I’ll be voting for Ed Gainey in the primary because he showed up for Greenfield when Corey O’Connor, our city council person at the time, would not.
Carnegie Mellon University wanted to privatize Junction Hollow, the park that links Oakland to Four Mile Run, in order to build the Mon Oakland Connector — a private road for shuttles between the campus and Hazelwood Green.
Residents of The Run were worried about the impact of autonomous shuttles on our streets, reluctant to hand public property to a corporation that doesn’t pay taxes and outraged when we realized that, unless we cooperated with the project, we wouldn’t get the stormwater mitigation we desperately needed to relieve flooding.
In public meetings, O’Connor seemed to stay in the back glad-handing folks, rarely speaking up and never solidly siding with the neighborhood. By contrast, Gainey walked our streets, listened and made terminating the MOC a campaign promise — that he fulfilled.
I remember this when I find another inflammatory flyer endorsing O’Connor in my mailbox. The wealthy people funding Common Sense Change Action seem desperate to get him elected. My experience tells me he’ll have their back, but Gainey will have mine.
Mike Holohan
Greenfield