John Kennedy

People at a coffee shopJohn is notorious as a cheapskate when to comes to spending other people’s money.One of the regulars at our corner coffee shop is busy knocking on his neighbors’ doors.

He’s running to replace a council member, Melissa Wynn, who after twenty-eight years of service is retiring from the city council of this small, suburban community .

The village has been John’s home for four decades. He and his wife raised their children there, educating them in the public schools.

John’s three business start-ups created jobs throughout the community. He’s known for his decades of volunteering; establishing, funding, serving as a member and presiding over non-profit organizations.

Never timid about offering well-articulated, alternative ideas to the powers that be, civic commitment seem to be part of his DNA.

Few have John Kennedy’s knowledge of past civic initiatives and policy shifts. Time and again his town (like municipalities everywhere) has assumed that simply spending additional taxpayer dollars would solve problems that remain as challenges to this day. He believes the budget should be balanced without raising taxes.

Affordability, transportation, diversity, equity and the environment are more important to this community than most. And John agrees with those goals.

But the basis of his campaign is that they can only be achieved when city government is dogged in finding less expensive and more sensible solutions to its challenges, in protecting the families invested in it.