In Blacksburg, two candidates are running for mayor: Michael Sutphin and Pete Macedo.
Leslie Hager-Smith, who has been the town’s mayor since 2017, is not running for another term.
Early voting is taking place Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Montgomery County Office of Elections in Christiansburg through Oct. 31. The office will also be open for early voting on Saturday, Oct. 25 and Saturday, Nov. 1 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It will be closed on Oct. 13. Early voting will also take place at the Blacksburg Community Center on Oct. 25 and Nov. 1 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Candidates in Blacksburg run as independents. Below are profiles on both candidates in Blacksburg’s mayoral race.
Michael D. Sutphin
https://www.michaelsutphin.com/#
Sutphin, 41, is the current vice mayor of the Blacksburg Town Council. He first moved to Blacksburg in 2002 as a Virginia Tech student and was first elected to the town council in 2011. For the past years, he has been the communications manager at Community Housing Partners in Christiansburg, and before that, he worked at Virginia Tech and two different colleges, also in communications. While he was a student at Virginia Tech, Sutphin served as the president of the campus LGBTQ organization, and later served on the board of directors of Equality Virginia for seven years.
To Sutphin, housing and managing growth are the two biggest issues Blacksburg is facing now. Those two issues are related to one another, he said.
“We’re home to Virginia Tech, and Virginia Tech is the largest employer and driver of the town’s economy,” he said. “But over the years, the number of students and faculty and staff have increased, and that’s put pressure on both our infrastructure and housing.”
Virginia Tech is only going to continue to grow, so the town needs to make sure it’s growing in a way that maintains the community’s character, while also providing a welcoming space for the students, faculty and new residents, he said.
The town has spent “an incredible amount of time” dealing with student housing challenges, and now it’s time to address the housing issues for the rest of the community, Sutphin said. This includes young professionals and seniors looking to age in place, as well as affordable housing, he said.
Sutphin’s time on the town council, paired with his experience on different committees and boards like the New River Valley Metropolitan Planning Organization, makes him a strong candidate for the position, he said.
“I’ve developed lots of skills in a full range of different areas that are involved in the role of mayor, whether that’s economic development, working across our region, transportation, managing our growth,” he said. “I think I’ve developed a lot of skills and experiences that will be very useful for the position.”
The town needs to update its zoning ordinance to ensure its optimal and reflective of Blacksburg’s comprehensive plan, he said. If elected as mayor, some things high up on his priority list would be supporting the town’s small business community and improving relations with Virginia Tech.
“I think we need to really work with Virginia Tech and kind of address some of the challenges that we’re facing together,” he said. “We can accomplish more if we’re working together.”
Peter Macedo
https://petemacedo.com/
Macedo, 50, has a bachelor degree in physics and a master’s degree in education from Virginia Tech. He worked at the university for 13 years, primarily with distance learning programs. When he left the university, he started Blacksburg Bagels, now located on Kabrich Street.
The biggest issue facing Blacksburg right now is not housing, but that everyone thinks housing is the town’s biggest issue, Macedo said. He feels that this is causing the town to miss opportunities and make decisions that are “sacrificing other elements of the town and the community.”
“Anytime there’s a decision to be made that’s related to anything, if housing can be up against that, then it’ll lose,” he said. “Housing is the trump card that you can play on anything, and it doesn’t matter what else suffers as a result — housing will always win.”
Macedo has never held any elected office before, but he’s held many leadership roles that would make him a strong candidate for mayor, he said.
“I think that there has been an assumption that if you are on town council for a long time, then it’s appropriate for you to be mayor,” he said. “But just because you are a part of a group or a member of a group, it doesn’t mean you have experience in leading a group, or more than just leading, but being the representative of that group.”
The perception that people need to have been on the town council for a while before getting elected as mayor is something that Macedo is trying to challenge. In a “transitional” town like Blacksburg, some people may only live there for five or six years, but are still capable of supporting the community, he said.
If elected, Macedo would prioritize finding ways to engage the community. And in Blacksburg, that doesn’t only include year round residents — it includes students and university faculty as well, he said. Students have a lot to offer to the town, but they aren’t provided specific opportunities to do so, he said. He’d like to find a way to connect the students to the rest of the community in a way that highlights the strengths they bring to the table.
“If we can … have opportunities for them to integrate service of their community into the curriculum that they are working on right now, I think it would be a big asset, and it would help improve the perception of the students and the faculty as being much more positive to the community,” he said.
Macedo feels that there is a lot of housing in Blacksburg that’s unused for different reasons, like developers collecting properties or people owning vacant investment properties. There is a way to study and identify those homes, and then find ways to incentivize owners to make those unused options available, he said.
“Before we start building new things, I feel like we need to sort of look in our pantry and see what we have, and see how we can use what we have, and then start stepping forward from here,” he said.
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