The St. Joseph County Democratic Party (SJCDP) held a candidates’ meet-and-greet event Saturday morning at its headquarters on Portage Street in Three Rivers. Called “Donuts with Dems,” the event featured socially distanced coffee, donuts, and a chance for citizens to meet and speak with local candidates for office. Watershed Voice spoke to some of the event’s organizers and attendees, as well as the three candidates who were present.
Clayton Lyczynski II, who is a Three Rivers city commissioner, has been present at several community events lately, and attended Saturday’s function. “While I don’t really identify as a Democrat or a Republican, I decided I’d grab coffee and donuts and talk about what is going on in the community, which I am very interested in, and interested in hearing what people have to say,” Lyczynski said. “I’ve found in the last few months of being a city commissioner you learn a lot by listening. I mostly just came to listen and see what I need to know.”
Paula Smith is second vice chair of the SJCDP, a position she has held officially for two years and unofficially for six. She helped organize the event, including providing the donuts, helping set up, and being on hand to answer questions.
Smith said she can also provide direction to anyone who might want to run for office. She helped one of the candidates at Saturday’s event to run. Amy East is seeking to represent the 59th District as a state representative in the Michigan legislature.
Smith said East is “more than cool. I met her last year at the fair.” Smith tried to recruit East on the spot, encouraging her to run for office. “Amy was clearly the leader, and clearly articulating what other people wanted to say in a really intelligent way. I’m listening to her and I’m getting goosebumps. She was so brilliant, so aware.” Smith stayed in touch with East. “Two days later we called, and she said, ‘I’m thinking about it.’”
Smith likes East’s capacity to listen. “She listens deeply, and she cares about the people of this county and of Cass County. She wants to see it be what it could be, employing everybody to their maximum skill level.”
East lives near Marcellus. She grew up in Cass County and graduated from Constantine High School. After college, she was an archaeologist, living in several different places before returning to Michigan. “My husband and I had our daughter. We really wanted to be home so that she could be near family, and so that we could give her a little bit of what I had growing up. I grew up on a farm. I always had chores and everything, and I wanted her to kind of learn those values that I had.”
East said she wants to work on economic options for the community. “There was always a low level of poverty when I grew up, but when I came home, it seemed like there was so much more, and I wanted my daughter to be able to have this home where at least if she wants to go off to school, that when she grows up to have her kids, she could have something to come back to, to raise a family here.
“There should be options here for people to go off to college, get a degree, and come home, and there’s not right now.” That’s important to East for the sake of her family’s younger members, for whom she wants to preserve the area’s blue-collar identity. “I wanted them to have place to come home to that was kind of stable. I wanted them to have the feel of small-town life, and the feel of being from an agricultural area. It’s one of the things I value most, and why I wanted to come back.”
These roots drive her platform, East said. “My platform is support for our public educators and the education system, supporting and trying to build back up the economy here, the small town, the agriculture. Three Rivers has done a great job of building this back up. It used to be pretty dead downtown,” East said.
She believes similar work needs to take place elsewhere. “There are a lot of empty storefronts and a lot of opportunities that are just not being met. Our towns and our schools all serve as the center of our community. They’re important.”
East says she wants to see a “broad spectrum” of employment and advancement opportunities in the county, including increased access to options for college, but also support for local workers.
“The skilled trades are highly important. They are important to agriculture, they’re important to downtown, they are important to renovating our old buildings, they are all around just important,” East said. She wants a community where workers who attend a Career and Technical Education (CTE) program “can come back and have good jobs here. I am pro-union. I really want to see those jobs be valued and well paid, because they’re skilled trades.”
She also values unskilled jobs. She wants to ensure “they’ve got the support that they need to make sure they are getting paid adequately for what they’re doing. Not just in the manufacturing industry, but in the stores, essential workers,” East said.
“We want to make sure that they’ve got a good means of being able to provide for their families, because not everybody has the option of going to school or even for CTE, and for some it’s just not something they’re interested in. So part of that is going to be strengthening unions again and making sure that they can fight for people.
“I mean, my dad worked at (General Motors), American Axle, but before when it was GM. He was a member of the (United Auto Workers), and he made good money for us. My parents were dirt poor when they got married, and what he was able to do with that kind of a job, it was an unskilled job, but he made good money, and it let us climb up into the middle class. My stepbrother just left there, and my mom told me he was basically making the same money now as what my dad was making in the late 80s.”
East is also concerned about environmental impacts on waterways and other resources. “We have awesome natural resources here,” East said. “The lakes, woods, wetlands, and everything that we have, it’s gorgeous, and it’s precious, and for our kids we should be able to be sure that the water’s safe to drink.” For East, this has value both for tourism and health. “I just want to make sure that we’re growing up healthy and we’ve got a good quality of life. That’s what it’s all about for me.”
John Kruse came to learn more about the candidates Saturday. He is a retired Three Rivers teacher who taught wood shop and home building in the schools’ Industrial Arts program until 1993. A native of Mason, south of Lansing, Kruse spent a summer working in his father’s Litchfield coal and lumber yard following a four-year stint in the Navy.
After marriage, Kruse’s mother-in-law told him, “you work so well with your hands, you could teach this.” Kruse attended college at Western Michigan University from 1959 to 1963, and then “came down here, and never left. I liked the town, I liked the people, I know a lot of the people. I’ve seen changes. I taught kids and I loved what I was doing. I loved my kids.”
Regarding his reasons to attend Saturday’s event, Kruse said, “When I voted in the last presidential election, I did not vote for Trump. The electoral college took my vote away from me, and I’m a little bit (angry). I think that’s a miscarriage of justice. I think they need to do away with the electoral college so every vote counts. I can’t stand the man. I’m not Democrat. I’m not Republican. I sit on the fence. I did vote for a Bush one time. I voted for a Kennedy one time. I look at the candidate, not the party.”
Kruse said he is largely content with local government. “We need to be progressing. We are progressing. Our city council is in pretty good shape. I could see some more infrastructure,” he said. On a broader scale, Kruse is concerned about race. “This killing in Minnesota was absolutely wrong,” he said. He said he is pleased to have lived and taught in a community with a Black population like Three Rivers, and was glad to have had African-American students.
When it comes to trades and training opportunities, Kruse’s feelings parallel those of East. A forced retirement buyout ended his 30-year career when the schools’ industrial arts programs closed. “Kids today don’t have any wood shop; they don’t have metal shop. When I was teaching here, they had a smattering of everything. They had civics, they had math, they had industrial ed.
“We had vocational auto shop, vocational machine shop, woodshop. With my building class we put up five houses on the north end of town.” Kruse said the programs came with expenses, but “we had (builders, electricians, plumbers, masons, and a youngster who became a vice president of a construction company), so it paid off. They don’t have any of that stuff now. My son in law is a pipefitter and millwright at (American Axle),” who Kruse says expresses frustration at the levels of experience new apprentices often do not possess.
Kruse became familiar with Saturday’s event through Andrew George, who is running for the position of First District St. Joseph County Commissioner. That seat represents Three Rivers city and Fabius and Flowerfield townships. (It should be noted George formerly worked for Watershed Voice and served on its board.)
Like East, George is strongly pro-union. “A lot of people have heard me drive this home for the past six months, but the three things I am most concerned about for St. Joseph County are transparency, inclusion, and economic empowerment,” George said.
“I am a pro-labor candidate. I would like to see St. Joseph County as a shining example of what pro-labor does look like. I’d like to bring a community benefits policy to St. Joseph County.”
According to George, a community benefits policy is “a very broad term. Companies can have one, that’s the most common form. When a company does it, they vow through their contracts that a certain amount of the benefits from that business must go toward the community, and they can earmark that.
“A less common version is at a government level. How our county can implement (one) is by assuring that if the county enters into any deals with real estate developments, subsidies, grants, whatever, the priority goes to those that use union labor and local labor.”
George also has policy proposals for his other two main platform values, transparency and inclusion, which he says “have been two big-ticket items for the citizens of St. Joseph county. I want to change the way our citizens view our local government. I want to include everybody. I want to bring everybody to the table.”
George said he would like to livestream all county commission meetings online, and increase the county commission seats from five to seven in order to be more representative of more of the county
George told Watershed Voice his other transparency platform point is to include an additional public comment period during county commission meetings, a proposal he said he has also discussed with 2nd District County Commission candidate Kathy Greaves.
If elected, Greaves would represent Park, Mendon, Leonidas, Burr Oak, and Colon townships. Watershed Voice’s Keep Your Voice Down podcast recently featured her in an interview. At Saturday’s event, she discussed more of her background and platform.
Greaves feels her background and experience will help her bring in new ideas. “I grew up in a small farming community southeast of Cleveland,” she said. “I left there and got myself a bachelor’s degree in psychology.” After driving a school bus for a year, she continued with a masters’ in exercise physiology, and a PhD in nutrition science. “Living across the country is one of the things that helps me in terms of being able to bring ideas to the county. I’ve lived in Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio.”
Greaves moved to Michigan about 12 years ago and is a nutritionist with the Kellogg Company in Battle Creek. She now works mostly from home. Eliminating the commute gave her the flexibility to run for office.
“One of the things I’ve seen since living here is that there is a lot of hurt,” Greaves said. “There is a lot of concern from a financial perspective. People aren’t able to make ends meet. Our small businesses are closing. Our farmers are not getting there, once they get their crops in the ground and it’s a good year, you know with COVID, they’re stuck with crops that would have gone to restaurants and schools.
“So, how can we build the farming community, how can we build our small businesses back up again? I saw that from a financial perspective, there’s a lot we can do within the county, and so I bring experiences from outside that sit really well with commissioners that have been born and raised here in the county. It helps to have another influence, another voice to help to mix the pot a little bit and bring in fresh ideas.”
Greaves has grant writing experience she believes will help with creative program funding options. “I am making three promises to the community of St. Joseph County. One is to listen. Part of what I’d like to do is start a listening campaign and hear what issues people have, not just what I’ve seen, but listen to the issues that people have.
“The second is to look at the budget and figure out not how we cut more programs and departments, but how we refresh that budget. Bring in money from elsewhere to make that budget work better for the county. And then the third thing is to make sure that those services and programs are working in the community, to make sure that people in the community are getting their needs met.”
If elected, Greaves would like to foster economic growth by encouraging larger developments on the U.S.-131 corridor and at the Sturgis Plaza, helping smaller businesses on the villages’ and cities’ main streets to recover and grow, and preserving local character that encourages tourism. She said she would like to address the nine at-risk dams around the county, including the critical Portage Plant dam on Hoffman Pond in Three Rivers.
As a Park Township resident who works from home and experiences poor internet service, Greaves would also like to work on rural broadband development, a goal she shares in common with some members of the Park Township Board.
In her view, the pandemic shutdown has brought new urgency to that issue. “We have kids who have to work from home, we have people working from home who don’t have access. I’ve heard stories of people driving to local businesses to sit in the parking lot to do their work or to download their kids’ assignments.”
Greaves’ emphasis on listening was a fairly consistent theme among comments attendees and candidates shared with Watershed Voice on Saturday. Several expressed knowledge and awareness of the challenges they face as Democratic candidates in a county that has voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Republican ticket for decades.
Carol Higgins serves on the board of Glen Oaks Community College, a position she won after losing three times since 2008 in contests for the 59th District State Representative position. Higgins ran twice in that race, and appeared on the ballot a third time as a write-in.
“The first time I ran, a number of people said, ‘if you really want to win, you have to run as a Republican.’ And, I thought about that, but not for very long. I felt that to run as a Republican, I was being a coward to my position.” After feeling that she had to choose one party or another and looking at each party’s values, she said “it was easy to see that I was more in line with the Democrats.”
Higgins said she would like to empower more people to stand up for their views. “There are so many people in the closet in this county who don’t want their friends to know (their politics). After a few more step forward, I think things could change here like they have in other counties in the state.” Speaking of places where voting shifts have occurred, she said “they really weren’t flipping hearts and minds. They were flipping the willingness of people to stand up and be counted for what they really believed in.”
Higgins also believes that political language is often not honest enough. For example, she said, “Almost every regulation out there is consumer protection based. We don’t just make up regulations for the fun of it. We respond to things where people have been injured and killed and diseased, and say in our economic world, we need to put some limits on what companies can do so they’re not killing their employees and the people that live around them. That’s consumer protection. But if someone says ‘regulation,’ the lights go off and somebody says, ‘we can’t have regulations.’ Of course we’ve got to have regulations.”
Higgins says more honest media coverage would also be helpful. “I did not know that as a Democrat, the media in St. Joseph County was going to just pretend I did not exist. I thought I would get equal coverage. I really thought I would. I just made that assumption, and as the months went by, it was like, ‘oh, they’re really ignoring me.’”
At a 2008 primary election town hall event that also featured Republican candidates, Higgins recalled one media outlet wrote “these nice paragraphs about the three other candidates, and at the bottom it said, ‘and Carol Higgins was also there.’” Higgins called and asked, “’what’s going on? I was there. Why didn’t you quote me on anything?’ They said, ‘Well, you’re not really contested in the primary, we’ll give you more coverage in the general.’ That was minimal as well.”
Higgins believes fair news coverage and more open, honest communication and dialogue will lead to better political solutions. “We have more in common than either side wants to admit,” Higgins said. She feels the social media environment has made political communication more difficult. In her view, certain communication dynamics are more likely than others to succeed. She stresses the value of one-on-one and in-person dialogue, and says, “the best way to get someone to change their mind is to get someone they respect to explain why they changed their mind.”
Greaves emphasizes finding commonality. “(I ran as a Democrat) because I needed to be honest with who I am and what my values are, and I think what I want to show people is that my values are just the same as everyone else’s,” she said.
“As a Republican, as a Democrat, we believe in family values. We believe in a strong economy. We believe in giving everybody the opportunity for success, not just the few. I may differ in some respects with my Republican colleagues as well as my Republican constituents, but the bottom line is, where we agree, we can make a difference, and I think that’s the important thing so that we improve the economy, improve people’s lives, get the farmers back on their feet, and get small businesses back up and running.”
Lyczynski’s views on commonality are similar to Greaves. “I think the biggest problem we have in politics right now is people are trying to choose a side and run as hard as they can to one end, when I feel like if we ever want to get anything accomplished we need to head towards the middle. I know it’s ignorant to think that we’re going to have everything in common, but you don’t have everything in common with anyone, so let’s just get together, focus on what we do agree on, and get stuff accomplished.
“I think the number one thing is to get face to face with a person, get to know a person, realize they’re human. Any relationship can be built if people are looking for solutions. So, I think if we can respect each other, listen to each other, try to understand each other, we set ourselves up for a much higher success rate.”
This article has been edited since it was first published. It has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Commissioner Lyczynski’s name.
Dave Vago is a staff writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.
