Joe Knopp: Candidate profile
Bio
Name: Joe Knopp
City: Batavia
Office sought: Alderman, 4th Ward
Age: 56
Family: Wife (Shelley), Daughter (Danielle), son (Kyle), son (Corey) son-in-law (Barney), grandson
Occupation: Senior Sales Engineer, Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies
Education: BS Systems Engineering, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio
Civic involvement: Volunteer firefighter in Ohio; Volunteer rescue squad in Virginia; Cub Master, Pack 112, Batavia; Fox Valley District Roundtable Commissioner, Boy Scouts of America; BB Range Safety Instructor, Fox Valley Park District Day Camp; Licensed Football Official, IHSA
Previous elected offices held: none
Incumbent? No.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/votejoeknopp/
Issue questions
What are the most important issues facing your community and how do you intend to address them?
Citizen engagement is the foundation of good local government, and if elected as a member of city council, encouraging citizen engagement will be a priority. More importantly, making sure there's an emphasis on real issues which impact us all directly. For example, although Campagna and One North Washington grabbed the headlines in 2017-2018, Batavia took the first steps toward renewing its aging water and sewer infrastructure with the construction of the new $65 million dollar Waste Water Treatment plant, yet that story was lost in the noise.
While working to limit any increase in our local taxes, discussing what we're doing with our current ones will be a priority. In addition, maintaining our quality of life and safety, while making sure we can keep this town affordable for those who want to start a family, will be front and center.
What makes you the best candidate for the job?
As someone who's entire career has involved being both technical, while engaging new people every day, the ability to see the complete picture while understanding people's perspectives and backgrounds has been required. Listening and understanding others has allowed me to be successful as a father, grandfather, high school football referee and technical sales engineer. As someone with decades of experience in business, working with vendors, negotiating contracts, dealing with happy and angry customers, and having to reach performance goals, while being successful and being able to roll with the punches, is normal. Finally, the years spent being a referee for high school football games, including Batavia, has made me appreciate the value of being able to make the tough call on a moment's notice (and how to avoid a tackle!).
Describe your leadership style and explain how you think that will be effective in producing actions and decisions with your village board or city council.
Taking the time to understand the complete issue and then studying the finer points is my leadership style: fact based with an eye toward understanding the perspectives and personalities involved.
A saying we use while training new football referees is “every game means something to someone.” My job on the city council is to remember that everything means something to someone and my leadership style reflects that.
How would you describe the condition of your community's budget, and what are the most important specific actions the town should take to assure providing the level of services people want?
As someone who will work toward maintaining our quality of life, while limiting any increase to our overall taxes (if any), the current state of the City of Batavia's budget is appreciated.
Our budget is balanced, and we're taking on new projects which need to happen, but the state of our reserves is a concern. As the state of Illinois is financially strapped, it's important to make sure our “rainy day” fund can protect the town in case of any reduction in revenue from the state. However, we need to make sure we're not just taking money from homeowners, like myself, just because we can. If there's an opportunity to lower the city's portion of the property tax rate, while maintaining our quality of life, we're going to take it.
What's one good idea you have to better the community that no one is talking about yet?
As a town which is approaching 200 years of existence, we have a lot of success stories we can celebrate. However, we are reaching a new state in our town's existence, we now have a large portion of our housing stock which is nearing, or over, 100 years old. How do we maintain the value and safety of our community as large swathes of our core housing stock enters their second century? Creating programs which help promote and encourage smart infill redevelopment, that is respectful to their surrounding neighborhood, needs to be a focus. We don't want to “cut loose” with McMansions polluting our established older neighborhoods, but we need redevelopment. When elected, we'll get in front of that.