St. Marks candidates attend forum
By CHARITY TUMBLESON Reporter
A political forum was held in St. Marks last week for candidates running for city commission seats.
Attending the event at the river park on Tuesday, Oct. 4 were candidates for seat 1, incumbent Richard Chichetti and Daniel Albert; Joe Crousore and Paula Bell for seat 4; and Ryder Rudd and Murray Stokes for seat 5.
Chichetti, who attended Florida State University was introduced to St. Marks after taking a biology class called Vertebrates of Florida and graduated with a BA in biology. He then went on to practice dentistry for 44 years in Tallahassee. He’s been a resident of St. Marks for the past 15 years with his wife Jo Ann, and has served on the commission for the past 26 months.
Albert, from Kentucky, is a retired maintenance man who has worked in the city for the past 13 years and retired in April. He emphasized the importance of upgrading the lift stations in St. Marks and pushing for upgrades through grants. Albert says he’s not a business person, “but knows what needs to take place for the City of St. Marks.”
Crousore has resided in St. Marks for three years. His experience includes running a construction business for 20 years and also working at Chrysler as a die cast operator and helping train other people. Crousore expressed concern about the lack of transparency of the city’s financial situation.
“It’s way out of hand,” he said. “The budget, I don’t know what the budget is this year, so I can’t say because the only posting of it was on the City Hall door. It wasn’t on the website because the website hasn’t been updated since 2019 and there was no city sign posting. So there needs to be transparency on where this money is going.” Another issue Crousor brought up was the capping of taxes for the city of St. Marks. “I think that taxes should be in St. Marks capped because we are one of the highest in the state of Florida.”
Bell, has been in St Marks since 2008 and has been attending the city council meetings for about seven years, and has a background in accounting. Bell agreed everyone was on the same page with wanting more growth for St. Marks to produce more revenue but said there was need for infrastructure. “We all want responsible growth. We’re talking about the infrastructure we’re wanting to build. If we don’t have the infrastructure, how can we build?”
Bell also stressed the importance of community involvement no matter who’s elected. “Let’s get to these meetings, no matter who’s in office,” Bell said. “Let’s start voicing our opinions. Let’s make the commissioners hear our opinions. Let’s keep this place nice like it is, with the slow growth, with the development of the infrastructure. And I love St. Mark’s, and I’d like to be a part of seeing it grow.”
Rudd was born and raised in Jacksonville and worked at the Department of Management Services, and also at the Department of Environmental Protection and the Public Service Commission. “So I think I bring a lot of value to especially with relevance to St. Marks which is environment and obviously we’ve got some utility issues that need to be addressed. The other thing I think that I can bring to the value is a connection to Tallahassee.”
Stokes has a background in construction and grew up in Marietta, Georgia spoke of getting the community all on the same page and suggested making an online group for the people of St. Marks, where everyone could also organize events to help raise revenue for the city, such as a community market. “I just think we can all pull together and make it a lot better place,” Stokes said. “It’s already wonderful. I chose to live here many years ago and finally had the opportunity to move down about seven years ago and plan to lay myself rest right here.”
Stephen Remke, the newest commissioner having been appointed two months ago, said in the closing of the forum that some of the “obvious” issues facing commissioners are some mistrust in the community, transparency, and the budget most of all.
“And I understand that the accountant told the city not long before I got appointed just recently to the seat that if we don’t get our budget straight, we’re going to cease to be a city,” Remke said. “We’re going to have to cede control to the county, and that’s the last thing we want. And to fix the budget, there’s only two things you can do... either lower spending or increase the income.”