Fairchild’s Blueprint for Dayton’s Future

Imagine good schools anchoring safe neighborhoods, supported by living wage jobs. Dayton’s future depends on all three of these building blocks of a healthy community moving forward together. Quality schools, safe neighborhoods and good paying jobs will make Dayton the vital city all residents deserve.

•Creation of a Police Cadet Apprenticeship Program (PCAP) for Dayton Public Schools students (DPS)

Prioritize funding to create a pipeline for junior and senior high school students to move from school to a good paying job with the Dayton Police Department (DPD) (starting salary $50k+ benefits). During their school years this pipeline will include introducing students to law enforcement officers to create interest, build relationships, and to identify potential candidates.  It will also include opportunities for students to experience the challenges and personal rewards of a law enforcement career. Key to this program is a paid apprentice program that serves as a bridge from high school to acceptance in the police academy. This apprenticeship will provide a stipend and benefits, appropriate assignments within DPD and enrollment at Sinclair. 

Benefits: Good paying jobs for Dayton residents, motivation to succeed for Dayton students, strong pool of candidates for the DPD, reduction in recruitment costs, and a police force that mirrors the population it serves.

Apply the expertise we gain in creating the PCAP and replicate it for additional jobs with the City of Dayton, with other employers in the city, and with unions.  Unfortunately, Dayton students have less social capital than their peers in higher economic communities. The apprenticeship/internship program will foster employment pipelines by exposing students early to potential careers, providing mentoring by role models, and creating post-graduation paid apprentice programs to prepare students. These programs will educate students and their families about the jobs of the future and the steps required to prepare for them; additionally, the internships and mentoring will increase a student’s experience and social capital.

Benefits: Providing qualified workers for local businesses, reduction in the skills gap, support for students, catalyst for job creation, and increased revenue.

Relentlessly pursue the adoption of an updated, comprehensive strategic plan for the city of Dayton. The Citiplan Dayton: The 20/20 Vision Plan was begun in 1996, adopted in 1999, and was updated with the Greater Downtown Dayton Plan in 2010. Currently, the city is not actively pursuing the goals of the 20/20 plan for its neighborhoods and has not updated the plan to reflect the changes to the city - especially those due to population loss and the foreclosure crisis. The 20/20 plan will expire in two (2) years; it is past time to create the Dayton 2050 plan. 

How do we move our city forward for the next generation? One way is to focus on growing our population to 260,000. I support Matt Sauer’s #dayton260k movement. The brilliance of focusing on population growth is that it requires us to think comprehensively - What jobs do we need to attract people? What type of neighborhoods and schools do we need? What amenities and opportunities? Once we ask these questions, the near term and long term innovative initiatives we need to create competitive jobs, improve our education system, and redevelop our neighborhoods come into focus.

I will demand that this planning process require legitimate citizen participation. Since the elimination of the Priority Boards, we have not had significant citizen engagement. It is time to restore citizen engagement to help lead the city and to cultivate the next generation of leaders. 

Benefits: Stability to our planning process, foundation for setting budget priorities, balance in our budget decision so that every neighborhood gets its fair share, effective use of resources, guidance for private development, and reassurance to future businesses who are looking to locate in Dayton.

Advocate for resources and common sense next steps. Four of these next steps are 1) assessing each neighborhood for viability using set criteria, 2) projecting the cost to fully revitalize our neighborhoods so that we can set priorities, make budget decisions, and obtain resources, 3) identifying the cost to maintain the blight, and 4) creating a regular process of citizen engagement with a cycle of periodic review and update.

Regarding neighborhood assessment, some of our neighborhoods have experienced disinvestment and blight to the degree that they are not viable as stable neighborhoods. We need to have an honest conversation about the pros and cons of “closing” some neighborhoods and the safeguards needed for current residents. 

Neighborhood revitalization is more than demolition and blight removal. By projecting total costs and setting priorities, we can prioritize infrastructure improvements and maintenance, and promote amenities, retail corridors and safe, affordable housing. We need to focus on how we enhance our neighborhoods so that they are safe, attractive and full of opportunities.  

Maintaining our current blight is not cheap and it promotes the expansion of the blight. A cost analysis of the blight will help us identify savings that can be used for revitalization. Further, we need to create urgency to addressing the unsafe conditions of our neighborhoods, including an “all hands on deck” summit to identify every resource and partner we can find to stabilize our neighborhoods.

Citizen engagement must be a priority. Creating a regular review schedule will guard against retreating to a similar position in the future. One possible cycle would be to utilize the Priority Board boundaries to review and update each neighborhood on a 7 year cycle.

Benefits: Increased safety, stabilization of neighborhoods, increased home values, and improved quality of life.

Restore basic services including snow and leaf removal, street re-pavement, and alley maintenance. Strengthen water protections. Implement rigorous zoning and code enforcement. We can do this by being fiscally responsible and prioritizing our expenditures.

Benefits: Improved quality of life, protection of home investment, and attractiveness of neighborhoods for new residents.

Advocate for safe schools. It is unacceptable to allow our students to go to school with unsafe buildings on the perimeter. The closing of Good Samaritan Hospital shows the limits of focusing our asset based development exclusively around our major employers. We should apply asset based development around our schools - make them the center of our neighborhoods and communities. The poor quality of the neighborhoods is a contributing factor to the low attendance at some of our schools, affects students’ performance and is a barrier to attracting top teaching talent.

By starting our neighborhood revitalization around our schools, we protect our children and begin the process of creating safe neighborhoods across the whole city. Increasing the presence of police in our neighborhoods is not enough. Increased policing will not overcome the fragmentation in our neighborhoods. The lack of cohesiveness creates the space and opportunity for bad actors to commit crimes.

As part of this strategy, hold the Dayton Public School accountable to their promise to make the schools community centers. We owe our students the comprehensive resources they need to succeed including quality education, social services, relationships with numerous caring adults, and extra-curricular programming. I will advocate for increased spending on programming for our children including before- and after-school programs and summer programs.

Benefits: increased academic performance by our students, more attractive schools, increased ability of schools to attract students and teachers, improved workforce, reduction in juvenile delinquency and crime.

Advocate to utilize the city owned network of fiber optics to increase economic activity and create new opportunities. Broadband industry experts report that the city of Dayton uses fiber optics to maintain traffic lights and that there is unused capacity. Simply leasing this capacity is estimated to be worth $1.3 million in annual revenue. Beyond simply leasing this capacity, forward thinking leadership could leverage this asset to create “new economy” enterprises, like a citizen owned utility or a public/private partnership. These initiatives could lower broadband costs for all residents, attract new business, and be part of the solution for closing the digital divide (46.8% of the population does not have internet access).

Benefits: Increase in revenue, attraction of businesses, making Tech Town more attractive, lower cost of internet access, and closing the digital divide.

Act on the recommendation from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) and the City of Dayton task force to take advantage of the $100s of millions of potential contracts with WPAFB and the Veteran Administration (V.A.) Medical Center by increasing the number of HUBZone qualified businesses. HUBZones are designations that encourage economic development and employment growth in distressed areas in historically underutilized business zones. To qualify as a HUBZone Business, businesses need to be located in the HUBZone (almost all of Dayton is included) and 35% of employees need to be residents in the HUBZone. The designation increases the number of points when applying for federal contracts and makes the business more competitive.

Benefits: Increased employment opportunities for Dayton residents, increased ability to attract businesses, increased tax revenue, and increased economic activity.

Advocate to protect the quality of our clean and abundant water and to maximize its economic potential. Dayton was a leader in protecting our water when we enacted our original source water protection plan. In the past five years, we weakened those protections and have retreated from our leadership role. Given the importance of water to our residents’ well-being and the critical nature of the world’s water supply, we need to take this opportunity to maximize our water resource. Foremost, we need to keep our water safe. Second, we need to secure water rights for our citizens in perpetuity to protect from any attempts to privatize our water. Third, we need to look at ways to use our water to attract new businesses including providing free water to businesses as an incentive for locating in Dayton. Fourth, we need to work with site selection experts to create a business park over our aquifer that will both protect the aquifer and be attractive for water intensive industries, and fifth, we need to look at opportunities to sell our water in new markets. 

Benefits: Access to safe water, increased revenue, potential job creation and increased economic activity.