Morgan Paul Welker

• Running for: Town council
• Age: 24
• Occupation: Electrical engineer with Motion Control Systems
• Community Roots: Born in eastern North Carolina. Lived in Danville, Blacksburg and Christiansburg before settling in Pulaski in 2004
• Affiliations: Member of Citizens for the Betterment of Pulaski and the Virginia Tech Amateur Radio Association
• Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech in 2004

Election index

• Other candidates in the NRV answer your questions

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

Morgan Welker: I think people should vote for me because I have a young perspective and an engineering background so I’m good at problem solving and can come up with creative solutions to some of the town’s problems. I’m also enthusiastic about politics and doing what I can to help.

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

MW: I would like the town to encourage businesses that will attract young people, young families, recent college graduates since we’ve got two universities and also two community colleges nearby so we can keep some of the young people interested in staying in our areas and locating to Pulaski. I think that’s going to do a lot for our economy. We also need to attract more high-tech industries, such as nanotechnology, and we should try to, with all the work going on downtown in the Main Street area, we should look at doing something to improve the traffic flow so that people are brought into downtown directly, especially with the theater coming in, because the traffic pattern does not direct people into the downtown and it’s hard to find some of these important locations.

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

MW: My role on council is to make the decisions that will allow our town to head in the right direction and make important choices that will hopefully contribute to the growth of Pulaski. But … we don’t want it to grow too much. We want to try to find a good balance.

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?

MW: Well I think we can encourage them and we also need to in particular the GED classes, maybe there’s something the town can do to promote those because a lot of the drug and alcohol problems probably go hand in hand with joblessness and things like that. So I think if we can do work to stimulate the local economy and try to improve the literacy and education that’s going to do more to help with that.