All the Little Sparks, New Candidate for Rail City's Ward 2 Jamie O'Connell Seeks to Keep the Good, While Creating Positive Change

A busy Ward 2 Sparks primary includes first time candidate Jamie O’Connell (filing in photo on left) whose website has as its heading “Change Sparks with You” with a section entitled “All the Little Sparks.”

“I’m Nevada born and raised, right here in the Sparks community," her bio at the top reads. "I graduated from Sparks High School and married my high school sweetheart. Together, we're raising two young men and striving every day to lead by example for them."

A main motivator she told Our Town Reno on a phone call this week is to make the area better for up and coming generations.

"We've gotten so big so quick," she says of Sparks in general, "that I feel like we're constantly trying to fix things without being able to fix before we grow more."

Her oldest is now a 16-year-old driver, and she says it freaks her out. "We have issues with traffic. We have issues of people speeding and burning red lights and then causing accidents, which brings me to our first responders and how short staffed they are because of how big our community has been over the last several years and that we need to not cut them out of the budget," she explained.

She's worried about other kids with three schools within a ten minute walking distance of her house by Moana Nursery. "We have kids that cross Pyramid Highway in the morning to go over to Lena Juniper [Elementary] and I'm like terrified for them," she said.

Three of the bullet points on her website are for transportation/infrastructure, public safety and families, youths and schools.

"Again, it's the amount of growth that we have," she says when asked about another bullet point about water resources and future planning.

"We constantly hear about the water levels. And if we've got enough water this year. I constantly hear 'we're in a drought' or 'we're a little bit above average and that should get us through into the next winter.' And I think that it ties into the growth of the community that we have to be very mindful and diligent of the fact of planning and not planning later and letting people go and build and create homes when we can't support what we have currently."

O'Connell currently work for a medical billing company where she does finance and budgeting for large medical firms, balancing millions of dollars on a monthly basis, which she says will come in handy if trying to help with the Rail City's budget.

Another trait she says she will bring is fighting for people being wronged. Several years ago she was featured on local television dealing with a leaky roof after filing a complaint with the Nevada Contractors' Board.

"I think that I've always been kind of annoying when it comes to just standing up for what's right. As silly as it sounds, I feel like it's so hard to do that," she remarked when asked about it.

"Unfortunately, we had to kind of just bow out because we couldn't afford it anymore. So I want to make sure that people have the opportunity to have their voices heard if they're trying to do the right thing," she said as a lesson she got from that experience.

"I think that if we're able to have a new council and even if that council stays on for an extended period of time, as long as we're seeing community connection, open transparency on things that they're doing, things that they have ideas on, and just brainstorming and having constant interaction with people, to let people know what's going on," she says of the type of council she'd like to see for Sparks with herself in one of the seats.

O'Connell says that despite all its recent growth Sparks still has a small town feel, with many people who are born here staying here, and who want to make it better while keeping what's been good about it.

"I think that just keeping the small town feel to it and just to be mindful of the people in the community is the biggest part," she concluded.

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