Even when Scott Bailey was working in Washington D.C., he lived in Lawrence.
The candidate for Lawrence City Commission spent 14 months in and 1996 commuting to the East Coast during a stint running outpatient clinics for the National Hospital Medical Center. He spent his weeks on the coast and his weekends at home.
"It's interesting," he said. "There's a lot of people who commute to the East Coast. You see the same people on the flight Sunday night."
And though Bailey had been raised in the urban environs of Pittsburgh, the experience was an eye-opener.
"It gives you an appreciation for all the great things Lawrence has," he said. "For us, going around the corner to the grocery store is a five-minute exercise. There, you've got to plan out ahead, and it's going to take some time."
Any lessons there to be learned for Lawrence?
Bailey thought for a second. "Sprawl happens," he said.
Civic Involvement: 101
Bailey came to Kansas as a high school senior in 1979. He arrived in Lawrence a year later as a Kansas University freshman. He earned undergraduate degrees in history and political science in 1987, following up with a master's of business administration in 1991. In 1985, he married Kristy Bailey, now a teacher at South Junior High.
In the late 1980s, Bailey began his civic involvement by joining the Lawrence Humane Society. He also helped with Junior Achievement and became a member of the Centennial Neighborhood Assn., through which he started working on neighborhood issues.
Scott Bailey, a Lawrence City Commission hopeful, says he is the candidate who is most 'representative' of local residents.
"At the time, it didn't look like we were making much headway on the single-family zoning issue," he said.
His activism culminated in 1999 with his appointment, by then-Mayor Erv Hodges, to the city's Traffic Safety Commission.
"Traffic's a very, very complex issue," Bailey said.
For instance, he said, few people know how traffic engineers set speed limits. Those rules usually are determined by the average speed of cars already using the streets. Reducing the limits won't necessarily change that average speed.
"Just because the sign's up doesn't mean people will go 20 miles per hour," he said. "I think the lesson you learn there is that what may seem like an obvious answer isn't always the correct one."
Grading the city
Bailey currently is employed at the Kansas Foundation for Medical Care, a not-for-profit private foundation based in Topeka. He wears two hats, one as the foundation's director of payment error prevention, the other as its director of business development.
He said his job requires comparing expectations of a project to its results something of which he said city government should do a little more so that the public and commissioners can evaluate whether ordinances, tax abatements and other policies have met their goals.
"There's a check-and-balance mechanism in there that I think would benefit us as a community to determine the true value of our decisions over time," he said.
Bailey said the city provides excellent emergency services and conducts other basic services "pretty darned well." City officials do a pretty good job of paying attention to the big picture, he said, pointing to plans to expand the Lawrence Municipal Airport to handle increased traffic for the new NASCAR track in Wyandotte County.
"The city looked out over the horizon on that one," he said.
The city has room to improve in staffing its departments, he said, as well as in soliciting citizen input on issues.
'Just a working guy'
Bailey hopes a "regular-guy" approach will appeal to voters. He said he more neatly fits the demographics of Lawrence than any other candidate. He is part of a two-income family that has no stake in development, but wants to see both businesses and neighborhoods succeed without being pitted against each other.
"I'm just a working guy who's probably more representative of the average population than anybody else who's running this year," he said.
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