On the ballot, District 6: Linda Harper
By News-Argus Staff
Published in News on October 25, 2015 1:50 AM
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Linda Harper
Q: Why do you want to be on the Goldsboro City Council?
A: First of all I'd like to have a biblical influence on the council, because the founders said that the constitution was for a moral and religious people. I'd like to be able to have an influence on the decisions that are made for our city. I'd like to see us have lower taxes, lower spending, lower debt and more support for the men and women in uniform, especially those who have been wounded in the war and they've come back and they're having lots of trouble getting their disability checks and things like that. I'd like to be able to help with that.
Q: What government experience do you have? If you have experience, what is it? If you don't have government experience, what are your qualifications?
A: Well, I have been a pastor's wife for 45 years and I have organized activities, I have been active in a lot of supervising, I have been a teacher for 36 years and I've subbed (as a substitute teacher) in Wayne County for eight years, and I've managed children, governed children, and I've studied government and I'm familiar with how government works. I have organized, like I said, a lot of things. I have managed money for many years. Not as much, probably, as this (a city budget), but I believe if you manage a little you know the principles of managing money and that's what's important for managing any amount.
Q: The council has designated four major issues it intends to tackle in the coming years. Where do you stand on these issues?
* Greenways and pathways around the city, both maintenance of existing systems and bringing new ones to Goldsboro.
I'm not really that much in favor of greenways because I feel like the money can be spent better. If we had lots of money and that was recreational, which, it is -- recreational activities do not fall in my category of necessities. When we have people that are in need and this kind of thing, I just don't think that should be a priority. I'm not against them, but I just don't think they should be a priority whenever we have so many other needs like crime. We need to allocate our resources for getting the criminals off the street. I've talked to a lot of people going door to door and talking to people and they are very upset about the crime. We have too many shootings and too many robberies. We just had robberies in Bayleaf, where I live. I just think we could allocate our resources better.
* Continue to invest in downtown
I see other needs, also, like the mall, the streets in our neighborhood and a turning lane into Bayleaf. I've lived there 20 years and I've advocated for a turning lane out there ever since I've moved there. I've called Raleigh, I've talked to my councilman, and I just can't get it. I think it (the money invested in downtown) should be distributed throughout the city. I'm not against beautiful things or having a nice downtown, but not at the expense of the outlying areas.
*Develop the city's Parks and Recreation Department
Well, when they get all the debt down. I'm not for having a lot of debt. I've found, over my years, that debt is not a good thing. You pay too much interest. That is my management goal, to not owe anything. And that's where I am. I manage the money, and we (my husband and I) don't have any debt. We paid off our house and we're debt free, and have been for some time. And that's the way I think it should be, because we never know what's going to happen. We're living on a very precipitous situation right now. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) is supposed to make an evaluation of the currency on Oct. 20, and there's been a lot of information online over the last couple years that we're broke. The federal government is broke. We can't keep getting grants from the federal government. I mean, tomorrow they might say, 'We don't have any more money to give you, and you've got to give this back.' And if they ask for it back, they can take it. They just take it. They're thinking very seriously about making the Yuan the national federal reserve currency. If they do that, our currency will automatically drop. Some estimates are between 30 and 50 percent. We've got this group of people over here that are feverishly working to lessen the impact of that currency change. They are working to lower the percentage that it'll make our currency drop. But it's very serious. Like I say, if it was any other time in history, I wouldn't have a problem with any of this stuff. But I just have a problem with a lot of debt that you don't know what's going to happen. You could get halfway into something and lose all your funding. And then you wouldn't know what to do.
* Combat blight throughout the city
Well, the bottom line, I think it's the owner's responsibility. I believe in the constitutional government that the people ought to do everything they can and the government shouldn't do anything that the people can do. Now so far as City Hall or government buildings, I think that's probably the government's responsibility. But the way I always thought a city developed was people who had something to sell through the public, they moved to a place along with other people and they created this product, they sold the product, and they made profits, and they remodeled or expanded and made their building, their company, beautiful, according to how much profit they had and their money manager. I'm not so much for transformational investment, although, you know, I'm not against some of it. But I just think, I don't think that you can spend too much money on transformational investment because you don't know -- like I said, the economy is so fragile -- if you're going to be able to bring somebody in. They're doing this corporate welfare where they're offering them $1,000 to base here, but that's only on what they think is anticipated profit. I'm just not for a lot of the city building the buildings themselves and then hoping that somebody will come in and then having to offer them money to put a business there. I understand the concept, I understand the principle and I've talked to many people who do not think there's any way around it. However, if we do not have any money, we don't have any money. With the crops the way they are, you've got flooding, you've got drought, they have been very undependable for the last few years. The agriculture and the farmers have been having troubles and I want to support the farmer because I'm from the farm. I think that helping them by providing them a venue like a farmer's market is a good thing.
Q: As for the budget, are there things you would like to see cut, increased or added?
A: I'd like to see more resources allocated to crime -- fighting crime and fighting robberies and making police more available. I know one time we had a robbery, and my husband went down to the police station and they said they didn't have anybody for a robbery. There were so many more life and death issues out here, so they didn't have resources to cover those kinds of things. So he had to do his investigation himself, and we finally caught the guy. But it was kind of disconcerting for them to say that they didn't have any resources to cover investigating that because there was so much more larger crimes than robbery. But it's our money, you know, it's your money. It sounds good to say you're covering all these drug crimes and all that, but then when you talk about losing your money and you read in the paper all the time about robberies and we never hear of a lot of them getting caught cause there's not resources to do it. Especially women. You know, 55 percent of the voters of Goldsboro are women. And so I think they need a voice on the council. The women's voice is important to them.
Q: What do you think the city needs to do to help curb the violence, particularly shootings, that seems to be escalating?
A: Probably the first thing they could do is cut taxes and regulations on businesses so they could create a better climate, and they could, in turn, maybe hire their own security officers that would help with the allocations for crime. That is one thing. Then hire more policemen and have them trained with training resources for robberies and crimes.