I am releasing the complete interviews over the next few weeks. Please subscribe at the bottom to keep up with the posting of the interviews. – Brad Durham
Terry Bell, Warren County Executive
Interview by Brad Durham
Why are you in McMinnville?
I actually live in the north end of the county. I live about two miles from the state park. I am a Rock Island man. I’ve lived out there all my life. Came home from the hospital out there in the Midway Community. I served on the County Commission for 16 years. I just want to see Warren County do good. So that’s the reason I ran for this office, and I just hope that I can make everyone’s life better.
Do you see a difference in McMinnville and Warren County? Why or why not?
There is a little bit of difference because the county has more country people and they live outside the city limits and they don’t want as much control from the government as people who live in the city do. And that’s why I think there’s a little bit of difference there. Most people who move out to the country are pretty independent and they kind of want to do what they want to do — versus the people in the city want to control more. Of course, they have a right to be that way because when you have close neighbors, it affects you more than when your neighbors are a mile down the road.
If you were mayor of McMinnville and had a magic wand, what three things would you change?
The mall would be one of the things I would change immediately.
I would have found some way to wind up with an indoor pool at the Civic Center when that project was done instead of…I’m not saying what they did was wrong, I’m just saying I would have made sure that was in the project.
Our lights need to be synchronized. When you hit one light, you pretty much hit them all when you travel at a normal rate of speed. That’s just not done. If you come through our town in a truck, you’ll catch one or two lights and that’s it. Then you’re stopped at all the others. For everybody who is just trying to pass through here, all those lights on the by-pass should be synchronized.
So that’s probably the three things I would love to see happen.
What do you think unites us?
We have a good community that showed up when we had the fire on the mountain. There was a world of people in McMinnville who called me and said if you have to evacuate people, we want to donate our church for staging areas — if they have to be evacuated. In the long run, I think everybody’s got the same goal. They want it to be a better place to live, and a better place to raise their children and for them to be able to work here.
It was really amazing, the outpouring. We had restaurants in McMinnville, and out in the county too because Gary (Prater) is in the city of Morrison. People brought pizza and barbeque, and we called and said we really don’t need more food up here. We appreciate the offer, but we actually had food left over. It was just amazing — the turn-out and the volunteerism that we had going on.
What do you think divides us?
More or less, what I think what divides us is our actual government. Actually, having the city government and the county government because most people don’t understand the difference between the city controlling this and the county controlling that…the tax thing divides us too.
If you live in the city you don’t want to pay county taxes too…so that’s a division that we’ve got.
Do you agree with the quality of education and the direction of the Warren Co. schools?
I do to the extent that they are having to follow what comes out of the federal (government) and actually the state has put in this third-grade deal…and that bothers me. But that’s not something I can blame our local school system with because they receive money from them, and that’s the mandates that they are forced to have. I think that’s an unfair thing. If a kid has a problem testing or if they just have a bad day, they are going to be held back and made to do all this…It is going to be a burden on our public school system to try to take them to the summer and get them passed on to the next grade before the next school year. That’s the main problem I got with the school system right now.
Does everything you need exist in McMinnville?
I really wish we had more restaurants because you can go anywhere on a Sunday afternoon and nearly all of them are full. And on our retail side, I wish we could get some of the big retailers here because competition is good for everybody, and that usually makes for lower prices.
Is McMinnville doing enough for the people who are economically disadvantaged?
UCHRA has really been (active) and that’s a plug-in with this mall (proposal). They are looking into expanding a lot, and they’ve got a new program called Empower. They’re trying to help, and they’ve got a big grant. They want to come in here and try to help families, and try to get them to move from a lower-paying job up to a higher-paying job. They also try to help them with things like child care, and they try to mentor these people. So, I think, on the horizon, we’ve got some help for these people.
The interviews are being posted in alphabetical order. The next interview is with Dr. Bryan Chastain.
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