I’m Erik Curren and I’m running for Staunton City Council because I think we need a bigger vision in City Hall.
Staunton is a great place to live, but things are tough out there. Just as in towns and cities across the country, workers are losing their jobs, families are losing their homes and businesses are closing their doors.
The economy today is intense. But in small cities like Staunton, the problem didn’t start overnight. For the last few decades, we’ve been losing jobs, our young people have been moving away and we’ve had to rely on the outside world to provide more and more of our daily needs, from food to clothing to entertainment.
It didn’t used to be that way. Just look around you. The town is filled with beautiful buildings from a time when Staunton was at the center of a thriving regional economy. We milled flour, we made furniture, we sewed clothing and we even made our own entertainment. That helped Staunton enjoy prosperity and self-reliance.
Now, the world is changing. Experts say that the next 20 years will be very different from the last 20. With high energy and transportation costs, we’ll get less stuff from places like China and we’ll meet more of our own needs at home.
If you elect me to City Council, I’ll work with everyone in Staunton on fresh new ideas for resilient local prosperity.
We’ll create good, middle-class jobs by supporting homegrown businesses in promising areas like local food, clean energy and even local manufacturing.
We’ll make sure our schools have the resources they need to give our kids the best education, while looking at innovative ways to stretch our school budget.
And we’ll do it all as efficiently as possible to keep taxes down and make sure Staunton continues to offer the services we need to keep our high quality of life.
Fortunately, we’ve got what it takes to make our own prosperity right here in Staunton. We don’t have to wait for Washington or Richmond or some big corporation to save us. We can start right now, right here, working with our neighbors.
I’m Erik Curren, and I approved this message, because I believe that there’s nothing wrong with Staunton that can’t be fixed by what’s right with Staunton.
Here’s to a prosperous Staunton,
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