Editor’s note: Responses from both candidates have been shortened for length and clarity.
The people of Grand Rapids will be electing a new mayor during the 2024 election as the second term of current mayor Rosalynn Bliss comes to an end. Two candidates remain, former commissioner and Grand Rapids Public Schools Board member Senita Lenear and David LaGrand, former state representative and local entrepreneur.
What would you like prospective voters to know about you?
Lenear: I moved to Grand Rapids at 9-years-old and I have lived here ever since. I’m a Creston Polar Bear, a Cornerstone Eagle, I also have credits at GRCC. I received an Alumna of the Year award from GRCC last year and I am currently a business owner of over 10 years. I own a couple of small businesses with my husband in the Alger Heights Business District. I have over 14 years of corporate experience that includes bargaining on the union side. It also includes being on the management side, managing leaders, also human resources, and community affairs… I own a business called Genesis Consulting Group, and it is a business and non-profit consulting firm. We are part of what we’re called the 5%… only 5% of commercial buildings are owned by Black people in the United States.
LaGrand: I have spent most of my adult life trying to wrestle with issues of justice and particularly to tackle the problem of mass incarceration in the United States, that’s something that I am passionate about and I’m never going to stop working on. I have also spent a long time, a lot of my life in public service, the stuff I’ve gotten done there, which is at least in part related to my work on mass incarceration and served on the (Grand Rapids Public Schools) school board, served on (the Grand Rapids) city commissioner and assistant representative, and I’m excited at the prospect of working as mayor. I’ve also started a number of neighborhood businesses, which have been really key catalysts for improving and revitalizing neighborhoods starting with… the first viable coffee house operation, downtown Grand Rapids back in the ‘90s… More recently, long road distillers and less traveled, on the West side and then on the East side, and all of those businesses I think are good for the neighbors there.
If you were to be elected mayor, what is your vision for Grand Rapids?
Lenear: My vision for Grand Rapids really is to fulfill the vision that we have as a city. It’s to be a world-renowned destination location for people here in West Michigan, where people feel welcomed when they’re in our city, where they thrive in our city, and no one is left on the outside, that everyone has a voice in the policies that we are creating and that we can build a better community by having people involved in the political process.
LaGrand: Well, I think that for a city to be successful and thrive you need a few key factors before anything else. First… People need to feel like their community is stable. So public safety is always an issue for residents. Second is an educational system that they think is going to be good for…their families and for themselves as applicable. Really the third thing is access to places they can live. So good, vibrant neighborhoods with affordable housing and all those are I think the three things that we were thinking that Grand Rapids has done has started work on all of those issues, but I think that we’re at a point where we can really… make some transformative progress.
How do you plan to achieve this vision?
Lenear: Emulating and continuing some of the work that I did as a commissioner… When I started as a commissioner, community engagement was almost nonexistent… but we began to do robust community engagement surrounding so many different initiatives that we were looking at and doing research in the city so that we could get the feedback from the community. So I would want to do something very similar as mayor. In addition to that, in the spring, I did what we are calling neighborhood connections, where I was in coffee shops, laundromats and in restaurants across the city, inviting people and meeting them where they gather to get their feedback on what they think is working really well for our city and to hear some of the concerns and ideas that they have. And so I would want to continue something of that magnitude while serving as mayor. I want people to feel that they have access to the mayor and that they are able to share their grievances while also sharing some great ideas to make the city a great place to live.
LaGrand: I sometimes say that complex problems almost always need complex solutions and things that are broad-reaching across our society and manifest themselves in our city are complex problems because if they were simple, they would have been fixed already. So for example, affordable housing is a very complex issue. We need to do things on the supply side and probably most acutely right now, in other words, we need to build a lot more housing in Grand Rapids… We have to get rid of a lot of bad regulatory mechanisms that are decades old that actually drive up the cost of housing really to no one’s benefit… We need to envision and be clear that our vision for public safety is that our policing works. First, we are talking about public safety and that’s a broader conversation than simply policing… That’s a long cultural conversation. It’s not going to happen some Tuesday afternoon because we (passed) an ordinance, but it’s going to take leadership, it’s going to take training, It’s going to take policies, it’s going to take intelligent hiring…Then neighborhood vitality. I think what I’m most urgent on is that we have a persistent effect of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, and that really plays out on the neighborhood level a lot. A lot of the ways we fund neighborhood development relies on neighborhoods becoming prosperous quickly and then capturing the benefits of that prosperity.
What do you view as the biggest issue currently impacting our community?
Lenear: The thing about some of the issues that I think about, some of them are so significantly large, but they are some of the challenging issues and they require engaging in our neighboring municipalities… While serving on the commission we were making a lot of policy changes to try to address the housing crisis as it was budding and then sprouting and then as it became as large as it is today, so we did some zoning changes… It’s important to engage other municipalities in those solutions and so I have experience doing that… So that’s the housing issue and my suggested solution for that. I’ve also talked about while serving as commissioner, A2P, and that stands for Alpine, 28th Street and Plainfield and those are corridors that may have vacant, like retail spaces and large footprints that could be re-imagined for housing.
LaGrand: Housing is a real issue in Grand Rapids… Affordable housing is a real human need, It’s a core human need… Grand Rapids has done some good work on sustainability over the years, but I think that, we have an opportunity right now to really do some transformative work on investing in renewable energy…The other thing that I am really urgent that we do, I said the public safety involves more than just dealing with crimes.We may be at a point this year where we lose more people to vehicular deaths than we do to, homicide… So one of the conversations we have to have is about slowing traffic down to sublethal levels on our city streets… There are lots of things we can do and have to do to increase pedestrian safety to make it safe for people who are using non-car forms of transportation around the city…Unfortunately in politics, people often act as though the goal of politics is economics as, you know, maximizing cash, and it’s not. The goal of politics is human flourishing.
How do you plan to address the cost of living?
Lenear: So as you think about the cost of living, part of what is needed is a diverse housing stock and educating people about how housing works. So if you have people who are aging in their homes and they want to stay in their homes, they don’t necessarily need to be displaced, but how can they re-imagine…So it’s trying to make sure that we can get housing, a diverse stock of housing in our community regularly, as regularly as possible as we’re building new housing, and I think that’s part of the solution.
LaGrand: …One thing you can do about the cost of living is reduce people’s reliance on making non-internal combustion engine transportation options more viable. So making cycling, walking and electric vehicle access better are simply going to make things more affordable for people… (Also) access to good quality food. There is a growing movement in Grand Rapids to get a food co-op going, which is exciting, and we’ve had more neighborhood grocery stores opening up… I think that affordable housing is probably the most important driver, and making sure that we have actual good paying jobs in town, because not all jobs are equal.
How do you plan to work with the Grand Rapids Police Department to reduce gun violence and ensure mental health crises are properly addressed?
Lenear: Gun violence is exactly the issue that caused me to run for city commission… Within the first year of serving, I became the chairperson of the Safe Alliances for Everyone Task Force, we call it SAFE. SAFE has … funded over $600,000 in grassroots nonprofit organizations and individuals to address violence in our community. I think SAFE is a contributing factor to some of that reduction… (We have the) Homeless Outreach Team, and they go out to address issues that persons experiencing homelessness may be facing to provide solutions for them. What we’re finding is that with those interactions, which also includes social workers, that people who are experiencing homelessness are getting the help that they need to help them to get off the street and so I think making sure that we’re funding initiatives like that would be a priority for me. In addition to that, we have a co-response team in the police department where we are pairing up mental health and social work providers and social workers with the police department so that they can respond to some of the calls that come in… so that we can mitigate how many people are experiencing mental health episodes that result in arrests so that we can provide the mental health that they support.
LaGrand: We just instituted in Grand Rapids a great new mechanism … We have a 12-bed crisis facility down at St. Mary’s campus and people can actually self admit to it… It’s the first response to somebody having an acute mental health crisis rather than incarceration. People often stabilize quite quickly. Sometimes it’s as early as six hours, I think the average may be about 36 hours. But if you think about it, if people are cycling through 12 beds, 365 days a year in about a day, that means thousands of people are going to get helped and it’s been really successful past all expectations and so it’s a real way to not treat mental health crises as an incarcerating event and as a criminal event, but as a health event… We’ve also started and we need to build on co-responder mechanisms in the policing that we do. So we have social workers who now are going out on shifts… We’ve also got some good public safety outreach to the unhoused population, and that’s been very good because the folks that do that, it’s called the HOT team…So chronic problems are really a thing you want to always try to solve for.
How has your previous experience prepared you to be mayor?
Lenear: We live in a community where we have a city manager form of government. So the role of the mayor is one of a seven-member body that has an equal vote. One of the things that I learned while serving on the school board and serving as president, which has some very similarities to serving as mayor, is that it really does take engaging with your colleagues… while serving as mayor, that will be a value of mine… everyone would have a voice at that table and that I would not suppress anyone… I would make sure that my colleagues are informed with what’s happening. If I’m suspecting that they may not agree with an issue, it wouldn’t keep me from sharing that issue… Leaders aren’t afraid to hear no, and leaders aren’t afraid to hear varying opinions to get to the best results, and so I would welcome those things. The experience that I had in serving nine years in the city commission, very recent years, so I’m very abreast of some of the issues… The relevance of my experience and the commitment that I have to serve and complete the terms that I’m elected to, I think those are all the things that will make me the best candidate to serve as mayor.
LaGrand: When I was in Lansing I got bills passed, which got 400,000 parents off of a government registry and that bill passed unanimously. It’s the only thing I ever saw pass unanimously in Lansing while I was there other than highway naming bills. That’s because I did the hard work of talking to people, communicating, convincing them, working through the policy with people. That takes a lot of time and patience, but it also takes the skill of being able to meet people where they are and have honest conversations. And that’s the key to doing transformative work is helping people believe in the opportunity…A lot of my life has been involved in leading teams and essentially that’s what the mayor’s job is, is leading a team of people who you hope are all pulling in the same direction and really going to work for the common good.
Early voting is currently underway, for more information on how to cast your ballot, check out our guide.
