Plack Throws Hat In Ring For Dist. 2 Council SeatChris Plack believes less government is better and government is at its best when it gets out of the way.
He also believes, “We can do the most good locally.”
The Anchorage, Alaska, native hopes there’s enough voters in the Warsaw Common Council District 2 who agree with him to elect him to office in the November general election. Though he “identifies” as a Republican, Plack, 39, is running as an Independent. He officially filed Friday.
Josh Finch was uncontested and won the Republican primary for the council district seat May 7. As of this week, no other candidate has filed for the position.
Plack moved from Alaska to Warsaw about 15 years after meeting his wife on a message board during high school in 1993. They are celebrating their 10th anniversary today and have 4-year-old twins. When he decided to move to Warsaw, he had to sell his house and resign from his job. He was working as a communications director for a church at the time and part-time with the Alaskan Republican Party.
After moving to this area, Plack bounced around a little bit finding his “fit.” He worked for a brief time in admissions at Grace College, helped start Pay Pro Media that is now 212, and then found his footing working with his best friend Rob Boley at 24/7 Cars. He also worked as a radio host, doing “Riding the Pine” with Roger Grossman on the ESPN station.
“I’ve been sort of a news/politics nerd for as long as I can remember. I held my first sign for a candidate when I was 9 years old in Alaska for former Sen. Ted Stevens. He was just a stalwart of our community back home. But I’ve always been somewhat involved,” Plack said.
He said he was a Republican who grew up in a Democratic household. He remembers his mother reading Hillary Clinton’s book, “It Takes A Village,” while he was reading Rush Limbaugh’s first book.
“I’m definitely the red herring of my family. It’s not from any sort of rebelliousness for me, I think it’s just a matter of nature vs. nurture, I suppose. I definitely have a more conservative bend. Now to be fair, I’m from Alaska and a conservative from Alaska is a little different than being a conservative from other places,” he said.
Asked to elaborate, Plack said when you grow up in Alaska, everything is “except for Alaska and Hawaii,” so residents there grow up with the notion of “state first, of independence, of we’re all we got.” He said from that sense of “state first,” comes “a real sense of bipartisanship in that whether you’re a liberal, whether you’re a conservative, as long as your ideas are good for all of us here in the state, bring it to the table. I guess you’d call it a Libertarian-sense of conservatism. It’s the ‘Mind your darn business’ party. As long as you’re not hurting anybody, mind your business. Government stay out of my business, let us live our lives. The less the government is involved in that, the better. And that’s the kind of conservatism that I adhere to.
“The best government is the government that gets out of the way. The best government is the government that fuels innovation, that encourages businesses to grow, not rule over them with a stick. That isn’t about bureaucracy. It isn’t about building government. I don’t need more committees. We don’t need to hire more government workers. What we need to do is use the power of government to incentivize the people who are already passionate about something. That’s the sort of conservatism that I come from.”
Plack has attended Democrat and Republican meetings locally. What he said he found was two groups of people who love their kids and communities and want the best for all of it.
“The idea of partisanship on this (local) level, kind of leaves me scratching my head to be perfectly frank with you,”?he said. “It’s a town of 14,000 people. There’s not a whole lot we can’t figure out over a cup of coffee.”
When he looked at his district, Plack said, he saw it was a little problematic. District 2 hasn’t elected a city councilman since 2011. After the unfortunate death of Charlie Smith Oct. 2, 2015, a caucus voted Ron Shoemaker in to fill Smith’s vacancy. Shoemaker did not seek re-election to the seat this year to challenge incumbent Mayor Joe Thallemer, but Shoemaker lost the election.
“But because of the caucus appointments that occurred, we haven’t elected anybody since 2011. And there have been votes that have happened that have contradicted the needs of that district. So for me, I wanted the opportunity to go out and go to every single door in my district and say, ‘Listen, I don’t adhere to any party. I didn’t wait in some room until it was my turn to get to run for office. No. I’m running for the people in this district, whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, an Independent, whatever. It’s about Warsaw and about the people in my district.' So that’s what really fueled me to make that choice” to run for city council as an Independent, he said.
Plack said he wanted the flexibility to go a Democratic meeting, like he did last week, and hear what their thoughts are.
Plack said he wasn’t concerned about angering party officials as his concern was more about the voters in his district.
He said he’s met Finch a few times and talked, and called Finch a “good man.” Plack said he and Finch both love their community and want to see what’s best for it.
“We’re going to hold each other up as men, as good men. We’re not going to get into any of this nonsense that we saw in the primary (in the mayor’s race). None of that is going to happen in this race, not as long as Josh and I have any word to say about it and I’m proud of that,” Plack said.
He hopes that party officials see that he is simply passionate about his community and his beliefs.
“If the fact that I am running an honest campaign against someone, one of their candidates, while at the same time holding up their candidate as a good man who also loves his community, if that burns a bridge, so be it,”?Plack stated.
There’s no specific local issue that got him fired up to run, he said. He did say the trash can issue – moving trash cans from the alleys to sides of streets a couple of years ago – has been kind of crazy.
“I live on Fort Wayne Street right here downtown. So I have tenant buildings where there’s a bed on the street corner every single week. Where some tenant moves out and leaves furniture. That stuff needs to get taken care of. So that definitely fires me up,” Plack said.
“I’m in favor of building infrastructure. We have got to build more workforce housing in this town. We’re desperate for it. Absolutely desperate for it. And we have to get someone in there who is passionate about that and is going to continue to fight to get that housing in this town. So that’s definitely a key issue for me – building that tax base.”
Plack said the city has 14,000 people paying the tax load, but 40,000 people coming into the city and using its services every single day.
“Fourteen thousand people are paying the costs for 40,000 people to use the services. We’ve got to fix that. One hundred percent we’ve got to fix that,” he said.
While he admitted he didn’t know all the issues to fix that problem, he did say there were a number of ways to do it. That includes working with the city planner, county and state and finding ways to cut through the red tape that prevents more housing from being built faster.
