Joel B. Burchett

• Running for: Town council
• Age: 41
• Occupation: Real estate agent at Page & Associates in Christiansburg, P.E. teacher at Crizer Elementary School
• ffiliations: Four-year term on Pulaski Town Council and attends Pulaski Church of God Education: Bachelor’s degree in health and physical education from Radford University and associate’s degree in general studies from New River Community College

Election index

• Other candidates in the NRV answer your questions

Why should voters vote for you to serve as on Pulaski Town Council?

Joel Burchett: I feel like voting for me gives us an opportunity to continue the recent momentum and the recent successes of council, to build on that. We’ve dealt with a lot of blighted structures in Pulaski. We’ve managed to pull in some outside investments, some small businesses and the large major investment — the James Hardie Corp., they actually chose the Pulaski site for a number of reasons: water, the availability of the land, the incentives we’ve offered. The council was responsible for negotiating a lot of those incentives that finalized the deal and got them here. That, plus, you know I feel like I bring a diversity to the council in that I’m a teacher and a real estate agent. I bring my experience with the youth to the council and my business experience, my knowledge of real estate transactions. I think that’s helpful to our government. I bring a very strong work ethic. I’m a man who has three jobs, and I don’t mind working hard and I like to try and get other folks to do the same. By that, I mean our town staff. I think our town staff has begun to work harder on a lot of things, but I would temper that statement with I think there’s more work to be done.

Rhonda Hodge of Pulaski asks: “What will you do to help the economy in Pulaski and bring in more tourism and business?”

JB: I think that the most important thing to helping our economy is continuing the clean-up efforts in our community. It makes it a lot easier for someone to want to invest in a community when they feel like people take care of their properties. I know I personally would feel a lot more comfortable investing my money somewhere where things look better than compared to somewhere where they don’t. Until we get Pulaski really cleaned up, we’re going to continue to struggle recruiting people to come here. That’s one thing, and to continue to try and push for a more educated workforce, trying to recruit businesses. We need to step up our recruitment efforts — that’s one thing we haven’t done a real good job with. Aric Bopp with New River Valley Economic Development Alliance has done a lot, but I’d like to see us, the town, do a lot more with recruiting people to come here and give us a look. I’m not going to sit here and try to convince anyone that tourism is going to save our town, but its certainly one of the things that we should be doing. It represents one piece of the puzzle. I think that we still need as many good-paying manufacturing jobs that we can get, and I’d like to see us also tapping into more of the hi-tech jobs. The nanotechnology that we’ve been securing in the town, could be a good shot in the arm of our economy.

What do you see your role as council member being, asks town resident Jennifer White.

JB: I think the council’s role is to provide leadership and vision and direction for the town staff. We should be looked at as these visionaries, the ones setting the tone for what we want Pulaski to be 20 years from now and 10 years from now. I should be the one that sits around and pictures the way things should be in the future. I’m also the one who should ask the hard questions of our staff, [like] are these the things that we really should be doing, should we do this differently? I feel my role is to scrutinize, not in a negative way, but to scrutinize the performance of the town staff. Are we getting as much efficiency out of folks as we should? Are we being as efficient as we should be? Not to say we have bad people in our town staff, we may just need to rework the system. We should be negotiators among ourselves as council members, in my opinion. We need to try to work from a platform of consensus, express our opinions but try to build consensus and move forward with consensus. Our council and our town gets nowhere if you have six different council members deciding an issue, sticking to their agreement if its in disagreement with someone and failing to budge on an issue. To our credit, the current council has always been able to do that. We’ve talked about things, we’ve agreed or disagreed, but we’ve always managed to move on. Previous Pulaski town councils have not been like that, and results have not been pretty when you have a gridlocked town government. I’m very proud of the guys I serve with on that particular issue.

Kathy Denny of Pulaski wants to know: How do you plan to work with nonprofits to combat the drug and alcohol problem in the community?

JB: You’re asking me a question here that that’s not exactly how I would deal with it, through the work with nonprofits. Certainly all those folks have their role in it, but I feel like as a government official I think we need to try to reach out to our youth through our programming and planning, our youth activities programs and through education. We’ve got a couple things that I think are steps in the right direction. We currently have town police officers getting paid to attend P.E. classes at Pulaski Middle School on a weekly basis. They get to know kids, have a positive interaction with them, and I think that helps out here on the street. I don’t know if that’s a research-based result, but I venture to say that I’m sure it has to have a positive impact on that sort of thing. We need to provide as much as we can for the youth of our community and try to work on the supply end of the problem. I feel that a lot of the drug problem, or perceived drug problem, is the fact that it’s so publicized about Pulaski. Other communities have the same issues that we have, but we seem to have gotten a lot more attention than other places have. I feel like we do have a problem, but I don’t think the problem is that much larger than it is elsewhere in the country. But I do understand. I do think we have a problem. “Our entire country has a problem” would be the best way to say it.