implementing it.

Question 6
What will your main goal be if you are reelected to Harrisonburg City Council?

DENT: Well, my main goal as I was just saying about climate, is to see the results of what I’ve started and another big example of that is I’m on the Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee to rewrite the zoning for the city, and that’s a once in a generation opportunity to reshape how we want our city to be. We’ve talked a lot about increased density, at least downtown, to make a more walkable, bikeable, sustainable, livable city. And perhaps sort of, some neighborhoods might be less dense and we need to look at that overall of the whole map of the city needs to change for our priorities for affordability and sustainability.