Photo courtesy of Mark Shiffer
Shiffer and his family
The list of candidates for the upcoming City Council election is growing longer by the day. Democrat Mark Leo Shiffer, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat in 2018, filed paperwork on Tuesday to run again this year.
When asked why he decided to run again, Shiffer had a short reply: “In three years, nothing has changed.”
Shiffer admitted that he entered the race too late last time and that running as an Independent in a mid-term election year wasn’t the best decision, in hindsight. This time he is running as a Democrat but he says his commitment to solving issues remains the same.
Shiffer is a resident of Taylor Run, and some of the most important issues to him are flooding and the chronic lack of investment in infrastructure around the city. He also believes that too much development hasn’t actually solved problems like affordable housing, but has contributed to more problems, like flooding, because of the increase of impervious surfaces and lack of green space which would naturally absorb water.
He is working on new solutions to problems like affordable housing. “I have a proposal that I’ll be putting up on the website for [affordable housing], which I think is a better proposal than the current solution of allowing developers to over build where they allocated a few units to affordable housing which in a couple years revert back to market rate units… It involves a public-private partnership with something called a benefit corporation," Shiffer explained.
Shiffer says it’s time to bring integrity, honesty and competence back to City Hall, where he complains there has been too much lip service and not enough action or use of feedback. He gave examples like cut-through traffic in residential neighborhoods and the 2016 creation of the Ad Hoc Code of Conduct Review Committee, which he says have gone nowhere.
“I think it goes back to civic engagement. We’ve got this great community that wants to be involved — but when people get involved and are then ignored, that... sort of turns them off and pushes them out of civic engagement,” said Shiffer.
There are currently 14 candidates running for City Council, including Shiffer. The others are current council members Canek Aquirre, John Taylor Chapman and Amy Jackson, plus Sarah Bagley, William E. Campbell, Alysia Gaskins, Kevin Harris, James C. Lewis, Jr., R. Kirk McPike, Patrick Moran, William Rossello and Meronne Teklu.
When asked what makes him stand out of the list of other candidates Shiffer prefaced his answer with the acknowledgement that there are other qualified people running. “Where I stand out is the competence side. We’ve got this great diverse group of people running, they’re all Democrats. We all have the same values. We’re all about diversity, we’re all about equity…the real differentiator is do you know how to solve a problem? And I don’t think that everybody does. I’m an engineer and I have training in engineering and science so I am very data driven, and for a living I solve problems,” Shiffer explained.
Shiffer is in the process of updating his campaign website which can be found here.
The Democratic primary is June 8. For more information on voting and elections in the City of Alexandria visit https://www.alexandriava.gov/Elections.
