“I am a Miami OH RedHawk who lives at Red Hawk in Wingfield Springs,” Diana Mackey wrote us as her favorite basketball team got a short lived Cinderella March Madness experience while she is striving to get through to the final two and then win the Sparks mayoral race in the current election cycle.
“People over the Powerful,” her email tagline reads.
Mackey, an Ohio native, who has lived in Sparks over a quarter century, has had experience encouraging candidates to run, and was trying to find someone for the Sparks contest, “because I live at Red Hawk where they want to rip apart the golf course and put in 800 homes and townhouses.”
Mackey had someone “kind of on the hook to run and he called me a week ago Wednesday night and he said ‘I just can't do it. I can't give up my job. I don't have the time’ and I've been working on him for six months plus he lives on the golf course. So he said, ‘why don't you run?’”
Without more prompting, she put on her suit jacket, got her 30 dollars ready and went down to city hall to file.
“I’m familiar with the issues that Sparks is facing, like running out of money, the same people running making promises, and then if in 12 years they haven't really made any changes, it's just same old, same old,” she says of running against an incumbent mayor, a long time city council member and another person who owns Engine 8 Urban Winery (Ed Lawson, Charlene Bybee and Wendi Dawson).
Not wanting any PAC money or developer support, “people who want to buy influence” she says, she’s trying to get a thousand people to give fifty dollars each.
She’s worked for the Census Bureau which gave her experience going door to door, has a business background, including working for a big utility company in the Midwest, a mobile company in this area and the prestigious firm Ernst and Young as a long time human resources recruiter.
“I’ve had to deal with all kinds of people, people who make two million dollars a year, all the way down to people who make minimum wage. And I was very successful in that career,” she says now ready to use her wisdom to lead an entire city.
Living at Red Hawk she understands people’s concerns of growth without proper infrastructure. “These people out here are so upset, they're crying, they're angry, they don't know what to do,” she said. “We’re running out of land.”
New streams of revenue are needed for Sparks, with the C-Tax “going down dramatically because people aren't smoking and drinking as much,” she says.
Her press release states putting public safety first, “Sparks families deserve fast response times, well-supported first responders, and a mayor who treats safety as non-negotiable;” fiscal stability without raising taxes, “by improving transparency, cutting waste, and finding creative ways to increase city revenue;” real solutions for housing affordability, “We need housing that matches the needs of the people who make Sparks run — not just luxury development;” fixing traffic and modernizing infrastructure, “People feel the strain of growth every time they get in their car. We need a mayor who will prioritize real traffic solutions and modernize our roads before approving more development;” and restoring trust in local government: “Residents deserve honesty, openness, and a mayor who listens. I will ensure that every major decision includes real public input.”
She’s sad to often see local businesses quickly come and go and wants to meet with as many local entrepreneurs as she can, while also going door to door in each Sparks neighborhood to hear concerns, and asking everyone “what do you need that you're not getting now? The best way to win is to actually go out and walk your neighborhoods,” she said with a plan to start in Ward 1 and work her way in, while attending as many local public events as possible.
“I’m good at problem solving, coming up with creative ideas and I think sometimes, things need to be shaken up a little bit,” she concluded in our interview. “For a long time, I don't think people have paid attention to their local government. And I think for the first time they're starting to pay attention. I just want people to know I have an open mind and I'm going to listen to them and then try to find creative ways of solving the problems.”
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