JACKSONVILLE ?? As a result of the November election, the Jacksonville City Council has two new councilors.
Danielle “Rose” Rains defeated Roger Sundermeier Jr. to the chair of Ward 5, position 2, occupied by Les Collins, who chose not to run for re-election. Rains, at 23, is the youngest member of the Jacksonville council since former Mayor Gary Fletcher won a seat when he was just 18.
“I was genuinely shocked by the rest of us [that I won], ”Rains said. “The unlikely margins were the icing on the cake and reinforced my belief – this is much bigger than me.”
Rains won 3,950 votes against 2,269 for Sundermeier.
Brian Blevins beat Lance Dulaney with 52 percent of the votes for the District 2, Position 1 chair that had been vacated by former police chief Gary Sipes. Blevins was sworn in on December 8, and the first board meeting for him took place on December 17. Rains will be sworn in on January 6.
“I saw both sides of the progression and regression of what the city was doing,” said Blevins. “The decisions that were being made were not making things better for the people who supported [certain council members].
“I wanted to be the voice of the people who need it.”
Rains said he felt inspired to run for City Council as a result of his desire for a better future.
“My mom taught me my family history when I was young and I found out that I, Rose Madison’s granddaughter, am a descendant of one of our founders,” she said. “Coach Todd Romaine taught me that history contains wisdom and what not to do, the power in it and the power of those who, despite all imaginable obstacles, appear to humbly claim their day.”
She said the late Cliff Happy taught her not to automatically believe a version of the story just because someone wrote it or said it, but to understand all points of view.
“I hope to inspire my nation to recognize its own share of the responsibility for our civic duty,” she said. “I will work to achieve fair representation, which is constitutionally our right, and seek a solution to the ‘general’ issue.”
She said that in Jacksonville, the positions of board members are separated by wards, but with the ‘general’ vote, each person votes to determine who represents the wards, even if the voter does not live in that specific ward.
Blevins said he has been a very expressive person in the Jacksonville community in recent years, especially being critical of the spending of the Jacksonville Police Department and certain board members who meet in particular in violation of the council’s open meeting laws.
Gary Fletcher was mayor of Jacksonville from 2009 to 2018 and has known Blevins for almost 10 years.
“Brian has been very involved in this community and whenever he sees a need, he intensifies and fills it,” said Fletcher. “He is just a generous person and wants to make a difference.”
In 2018, Blevins secured donations of food and money to the Jacksonville Boys & Girls Club and its feeding programs. He also donated a 3-D printer and three 40-inch flat-screen TVs to the Martin Street Youth Center that year.
One thing Blevins would like to change during his time on the board, he said, is to modify the law that Fletcher instituted that prohibits pit bulls. Blevins said he wants to replace the law with a very strict regulatory process for dogs, such as regulations that have been implemented in cities like Cabot and Sherwood.
“I worked very hard for about 15 years to achieve this,” said Fletcher. “So, we sometimes disagree a lot, but Blevins has about four or five things he’s already trying to solve.
“He’ll keep the council busy, it seems.”
“When we eliminate all the reasons why people don’t live here,” said Blevins, “it will give them reasons why they want to live here.”
He said he would also like to create a youth city council to help involve youth and families in the area with what is happening in Jacksonville.
“We need to regain the confidence of citizens, and the only way to do that is to listen to them and hear what they have to say,” said Blevins.
Rains graduated from North Pulaski High School in 2015 and attended college at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, with a double specialization in business information systems and computer science. She took a break from her college education, with half a dozen classes left to finish, during her second year of service at AmeriCorps.
“I was being asked for bigger things and I needed to make sure I had time to take care of myself too,” she said. “I am looking forward to finishing graduation and pursuing graduate studies, studying economics.”
She said that by serving in the City Council, she hopes to obtain fair representation.
“My vision is for a community to be fairly represented by our leaders – leaders who are able to hold this city accountable for their responsibilities,” she said, “be inherited from previous administrations or otherwise, and not push things into the next one. generation.
“[We need] those who will listen to their community instead of taking a stand on their own beliefs ”.
Blevins graduated from high school in Tennessee in 1996 and moved to Jacksonville from Sumter, South Carolina, about 23 years ago. He is the former Game Store owner in Jacksonville; the deal closed in late 2018. Part of your goal as a city councilor is for the city to hire a full-time economic developer and a communications director who will manage the city’s social media accounts and update its website.
“We have an outdated website and this is our salvation for the city,” he said. “I do not think [some of the other councilmen] I understand that it is the most vital tool we have to reach the city as a whole. “
Rains said that although she is the youngest councilor, she will no longer allow herself to be challenged “by someone else’s intentional ignorance or personal prejudice”.
“When I am firm and openly myself, most people reflect and give me the basic human respect that we all deserve,” said Rains. “We need to have a representation from different perspectives.
“This is not just age, but also sex, race, religion, creed and color. We need to seek to understand all points of view. “
“I’m not wasting those two years,” said Blevins. “I’m going out with guns on fire. … I will be different from any member of the City Council that these citizens have seen. “