Margaret Burkholder is making progress along the campaign trail to take over the seat of incumbent Ward 4 council woman Shirley Scott. The former school board member at the Vail School district describes, herself as a citizen – a mother – a teacher, and a Girl Scout leader says she hopes to find a middle-ground and create a collaborative Council rather than the agenda-driven one currently in place.
There are “six City Council people and a mayor, and a city manager,” says Burkholder. “How do you get all those people to come together, have courageous conversations and get the job done? Right now you have the mayor and the six city council (members), all democrats. Where is the balance and voice? Where’s the person saying, ‘Wait, lets consider the other side of the issue?’ Why do we have two parties? So we can debate things. So we can bring up both sides of an issue and then find that middle that we’re looking for. I don’t think it serves our country well when either has all the power. You want to be able to have those checks and balances and right now we don’t have a City Council that has any kind of checks and balances.”
During her time on the Vail School Board, the District has doubled the amount of schools within its boundaries. In just ten years, with all that expansion, Burkholder and the rest of the Board managed that growth while maintaining the standards and goals they looked to achieve every year. Burkholder says the main reason for that success is in large part, due to her ability to refrain from micromanaging staff and being able to monitor when changes needed to be made, a problem she notices appears quite often in the current council.
Even with the knowledge that Tucson ranks in the top five poorest cities in the country, Burkholder knows that there can be massive improvements to Tucson within the City’s current $1.3 billion dollars. The other ranking that Burkholder pays close attention to is Tucson’s rank as one of the more dangerous cities in the country. This is a result of people becoming desperate due to hard times, Burkholder says, and the best way to combat that is to improve the City’s economy.
“What is the median income in Tucson? Is the median just above poverty? That says something,” argues Burkholder. “Also, I look at median income when I can look at how our country is doing. If we have a much lower cost of living index, should our income be commensurate? Should our property values and income taxes be commensurate to that? Of course they should. But we have to compare both of those things…I’ve never been rich. Would I like to be? Sure. I think most of us just want to be comfortable. We don’t want to be struggling. And right now, way too many people are struggling. When people struggle, crime rates go up – because they’re desperate. When you have increased crime and more and more desperate people, right now we are watching the poverty grow. And some of the rich are still growing and this middle class is sinking.”
Council woman Scott has held her seat for the last four elections, with the help of the Democratic Party’s machine. That machine is losing steam and Burkholder she sees herself taking an “easy win.”
As both parties continue their collapse, it is just a matter of who will win the independent vote – and if they vote.