Xenia mayor reflects on her time in office as she prepares for new role on county commission

Xenia City Commission will have their last meeting of the year on Dec. 23. At the end of that meeting, Mayor Sarah Mays will vacate her position a full year before the end of her term. She’ll then take a seat on the Greene County Commission.

As part of WYSO’s City Mayor Series, we spoke with her about that move and some challenges the city is facing.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Mays: I've been mayor for seven years. I actually have one year left on my term, so I am vacating one year earlier. I've been on council for nine years total. I really got interested in local government because of volunteer work through my church. Our church is very involved in our community and the city partners a lot with an Association of Churches. That's what got me started, got me interested. I started meeting people at events who are already on city council, and I just I fell in love with it. It's an opportunity to advocate for home, for my family, for my friends. This is my heartbeat, and so as I have grown in this position and gotten to know people at the county level and at the state level, I realized this was an opportunity to really go to the next step for my county. I'm a 'born and raised' Xenia girl, but Greene County is home. My relatives all were in Bellbrook. My parents grew up in Bellbrook.

I have told this story many times. I remember sitting on the highway at the Wilmington Pike exit for the ribbon cutting of I-675. My mom took me when I was a kid. I remember when the mall was built at Beavercreek and driving down the road and my dad saying, 'There's going to be a mall there.' and I just laughed. I said, 'you're out of your mind. That's in the cornfields.' So what an interesting opportunity when it came up, to have a chance to represent — just at an even greater capacity — this place that I love. I was already doing a lot of things advocating for this community. I'm very involved at Wright-Patt, I have a lot of friends there, contacts there, built a lot of relationships, and so it just seemed like the natural next step to be able to say, 'Yeah, I want to be able to continue to broaden those relationships at Wright-Patt with the Dayton Development Coalition and see this community grow.

Jerry Kenney: Tell me a little bit more about the move to county commission.

Sarah Mays: It's a very different way of governing than a local municipality. We do have some legislative power here at the city. We have the opportunity to do things. If the Ohio Revised Code doesn't address it, we get to address it in a municipality at the county level there is no legislative power and you can only do the things that are prescribed in the Ohio Revised Code. So it is a shift in thinking in how things get done. A lot of it is budget priorities, getting things done by the budget, working with those county services, maintaining the facilities and really there's a lot of advocating at the state level, being that liaison. So that's a big shift.

Kenney: So we did some outreach for this series to talk to people, to get their ideas about some of the challenges that are happening in cities and what's going right. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges for the city of Xenia?

Mays: Sure. I think one of our biggest challenges — and this is probably most every community — infrastructure. I'm sure that's already been said. It is expensive. It's hard to keep up with your roads and your infrastructure. Our waterlines, our sewer lines, they are old. This is an old city established in 1803. There are a lot of old systems here and the city of Xenia, in particular, got really behind in keeping up with street paving up until about 15, 20 years ago, in that ballpark, there was no line item for budget for streets. That changed and there is a line item now and we put every dollar we can towards streets. We aggressively work for grant money for streets. One of the challenges with grant money is that it does not address neighborhood roads. And so this is an incredible time for Xenia in Greene County, there is so much growth.

As you said, development comes up a lot. There's a lot happening at Wright-Patt. I mean, up to 38,000 people that work inside the fence. That doesn't include outside the fence. The Honda plant that's being built. There are approximately 1,400 homes that are either starting to be built, just built, or in the queue for Xenia alone. These are incredible things, but with that comes growing pains. When we're already trying to address the infrastructure of our current streets, we absolutely want to see that growth because as that tax base increases, that's good for us to have the funding to do the infrastructure. But that means more strain on public safety, our first responders and more infrastructure to take care of. So it's a push pull. It's just like any community just like we live. It's growing pains figuring out when to make that next step, when to put it on pause for a moment, how you grow with it appropriately.

Kenney: Talk a little bit more about the situation with Greene Memorial Hospital.

Mays: So Greene Memorial Hospital has been in Xenia for a very long time. It's an interesting hospital because it was supported by a tax levy, which is different than most hospitals. That tax levy is expiring at the end of this year. So I point it out because it's the long-term understanding of Greene Memorial is that it wasn't a private hospital for a long time. It has had public funding. Not completely, but there is a piece of that that has public funding, and so although we are not in the hospital business, we obviously have a strong interest in making sure tax dollars are handled well. So there's been some opportunity to figure out what are the next steps in that it's, right now it is a functioning hospital on a smaller scale. There are some services that have been taken back or taken away. And again, it's that push pull tension when you have the bigger hospitals like Soin and Miami Valley that have grown and then services leave. Is that because services are there or is it because people don't have a choice, and they have to go to the bigger hospitals? And that's the tension that we're working through. And we're at a place where we've had good conversation and we're trying to figure out the appropriate next steps, what's good for our community, what do we need, what can we sustain? And those are the questions that we're trying to evaluate. So that's where we're at. It's been a bumpy road and that's not news, but we are definitely trying to be proactive. We are trying to figure out solutions and we'll see where that goes.

City of Xenia

Kenney: So as I mentioned, we're also talking to mayors about what's going right. Are there any programs, initiatives taking place that you care to highlight?

Mays: I think the biggest thing that I am so excited about, probably the most proud of, is our downtown development. We just had a groundbreaking there this past Thursday. That downtown square, King, Galloway West, in between Church Street and Main, that was one of the worst hit areas from the 74 tornado. So when it was rebuilt, it was built into a superblock. You had Kmart, you had a grocery, at one point it was Kennedy's, Fulmer’s, Hallmark used to be there. Super blocks are just going away, right? That's just not something that you see a lot of anymore. That takes away from that walkable downtown. So it absolutely had its place in that time, but it has dwindled. There's a lot of timeline with that. When we were able to take site control and take down the old Kmart building. When we could eventually get site control of most of that area. Since then, we've had an incredible partner with Larry Dillon of Dillon Development, and so we've started those steps. Ultimately, it's about $150 million project, private investors [for the] majority of that. We've got some public dollars for the infrastructure. But having that downtown piece, knowing that we have an incredible developer that understands both existing downtown and what he wants to do and is planning to do for that area, that ties in with the rest of the downtown so that it's all connected, it's walkable, it's what people want.

We spent a year engaging Xenia. 'What do you want? What do you want to see here? What's good for you? What do you think is the right thing?' So we've listened. We've tried really hard to listen to our community. It really was a once in a lifetime opportunity when we were able to get total site control. And so it's just been a very long and arduous process. But to see the groundbreaking and seeing that this is happening - restaurants, hospitality, new homes, townhomes, something that's not been offered in Xenia before, this is a huge turning point in our community. [I'm] beyond thrilled. And so this has been something we've worked on for many years. I mean, this has been 5 to 9 years in the making, really, if we went through the whole timeline even longer. So knowing that I was leaving in two weeks as mayor and having that groundbreaking before we got to leave, gosh, what an incredible gift. I mean, that's... I'm a person of faith, I'm the first to say that as a gift from the Lord to have that really as a closing piece of my time here. But I am so excited for this city. The staff has worked hard for this. it is an incredible opportunity for Xenia.