Chelsea voters elected Cody Sumners as the city’s next mayor Aug. 26, choosing him over challenger Mike Rochester. Sumners received 1,403 votes to Rochester’s 411, according to City Clerk Crystal Etheredge.
Sumners will take office in November, succeeding Tony Picklesimer, who did not seek reelection after serving as mayor since 2016.
He recently spoke to 280 Living about his plans for his term.
Q: In recent interviews you’ve talked about wanting a more professionally run city. What’s your thought process behind that and what professionalism would you like to bring to Chelsea in the future?
A: The first mayor Earl Niven was a businessman. And he was the right person to get Chelsea started. He was a lifelong Chelsea resident. And he came in and looked at it through a business person's perspective and grew us from a city of, I think, 967 people when they incorporated with a $32,000 budget. We now have an 18,000 population.
So you have Niven who was a businessman, you’ve also had Tony Picklesimer who was also a businessman. They've been able to look at it through that lens of running it like a business. Whereas I have a background in the public sector, not the private sector. I've been able to look around at things and be like, well, we don't have job descriptions for our employees. We don’t have evaluations. We don't have a pay scale. The things that I saw while working for Shelby County for 26 years, to me, were just kind of given. We haven't been there. But it's because we haven't had the right mayor with that right background.
Q: Where will the revenue be coming from to enhance those city services and hire those additional personnel for the city?
A: It will come from our city budget and sales tax. We’ve got some new things that should be coming online this year that will help out with our budget, the Valley Post and Chelsea Plaza coming. But I would anticipate a much more conservative budget for the next few years.
Q: How does public safety come into play with the professionalism and a more conservative budget you’d like to implement in Chelsea?
A: With my background in law enforcement, public safety, even without that background. Public safety is the number one responsibility of any government, because if the citizens don't feel safe in their homes and work and they're going out in the community, then nothing else matters anyway. But none of those things are going to be impacted by these other jobs. As a matter of fact, in the budget we just passed, we approved a pay scale adjustment for the fire department. That increases their pay and puts them more in line with the agencies that we compete with. I think when we took office in 2016, our fire department had five or six full-time employees. Now we've got, I think, close to 30. That was part of us becoming a professional fire department. When Chief Joe Lee came in, he wanted a full-time fire department. We worked toward that, our fire department has been fully funded. We've got great equipment and great personnel.
Our contract with the sheriff's office is also another positive. I don't know why more cities don't do contract law enforcement. It's great because you get all of the services. You get all of those resources and you have zero liability because the sheriff assumes all the liability. So contract law enforcement is a great thing, especially for Chelsea.
If we were to try and form our own police department, it would be much more expensive than what we're doing right now. And we would probably have less qualified and professional officers than what the sheriff's office has.
Q: What have residents expressed to you for their vision in residential growth and preferred guidelines?
A: They don't want rentals and that's shown itself twice. We've had two rental developments that have been proposed that the citizens came out strongly against. That even reflects itself in the strategic plan. Out of 126 different categories that were ranked, from one is the most important to the citizens, to 126 the least important, rental developments were 121. So making sure that we aren't doing anything that doesn't conform to what the citizens want.
And they don't want cheap houses. We want to preserve our property values. That might mean larger minimum lot sizes. Or making sure we don’t become like other cities that grew too quickly. Or don’t have adequate housing for what their citizens want. That means making sure we preserve our property values and our way of life here in Chelsea.
