Candidate Interview – Matt Kelly

Matt Kelly is seeking to return to City Council, where he’s been since 2012 – and where he served from 2002 to 2020 – and he has a clear vision for what he wants to see happen.

FXBG Advance: You’ve been in Fredericksburg for a very long time, and you’re well-known. But with all the growth in recent years, there are many who don’t know you. Tell us about yourself.

Matt Kelly: I was born in Newport Beach, California. My father was a career Marine, and my mother was a cum laude graduate in art and art history from UCLA.

My family came this way at the request of George Van Zandt, who was one of my father’s lieutenants. He encouraged his old gang to come here and go to college. That’s how we found our way to Fredericksburg.

George was a career Marine who was big in the Democratic Committee, and a strong supporter of the library. He was a stand-up guy.

I met my wife, Cindy, here and we had three kids together. She’s from a military family, too – her father was a Naval Academy grad – and we decided we didn’t want to put our kids through the bouncing around that we experienced growing up. So we decided that whatever we would do, we would stay put.

FXBG Advance: Once you settled here, when did you start getting interested in politics?

MK: The politics bug bit me when I was at school. I worked on a number of campaigns, and decided it would be fun to go and try earning a seat.

I was not elected on my first try, or my second, or my third. The fourth election was the charm for me.

As my buddy Joe Wilson always said: “You wore the voters down.”

I got on to City Council in 2002, then stepped down in 2010 to spend more time with my son. I returned in 2012 and have been on ever since.

FXBG Advance: This city has undergone a lot of changes over the years. What’s good about the changes you’ve seen, and what’s not so good?

MK: To answer that, I’m going to paraphrase a previous Opinion Editor at the Free Lance-Star, Paul Akers. He once said of the city, I do understand that we’re going to change, and that’s the way it should be. But you have to balance that growth with what Fredericksburg is.

For me, it’s critical that we keep our unique character. Otherwise, we just become another stop on the I-95 corridor.

FXBG Advance: So how do we keep our unique character?

MK: We start by looking at what our strengths are, those traits that make us unique, and we then play on those. By doing this, we keep people coming into town. We need those outside visitors – many, many of them – to come and visit our city.

Unfortunately, over the past several years, we’ve lost a lot of our character.

A great deal of the challenges to keeping our character come with addressing housing. I would encourage readers to visit my Friends of Matt Kelly Facebook page, where I provide extensive answers to questions about housing, housing density, and working regionally to address these concerns.

There is a way forward here, however. And developers are going to be a big part of that way forward. We have to provide a consistent vision for them so they know what we want.

It’s true that nobody likes rules. No one wants restrictions. But everyone wants consistency.

We need to be very upfront with developers. I have a good relationship with the developer community, and they know that as projects move closer to the center of our city, I become more circumspect about what we should and shouldn’t allow to be built.

FXBG Advance: For a long while, you toyed with not running again. What convinced you to move ahead with a campaign?

MK: I’m a preservationist, and I’m concerned that we’re not as preservation-oriented or character-oriented as we should be.

When one looks at the changes over the years, we see lots of incremental changes that on their own don’t seem so bad. Things like going from R-12 to R-24 residential density. And then there’s the issue of Accessory Dwelling Unites.

Take these changes as a whole, however, and the changes to the city become concerning.

If we aren’t more careful, we’re going to lose what makes us special.

FXBG Advance: Development and density, of course, are huge issues. We’ve seen this over the past year with significant battles over issues like the Special Use Permit requested for St. Mary’s Catholic Church on William Street, and the debate over ADUs. Why did these issues become so inflammatory? We’re you caught off-guard by how contentious the battles became?

MK: I wasn’t caught off-guard by the anger.

Two things that brought the ADU debate to a boiling point are worth noting. They explain why people were so upset.

1. There’s an unease in our community about where Fredericksburg is going, and what are we going to look like in 10 or 20 years.

2. National politics and the way we talk about them have infiltrated the way we carry out local conversations. The result is that we start throwing around insults, usually adjectives that quickly stymy a discussion, and from there things go south quickly.

We didn’t do anything to control those arguments, and at the end of the day these arguments did more harm than good to the community.

FXBG Advance: How can the city increase the level of minority representation in city government and in these civil debates that we have in this city?

MK: We’re going to have to go out and engage those communities, so they know we want their opinion. And hopefully, this leads to more people getting involved.

As far as my colleagues are concerned, we go out of our way to reach these people. They will point to our public meetings and the fact that everything is livestreamed and recorded.

The problem, as I see it, is that it’s not the public’s job to have to come to us. It’s our job to go to the public.

FXBG Advance: How can the council do a better job of doing this?

Right now, every civic group that wants me there, I’ll be there.

One council member should be at every civic event.

St. Mary’s has a very active Hispanic component. It’s a great place to be able to meet and hear from them.

We could also be sending out newsletters with the bills.

We need to be using social media and reaching out to the people.

What we can’t do is to continue doing business as usual.

Too often, when we put out meeting notices in the city, they’re written is such a way that unless you’ve been in government for years, you wouldn’t understand what the meeting notice is talking about.

We speak at such a level that most people don’t understand what we’re talking about. And that’s a huge problem.

FXBG Advance: Education is a major concern of yours. What would you like to see happen to change the outcomes we’re currently seeing?

At some point, we’re going to have to agree on a criteria of success. We need a baseline on which to judge things.

Right now, that baseline is test scores. What do realtors and people moving into the area look at? Test scores.

From 2014 until just recently, our scores have been dropping. There are lots of reasons for this. It ranges from demographics to the wide variety of languages we serve and more. What I’m not going to do, however, is blame teachers.

Improving our schools is going to be a slow process. To be successful, we’re going to have to have some honest conversations about results – what they look like, what we expect, and how we make that happen.

FXBG Advance: You’ve long been committed to finding regional solutions to problems in our area. Why is that so important?

Regionalism is critical to the city’s future. We can’t afford to fund police, fire, and everything else we’re doing without regional help. Fortunately, the state is starting to push the regional plan, and that could help us down the road.

We have good opportunities with Caroline, King George, and Stafford right now to do some of this regional work. One area we could move on is workforce development.

There is no way the city can put together a workforce development program that does all we want it to do. We’re too small a locality.

We’ve had conversations with the state that say if you come up with a regional approach we’re in.

Another example of why regionalism is so vital is our police department. We did a study in 2020 saying we need nine new police officers. We’ve not made a dent in that number.

FXBG Advance: If you win, what do you most want to do?

MK: Maintain our city character, first and foremost, because I think it’s what will attract outside dollars.

Second, we need to diversify our economic base.

And finally, we need to do a better job presenting to the public what we’re doing.

People want to feel they’ve been heard, and that their questions have been answered. And we’re just not there yet.

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