Terry McGuire, Roanoke City Council Candidate, Answers Our 9 Burning Questions for 2024

Ahead of Roanoke’s municipal elections on Nov. 5, The Rambler once again sits down with each of the candidates — this time with a twist.

Three candidates for mayor and seven City Council candidates agreed to videotaped chats as we probed them on Roanoke’s past, present and future. To distinguish our questions from those frequently asked of the candidates, we focused on budgets, segregation, climate, housing and more. (Of course, we also had to touch on where they like to dine out.)

For mayor, Vice Mayor Joe Cobb is running as a Democrat, Councilwoman Stephanie Moon Reynolds as an independent and former mayor David Bowers as a Republican. For City Council, the candidates are Democrats Terry McGuire, Phazhon Nash and Benjamin Woods; independents Evelyn Powers and Cathy Reynolds; and Republicans Jim Garrett and Nick Hagen. Voters can choose up to three Council candidates.

This interview features McGuire, a 42-year-old Franklin County native who lives in Old Southwest. McGuire is transitioning to a career as a public school teacher after working as an environmental lobbyist. He ran for Council in 2022 but fell short in a Democratic primary.

Candidates did not receive copies of the questions beforehand. Transcripts of the interviews have been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

View the candidate's full video interview here:

Why do you want to serve Roanoke as a City Council member?

I think that is a great question. And I've known for a long time that I wanted to run for office. I ran in 2022. I have worked in public policy, environmental policy, specifically, at the federal level for the last 13 years. And I love that. And I was very passionate about the work and especially the subject matter. And one of the things I learned from that — I learned a lot — was the importance of strong, competent, thoughtful, progressive, forward-thinking, local elected government. Local government is so important, and it often, you know, we will see thousands of people that will come out to vote on November 5th and will not vote in our local City Council races.

I know from my experience how important it is. I love neighborhood organizing, community organizing. I like pushing to try to make things better. And I've always, either professionally or in my personal life and capacity, have been involved with things to try to improve, you know, quality of life, environmental health, public health. And this is my home. I'm from here. I love it. I always knew I wanted to move back, and I think we have a tremendous amount to be proud of and progress to defend, things that we have accomplished.

Let’s talk policy priorities. If you’re elected, what’s one of the first actions you would push for City Council to take?

That's a great question. My number one policy priority is restoring funding for after-school programming and getting our youth recreation programs in better shape and sorted out and more equitable. I don't expect that that will be something that we'll be able to do in the first year. But one thing that I would definitely like to do with, in the first year of being on Council, another issue that's really important to me, is traffic and pedestrian safety.

And it's something I've worked on a lot in my neighborhood. I've grown even more passionate about it, going all over the city because I see that unsafe driving. And I hear about it, and I want to pass an ordinance to allow traffic cameras in school zones, which is a new authority that Richmond, the state legislature, granted localities recently. And we have to proactively opt into that. So I would like to do that. I think that's something that we can do right away.

A main priority of Council is overseeing a roughly $380 million annual budget. What do you want to see happen with the city’s budget over your four-year term?

Well, I have a lot of ideas, and I know that a lot of things that I'm calling for, whether it's, you know, increased investments in sidewalk improvements or restoring funding to after-school programing, I know that these things cost money, so I'm very eager, if elected to … I can … I hate waste and redundancy. Waste of taxpayer dollars, waste of time, waste of effort.

So I'm really interested in sitting down with my colleagues, looking at where can we save money, what are the things that we can do? And from little things to bigger shifts. I'm not interested in raising taxes on especially working-class, middle-income people, but I think that there are ways, big and small, that we can look to come up with some money.

I think we have an issue with our city employees idling their vehicles. I see that all the time across departments. That's a small thing. But I also hear a lot about people complaining about the cost of gas, so, you know, we could save money there longer term. I'm excited to see a lot of our schools installing, finally, solar panels. I think that's a good long-term investment. I was glad to see us go back to two assistant city managers, down from three. I think that was prudent. And we'll work out just fine.

Longer term, I want to see us increase, I think we average about 2 percent of our total budget is allocated to parks and rec and urban forestry, and that's everything from our parks and rec maintenance to our urban forestry efforts, our trails maintenance, all of that. And if you look at comparable jurisdictions, in Virginia, even, we lag behind. And so I would like to see us get that up to 4 or 5 percent of the budget dedicated to Parks and Rec and investing in that infrastructure. You know, whether that's getting the rec centers reopened and just starting to eat into, I think it's — I forget, I haven't been on the Parks and Rec board in a while — but it was something like $70 million, $80 million in deferred maintenance needs.

And so we need to work on that. And I think those are investments that are good for us as people that live here right now and our neighborhoods and families. And it's also good, I think, longer term or shorter term, even for growing our outdoor recreation economy.

Roanoke’s residential neighborhoods remain highly racially segregated. What role should city government play in dismantling that legacy?

Well, I am not an expert on real estate law, but I think there was some of that, attempts to take out some of the .. the remnants of the racist, you know, redlining, real estate practices of the past, housing policies of the past in the zoning updates that the Council just passed. So, you know, again, I'm not quite an expert on that, but if that is indeed what you know, you know, that that seems to me like something that Council did do to seek to address that.

I don't know that I have the full answer, but I think that economic opportunity, lack of opportunity, poverty, I think, continues just to hold back so many of our neighborhoods and how do we break those cycles of poverty? Some things, we have, you know, state and federal problems, and the city can't solve every issue for every person.

But I think there are things that we can do to work towards greater economic opportunity, continuing to stay focused on education. I think that's just a foundational sort of doorway to any opportunity is having a good quality public education and working really hard to figure out what do we do to address discrepancies in outcomes that we see in our schools from, you know, wealthier parts of the city to to less wealthy parts of the city.

I'm going to keep being out in the community and listening to people … I am very aware of the huge lack of trust that a lot of people, a lot of the members of the black community in Roanoke, how they, how a lot of people feel towards city government.

And I think it's justified and totally understandable. If I am elected, I want to really hear from people what, what do they want to see for their neighborhood? I think that that's really important to me, thinking about development broadly, whether in the Black community in that, you know, Black neighborhoods, Latino neighborhoods, everyone deserves to be involved in what's going on in their community to, you know, how do we mitigate gentrification?

That's an issue that we haven't, I don't think Roanoke has. You know, we're not Charlottesville. We're not Richmond, we're not in Northern Virginia, but it's a nut that not many cities have been able to figure out how to crack. How do you grow in a way that doesn't push people out and displace them? And so I don't have the answer to that, but I'm very aware of not wanting to replicate mistakes that other places make and just to be thoughtful and intentional and kind of on the ground and listening, is where I'd like to start.

How would you work to implement the city’s climate action plan? Or do you disagree with its recommendations?

Yes, that is a great question. I was very proud to help lead the push to encourage Council to incorporate that into the comprehensive plan. I think that, in sum, in total, it is a very good plan with a lot of ambitious suggestions, recommendations, observations, advice on what Roanoke could do, to move the needle.

We’ve made progress on addressing our carbon footprint. We've gotten a lot of the low hanging fruit, so to speak. And so we know that climate change is real, it exists. It's going to get worse before it gets better. And so we have to take very aggressive action to tackle it, to reduce our footprint, but then also to prepare our neighborhoods and communities for the impacts that we know we're already seeing.

So I think it's a very good plan. I think that we have to create, we have to empower staff to come up with an implementation plan that then Council should absolutely adopt, support. I think that we have to have a sustainability department. There's a staff of one person right now. If you look around at localities around the state, you know, just looking at Virginia, I think Blacksburg has two sustainability staffers.

You know, we should have, we need a team of people. We need a sustainability department with a director, with a team of staff. And whether this person sits in that department or another, I think that we need additional people on staff with the city that can do grant writing, to apply for grants and get state and federal dollars. I think that we're missing out on a lot of money, because we're not applying locally to get it.

You’re on record opposing current policies that ended exclusively single-family zoning. What’s your solution to encouraging the development of more affordable housing?

I didn't like the package. I wouldn't have supported them as they were passed. I think that compromise is really possible, and I don't know what's going to happen.

I think we absolutely need more housing. We need more density, especially in our neighborhoods that are closer to downtown and sort of work, you know, work out, I think it should get less dense as it goes out. I have big concerns, though, about our code enforcement. Our current code enforcement efforts to me don't seem where they need to be. And if I'm going to go into neighborhoods like mine or Southeast, where you have a lot of slumlords that continue to exist and operate houses or vacant and blighted houses … we should be cracking down, we need more aggressive code enforcement. So if we want more density, how do we say to folks in Southeast, ‘we want you to have even more of these kinds of apartments and houses,’ when I don't think a lot of people that I talk to feel like they're getting adequate services and responses from the city now?

We've seen that happen in other places where growth did happen very quickly and suddenly from Asheville to Arlington, developers coming into neighborhoods like we've seen on Norwich and buying little houses, two bedroom, three bedroom, one bath, leveling them and building something, you know, packing it with townhouses. I think we do need more townhouses, but I would like to see design guidelines that keep neighborhoods, kind of on scale, relatively make sure that we don't stress out the infrastructure too much, make sure that it doesn't diminish people's quality of life that already live there. And I think that that's possible.

I would also like to see us more aggressively go after redevelopment of underutilized and vacant and blighted spaces. I don't see as much of that as I would like, the pushing for redevelopment of Valley View and Town Square and just the different, numerous strip malls and vacant and underutilized asphalt parking lots that we have around the city. I really want to focus on seeing those developed first.

You have been working as a substitute teacher in the city school system? You probably heard that the superintendent recently proposed an idea to launch a new magnet high school in the city that would help ease some of the crowding at the two city high schools. What do you think of that plan? And do you think that that is the right way to go?

Well, I'm definitely not, you know, there are people that are going to have to look at that and see if it's workable from an operations and facilities perspective. But as an idea, I love it. I think it's a great idea. If we need another high school, I love the idea of a magnet high school. I love the idea of repurposing, reusing the Jefferson Center.

So I think it's a very cool idea. If it works out and it's something that the school feels like works for them. I would love to, you know, help with that however I can.

You’re going out to dinner in Roanoke. Name one place — where do you go?

Okay, I'm probably going to Tacos Rojas. Yeah. And getting horchata and chile rellenos and tortilla chips and salsa.

Tacos Rojas has a few locations. Where's your favorite location?

The one kind of over by Grandin and Mountain View.

What books are on your night stand? What are you reading currently?

What books are on my nightstand? Well, I'm kind of embarrassed. I don't really have any books on my nightstand right now. I'm not really doing a lot of reading. I have a gratitude journal because campaigning can be stressful, and being a teacher can be stressful. So I've been writing down things each day that I'm grateful for. I have way too many Roanoke Times piled up, and a couple of Blue Ridge Outdoors magazines, I think. No books at the moment.

Old school with the print.

Yeah. I still get The Roanoke Times.