Editor's note: This is one in a series of profiles on candidates for Lawrence City Commission. Each day this week, the Journal-World will profile one of the six candidates in the race.
By Joel Mathis
David Dunfield, incumbent city commissioner, learned the ropes of city government through his involvement in Lawrence neighborhood associations.
jmathis@ljworld.com
To hear David Dunfield tell it, he was nearly drafted into city politics.
Dunfield, an incumbent city commissioner running for re-election, spent 13 years in Lawrence during the 1970s and '80s before embarking on a decade-long migration to New York, St. Louis, Kansas City and Japan, where his wife was researching Japanese art.
In the early 1990s, his family returned to Lawrence. Soon after, he went to a meeting of the Barker Neighborhood Assn.
"I stood up and introduced myself and said, 'I'm never moving again,'" he said. "And they immediately latched on to me as someone who might be willing to do some of the work."
A year later, he was the president of the association. Ever since, even as a city commissioner, he has been identified with neighborhood interests.
"It's always seemed to me that the way to make the most impact in the community is to start closest to home," he said. "We have more contact with our neighbors and with people whose kids go to the same school than the rest of the community, so it seems to me that politics starts in the neighborhood."
Learning the ropes
Dunfield grew up in Wyandotte County before coming to Kansas University in 1970, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in art history and a master's in architecture. Today, he is an architect with GLPM Architect Inc., 1001 N.H.
With his family's return to Lawrence, Dunfield's civic involvement began in earnest. After his stint as neighborhood association president, he went on to be the president of the Lawrence Assn. of Neighborhoods.
It was during this time that Dunfield began to get a close look at the workings of city government and its effects on everything from basic services to traffic to schools.
"That was a real education," he said.
He ran for city commission in 1999, emphasizing his opposition to development at Gaslight Village, a mobile home community where proposed stores threatened to push residents out.
"It's not that I'm anti-development. It's that I'm for development that meets our planning standards," he said at the time.
Many residents were forced out of the park, but the development so far has failed to get past the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission. Dunfield, meanwhile, has maintained his stance of trying to get the city to hew to Horizon 2020, the long-range planning guide.
"Flexibility must be a two-way street," he said in February. "Granting more development than it recommends in one place may mean granting less in another."
A focus on community
Dunfield said every city issue relates to the quality of residents' lives.
"Whether you're tackling economic issues, infrastructure issues, other issues, you're trying to achieve what's best for the general population of residents the greatest good for the greatest number of people," he said.
He said that during his term the commission has been the most "neighborhood-friendly" in recent memory, starting a housing trust fund and adopting ordinances to deal with nuisance houses and limiting unrelated occupants in single-family homes.
"I think that's a pretty significant shift in the city's activity toward neighborhoods," he said.
Dunfield said he's still concerned about the city's stormwater policies and the future of traffic, as well as economic-development policies. In the last year, he cast votes against tax abatements for American Eagle Outfitters and DST Systems.
"We're looking at some needed changes," he said, referring to a task force examining tax abatement policy. "At this point, it's an open question how those things are going to shake out."
In 1999, Dunfield captured the third city commission seat in the general election, moving up from fourth place in the primary. He faces the same task this year.
"Most people are pretty happy with the way things are going, so it's hard to develop that sense of urgency," he said.
But Dunfield believes it can happen.
"I think I represent a majority voice in the community, frankly," he said. "And if we have a substantial voter turnout in the general election, I think we'll see that."
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