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

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

Deanna Reed: Well, I think that the citizens of Harrisonburg know who I am. They know what they are going to get with me. I love this city that we live in. It’s my hometown. And so, I wake up every day wanting to serve my community. I’m experienced. I’ve been on City Council and the mayor for going on 8 years and so with that I bring experience and I show up. I think people in Harrisonburg know that they can trust me. They can count on me and I’m going to do the work. And that is the driving force for me to wanting to come back for a third term.

Question 2
You get a chance to talk to a lot of the folks in the city. When you’re out going door to door, and particularly during a campaign season, what’s the biggest challenge or problem that they’re telling you needs to be dealt with?

REED: Affordable housing. For the past eight years, that is what I’ve heard the most. Harrisonburg is a beautiful place to live, a wonderful place to live. But there are challenges trying to find housing here in Harrisonburg and so that is one of the main reasons for me coming back or wanting to be reelected because I don’t think we have solved that issue and it’s very it’s very complex, right. I do believe that one of the most important things that we did on Council is hiring Liz Webb, our housing coordinator. And so having her and having her expertise will help us with this challenge.

Question 2 continued
It seems like the affordable housing challenge goes hand in hand with another issue that’s out there, and that is growth, and you obviously need growth as a city. Harrisonburg is one of the few cities in Virginia that’s actually seeing increases in population. So, folks want to live here, but at the same time, that growth then brings that additional pressure on that affordable housing.

REED: It does, and we want to grow, right. We are fortunate enough to have a State University here and a private university here, we have two. And so, as long as JMU is growing, we’re going to grow too. We know that. And like I said, we want to grow, but it does form that challenge of housing. And so, housing is very layered. You know, if it was just a one quick fix, we would have done it by now. But there’s a lot to it. And affordability means different things to different families. And so, it’s not just a quick fix thing. And I think that for me going forward, it’s working with city staff, working with developers, you know, working with the Community, working with business owners, trying to figure out how can it become more affordable for people who want to live here.

Question 3
Are you more optimistic or pessimistic after your time on the Council that this issue of affordable housing can be dealt with satisfactorily in the city?

REED: I’m always optimistic. I do think that we’re getting there. Like I said, hiring Liz Webb was what we needed to do because we needed somebody that this was their job, their focus, 24/7, right? And Liz does that. We also did a housing study that told us our inventory, told us what we needed to focus on. I do believe one thing we need to do is we have to establish a Housing Trust fund. I think that’s important. We put some money in there after our ARPA funding that we got, but we gotta keep building on that. We gotta find ways to work with developers, right? And how to really be a city that developers want to come to and build in. So, there’s a lot of layers that we have to dissect to do this. And on the on the really extreme end, you know, the one thing that I’m very happy and that that we got done with the ARPA funding is we are opening up a navigation center, which is the other end of housing, right. And so, we’re opening that up hopefully in November. And so that will help people that are on the streets, get off the streets and it it’ll provide those wrap around services for people to eventually get into stabilized housing.

Question 4
Is there a particular issue that you feel very strongly about that you either wish you had more time or more resources, or hope that in the future there will be time and resources to deal with this issue.

REED: Yeah, so along with housing comes affordable childcare, right? And transportation, they all go hand in hand. And I think childcare is a big issue, especially with the families coming here to Harrisonburg. Because one thing that I can say, we have great schools, and so families want to come here and put their children in our schools, but they have to have childcare as well. And so that’s the issue that I’m going to focus on along with transportation. Because we have a lot of people here that need our public transportation to get to work and they need to get to work at different hours and so we have to have a transportation system that can expand their hours and expand their routes and so those are the things that I’ll be focusing on.

To find out more information on Deanna Reed, visit www.deannareed.com.