In the last census, the City of Kettering had a population of almost 58,000, making it the most populous suburb in the Dayton metropolitan area.
WYSO's Jerry Kenney spoke with Mayor Peggy Lehner about her time in office and the city's approach to issues of housing and crime.
This story has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mayor Peggy Lehner: I've been mayor the last three years. I have one more year to go in my term. I'm actually returning to Kettering after 12 years in the state legislature as a state senator there, and I was on city council for 12 years prior to that. So when I was leaving the state Senate and the position for mayor was coming open, I was asked and was interested in coming back to this great city.
Jerry Kenney: Can you talk a little bit about the difference between your approach to state politics versus local?
Lehner: There is a lot of difference. For one thing, at the local level, everyone gets along and there's very little conflict. And getting things done is easy. The state level is very difficult and has increasingly become so. I saw a big difference from my first eight years in my last four years, for example. Kettering is a great place to work because we have a wonderful team of people here and now, we've had a great deal of transition since I became mayor. Our city manager of 26 years, Mark Schwieterman, retired. He's now taken a short-term gig up in Vandalia, but he's basically retired. So we had to find a new city manager. My first year, we spent a lot of time on that search and then hiring Matt Greeson from Worthington, and orienting Matt to the district and, you know, he's putting his team together the way he feels most comfortable doing a great job. It's definitely been a transition period. And now, he's on board, his team's in place.
We're completed a strategic plan and we're now working on a comprehensive land use plan. So it's been a lot of planning, reorganizing for the last several years now. We're really ready to burst forth with a lot of very productive initiatives.
Kenney: As far as planning, as you know, we put out some feelers on social media about any concerns that people might have within the city of Kettering. And one of the concerns was housing and the availability of housing for low-income residents. Can you speak to that as it happens to come up in that planning?
Lehner: Housing is central to the future of Kettering and of many communities. This housing crisis that we're facing right now is a national actually an international problem.
In Kettering, though, it's particularly acute because we are built out community. We don't have very much, if any, available land for new housing. So we have to kind of create that land by redeveloping areas that we have. And that's a lot more challenging than building new properties.
"But more than crime, more than housing, more than economic development, I am concerned about the mental health of our citizens."
We've put up several I can think of three right off the top of my head, but there may be more than that. Large, low income, not low income in the sense of government subsidized, but for people making under $100,000 a year. And there's a lot of those people. We've put up three large apartment complexes. Multifamily is obviously something we have to look at and something people seem to want now, too. So we're doing that. We need to do a lot more of it, but it's a question of identifying where we go with it. But we also have a great need for higher income housing too. Housing is a shortage wherever you look, and Kettering is an attractive community with lots of amenities.
People want to live here, but they often go, "I can't find what I'm looking for in housing," so that's a challenge.
Kenney: And as far as that plays into the city budgeting process, are there challenges there?
Lehner: Well, they are. Kettering is pretty fortunate to have a very stable economy. I would not say that affordability is the number one challenge that we have. It's availability more than affordability. So that's harder to deal with.
Kenney: Another concern that people had — and this is city to city — was concern from residents is crime. Can you speak to that?
Lehner: Well, crime is an interesting issue because the statistics show us that there has not really been a significant increase in crime. In many areas, there's less crime than there has been and yet people don't feel as safe as they once did, they all have stories of burglaries in good neighborhoods that they say didn't occur before. Now, the stats don't agree with it, but we have to deal with people's fear and their sense of of being unsafe. We have a very robust police department in Kettering. Police and fire are two departments we're very proud of and we continue to work with them and make sure that we aren't seeing an increase. And if we are to try to identify the causes of it.
There's no question that drugs have contributed to a certain level of crime that's going on, and we have to have the programs available to try to help people who are addicted to drugs. And we aren't just warehousing them in jail. It's so unproductive. It's community wide across Miami Valley, and I think people are aware of that and trying to address it. That is one of the things you hear people most frequently mention.
You have to recognize that crime that's being caused by the opioid problem or opioid issue is of a different category than that which we're most used to. It's not violence as much as it is mental health that's driving it. And I'm deeply concerned about the mental health.
I've met lately with a number of students from our schools who are facing serious challenges. The kind of questions I'm getting are nothing like what I used to hear when I go into a classroom. These kids are dealing with really serious issues, and I think it's a sign of something that's going on nationwide. It seems particularly bad right now in the midst of all this political chaos. But more than crime, more than housing, more than economic development, I am concerned about the mental health of our citizens.
Kenney: And from that social services aspect, how is the city meeting those challenges?
Lehner: Well, I don't think we've really come to grips with it yet. I think there's efforts when we're talking about more and more counselors. Well, there aren't counselors out there. You know, it's going to take a long time to train the number of counselors that we're talking about employing. I'm talking nationally and this isn't Kettering specific. So it's a problem I think we're just now really coming to grips with, and you hear more and more about it, but like I said, I'm hearing it from the kids and that's really bothering me.
Kenney: And finally, let's talk about any new initiatives that Kettering has under way. You mentioned the strengths of this community. Can you add to that?
Lehner: There are a couple of kind of exciting things that are happening right now. One is the building of a new school, new STEM school, elementary. We've had the STEM school for a while in Kettering since it was first started, but now they're building a new elementary one. And that's really exciting. That'll be over by the current high school STEM High School over on Woodman and Patterson. It's right in there. And so we're thrilled with that.
We are also building a new 300 unit apartment complex near Research Park, kind of in the similar area where the STEM school is going. We have a contractor that we're not quite ready to make public, but that announcement will be made soon. So we're looking forward to that.
The biggest thing we're going to do is be working on a comprehensive land use plan that is going to try to identify where we can start now, projects that might not happen overnight, but over a period of time to address both our housing and our economic development programs that are in the queue.
