Matthew Mosher believes it is important for elected officials to be responsive and accountable to all of their constituents, no matter who those constituents are. At a campaign meet and greet event at Meyer Broadway County Park this past Sunday, Mosher discussed with Watershed Voice the measures he would take to bring about that responsiveness and accountability, as well as what, exactly, those things mean to him.
Mosher is a candidate for the First District seat on the St. Joseph County Board of Commissioners. He is running without any party affiliation, which he says is different from running as an Independent in Michigan, where he says there is actually an Independent Party ticket on which candidates can run for office. Mosher faces Republican Jared Hoffmaster and Democrat Andrew George for the First District seat in the November 3 General Election. The seat represents Three Rivers city as well as Fabius and Flowerfield Townships.
The decision to run without party affiliation was based on Mosher’s disillusionment with the two major parties. “Both political parties just continue to play to only their base on a few hot button topics that intentionally create the division,” he said. “Those of us who see that there’s broader issues at hand, that have to be addressed, aren’t falling into those categories anymore.”
Social media, Mosher said, reinforces that trend. “When someone only seeks out news sources or data sources that reinforce their worldview, then they tend to never see any other sides,” he said. “And whether a different side might be wrong or right, they’re just never even exposed.” Mosher said he believes the problem of widespread misinformation doesn’t necessarily come from false information, but often instead from each person receiving only a narrow part of a broader picture based on what online algorithms feed them, reinforcing their respective worldviews.
Mosher was born and largely raised in LaGrange, Indiana, but most of his family lived in St. Joseph County, Michigan. He had family in Sturgis and Mottville, as well as in Flowerfield and Fabius Townships, and he briefly attended Constantine High School. As a youth, he worked at Banks Hardwoods in Mottville. After graduating high school, Mosher went to California and worked for the California Conservation Corps.
That set him on a career path that largely involved environmental restoration and youth development in a variety of locations. He helped forest fire crews, participated in oil spill cleanups, built trails, and mentored youth for organizations ranging from the Red Cross and the U.S. AmeriCorps program to a community library.
Through that work, Mosher has lived several places in California, as well as in Louisiana, South Carolina, and a few other locations. “I’ve been in a lot of different places through the different kinds of work that I’ve done,” Mosher said. He even spent time in Puerto Rico, while his wife pursued an AmeriCorps service position there.
“I like that that’s what I’ve done. You get to see the world and try new things, meet great people. It kind of helps change your world and your view of how things are.”
Family brought Mosher back to Michigan. “My wife and I knew we wanted to settle down somewhere once our first child got to the point of starting kindergarten like school. And so, we did that.” The couple lived in Kalamazoo while their first son was a toddler, since Mosher’s wife was in graduate school at Western Michigan University. Then, Mosher said, “the year he started kindergarten, we started him at Andrews Elementary in Three Rivers. We just moved here and bought a house.” That was 10 years ago.
In order to help his wife in her work to obtain her degree and pursue her career as a therapist, Mosher looked after the family, which has grown over time to include five children. Raising children, he said, is “by far the hardest and most rewarding job I’ve ever done in my life,” even compared to backcountry trail construction work where “all our supplies came in on mule trains” and “we’re hiking nine miles to our worksite, work all day, and hiking nine miles back to camp.” In addition to his household duties, Mosher works part-time today for Native Connections, a company which propagates seeds for native Michigan plants.
Mosher said he decided to run for office due to changes he sees happening at both a local and a national scale. I feel that there’s very difficult societal and economic changes in the future. And unless we start planning locally for these changes, I feel that St. Joe County, and the state of Michigan economic conditions are going to continue to deteriorate, and our quality of life is going to continue to deteriorate,” Mosher said.
With the pandemic showing that many jobs can be accomplished from anywhere, he said he expects outsourcing to other countries to ramp up. “Unless we start implementing some things Locally, I feel like St. Joe county is going to really struggle,” Mosher said.”
Freedom, Mosher said, is the basic concept around which his platform revolves, which he said means minimizing the influence government has over both individuals and companies. For Mosher, county-level governance sits at the juncture of fiscal responsibility, minimizing regulations, and ensuring people have both critical needs met and the kind of quality of life resources that help to keep people and employers in the county.
Mosher would like to see greater citizen input in county government, which he believes can be accomplished by means of forming a citizen board on which anyone could serve and that would provide feedback and input on the Board of Commissioners’ work, while also helping ensure that more citizens are informed on what local government is doing and how it works.
The county’s budget is also something Mosher would like to make leaner. For the past several years, the Board of Commissioners has passed a balanced budget, but only by using funds from the Delinquent Tax Fund to make up shortfalls. Although he is firmly opposed to higher taxes, Mosher does not want to cut critical services. Instead, he said he would like to balance the budget by opening communication between departments and agencies and looking for efficiencies that eliminate duplication and overlap.
He would also reprioritize how the county spends Federal dollars and other discretionary monies for which it is responsible. “A lot of federal programs get funneled down through the counties and the county has to administer it,” Mosher said. He would like to prioritize mental health and veterans’ services over what he sees as more discretionary spending on things like parks.
“I see this happening here,” Mosher said. “There’s a trend in Puerto Rico, there’s a trend in low-income areas, where they’ll get an influx of money to be able to build a facility or create a program, but they’ve not budgeted how to maintain it. So, there will be multi-million-dollar facilities that will get an influx of money into a certain program or a grant. But because the county has such a low operating level of income, they’re unable to maintain it. And within one or two years, the facility starts to deteriorate already.”
Mosher said he isn’t opposed to things like parks, since they are also important to keeping young talent in the area and attracting employers. However, he said he feels that mental health and veterans’ services are underfunded enough that they should take a certain amount of priority. Mosher also feels like other issues, like local crime, drugs, access to quality food, technical education and job training programs, and the condition of dams in the county, are underserved at the moment.
Further, Mosher said, some things cannot happen without balance with other priorities and fiscal responsibility, especially in the face of revenue impacts from the pandemic, recession, and other issues. “I would definitely plan for lean times when we can anticipate lower tax revenues and fees,” he said. Lower taxes, he said, are important for not only keeping people and employers in the county but also for attracting more.
Instead, Mosher said, the key to keeping services robust is to define priorities with citizen input. Using that citizen input, Mosher said he advocates for a formal plan to prioritize how resources are allocated in the county. To accomplish work under those priorities, Mosher said he would work build relationships between county government, various agencies and nonprofits, businesses, and civic and faith organizations. Through those relationships, Mosher said strengths can be identified, partnerships built, and more accomplished with less.
The biggest challenges Mosher sees for his campaign efforts and ideas come from being a political outsider with different priorities. The campaign efforts of “anyone else but the Republicans are had in this area, but you’ve got to do what you believe in,” Mosher said.
In addition, he said, “in small communities, sometimes there are agendas. It would be naive to think there’s not agendas in our community. Not everybody knows about everything that goes out here because of certain agendas. The information sharing doesn’t happen freely sometimes.”
Mosher said county politics often excludes the people who have the most at stake. “At times, I think it’s party affiliation, but also, it’s income level, education level, race. There’s a reason people are disenfranchised. Especially in the First District, in Three Rivers, there’s a lot of faith-based organizations, and some of them have come together, to work together and help each other. And so, I even see there’s religious division sometimes, where we don’t put the service first, but we put who’s serving and who’s receiving services first,” Mosher said.
“What astonishes me is in a community as small as ours, you know, usually you know who’s doing it and why. I think that we need to move beyond that and treat this as a cohesive community that we all need to work together. Yeah, we’re not going to solve this on our own,” he said.
As a Ron Paul supporter, Mosher was once an active Republican. He felt Paul was an outsider who challenged existing dynamics within the Republican party. Because of that support for change, Mosher said he is aware of the challenges of running on an unaffiliated ticket. “I understand the dynamics of this area. I specifically chose to run as a candidate without party affiliation to hopefully overcome that stigma and stereotype,” Mosher said.
“I don’t want to be beholden to political ideology. I want to try to serve as many people with or without political parties as possible without having that political agenda behind me, making it feel like I have to represent a certain party or ideology, or that the opposing party shouldn’t receive certain things. I think that this is a good way to overcome that.”
Dave Vago is a 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.
