Morning Edition; Steve Urie

It's more than an addition on KRPS. We are eight days away from municipal elections taking place across Missouri. Locally, Joplin City Council election was scheduled to take place on April 7. But because of the pandemic, the elections were shifted to Tuesday, June 2nd. This morning we focus on Zone 3, and we hear from both candidates. Next hour we'll hear from Phil Stinett. But first we hear from Steve Yeary, who's running in Zone 3, a four-year seat on the Joplin City Council. Like all candidates, I first asked Steve to introduce himself to voters. My name is Steve Yeary, I'm running for Zone 3 for the Joplin City Council. Before I get into introduction, I just want to remind people that you don't have to live in Zone 3 to vote for me. There is a big misconception out there for that. The whole city votes even on the Zone seats. I'm a retired registered nurse and a retired Christian pastor. The reason I'm running is because I feel that my city is important enough that we need to correct some things.

We have a bright future coming up, but there are still issues that have followed us for years. One of those is lack of trust between our citizens and the local government. And we need to reestablish that trust. There has been some lack of transparency over the years, and even though it's becoming less and less obvious, there are still some hidden things there that shouldn't happen. I'm also running because our Joplin Public Safety Departments still need our help. They actually had property passed, which was an important first step, but their salaries and benefits are still way behind according to national standards for cities this size. Our infrastructure needs some work, a large portion of it is at its end of life 30 years, which means it's going to have to be addressed. But we still have large areas in this community with limited infrastructure, no sidewalks, no

guttering, no bike paths, which increase the risk to pedestrians as well as vehicles. We have no lighting in a lot of areas, which increase our crime rate, and that needs to be addressed. The last thing I think is that we need to look at promoting our youth, making sure that they're involved in our city, and in that fashion and be able to have policies that will give them to stay here, the best end of the brightest, which then attracts more. So that's part of why I'm running. Compliance City Council is a unique format in that somebody can live in zone one and vote for you in zone four. Correct. The situation is that our classification of city puts us in a format different than web city and garbage.

In Joplin, the petition process, half of your signatures must come from your zone. So once that is completed, then the election actually allows everybody living in the city to vote for all the council areas. We have a two year and four year seat coming up. They'll be able to vote for the two year seat, as well as the four year seat. We have zones, zone two and zone three are running this time. They'll be able to vote for both those zones, and that's probably one of the biggest education pieces we need out there because there are a lot of people that don't understand that process. Okay. Say that you had a wish list for one or three things that you wanted to get accomplished in Joplin during your, if you are elected during your time on the Joplin City Council or pushed forward, who would be on that wish list? Well, one of the first things on the wish list is I would like to see our city more handicap accessible, more pedestrian friendly and more bicycle friendly.

The ADA Accessibility Committee, which I'm a member of, addresses some of these issues, but it takes a long time to get the process done and complete it. And I think that they need to be a little bit more proactive with that. We've got people in our local government that don't understand what a handicap accessibility devices. So there's a lot of education that needs to take place. Our walkways are not necessarily pedestrian friendly. You can't get across the intersection outside the library here in the time that the walk light is on. The time you get into the middle of the middle lane, it's already changed until you don't walk, and that is not a safe situation. We have traffic lanes in this city where it says bike and car share the lane.

That is not a safe thing either. And in most of those particular lanes, there is room to have a separate bike lane. So I would like to see those things take place, which would make us a friendlier, healthy city. Thomas Steve Erie, who is one of two candidates running to fill a four-year seat in zone three on the Joplin City Council. To learn more about his campaign, visit his Facebook page Erie for Joplin 2020. You can also hear this interview again along with the rest of the candidates running for Joplin City Council at our news blog, krpsnews.com.