There are advantages and disadvantages to incumbency, and Mike Rundle is experiencing both this campaign season.

Rundle is the only sitting member of the Lawrence City Commission seeking re-election this year– he is finishing a four-year term and served from 1987 to 1991.

The two terms allow him to tout his experience on the campaign trail, and Rundle does it often.

“I want to put my eight years of experience to work for you,” he often tells audiences during candidate forums.

That experience also gives Rundle a record, one that critics and opponents are using against his re-election effort.

They point to his steady votes against tax abatement requests in recent years — especially against an 80 percent abatement for Serologicals, the biotech company that will pay employees an average $47,000 a year — as proof Rundle isn’t serious about economic development.

Rundle said he would have approved a 50 percent abatement for Serologicals. And he said he had voted for other abatements, including API Foils and Sauer-Danfoss.

But he’s skeptical that opponents really see him as antibusiness.

“There’s simply no basis for the comment that I’m business-unfriendly,” he said of his critics. “I don’t think they see that at all. Those are made-up arguments, scare tactics and distortions.”

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Long history

Rundle, 49, has been down this road before. He made his first run for the City Commission in 1987, part of a group of candidates in another divisive campaign against a proposed downtown mall that would have changed the face of the city.

It was a different campaign — Rundle didn’t spend anywhere near the $16,000 he has spent on this race — but the themes were similar. Lawrence’s growth, he has said repeatedly, must not come at the expense of the city’s neighborhoods.

But Lawrence has changed in the intervening years, he said. The City Commission and Planning Commission have increasingly departed from Horizon 2020, the city-county comprehensive guide, to approve plans that aren’t necessarily good for Lawrence.

“When I was on the commission the first time, we were able to defend our decision against a mall because we had followed our plan,” Rundle said. “I don’t know that we could do that now.”

He left the commission in 1991 but ran again in 1999 because of growing concerns.

“I’ve felt we were at a crossroads the last 10 years, where the scales would tip and we’d become another congested, polluted, uninteresting town,” Rundle said.

That hasn’t happened so far, he said. But it’s not necessarily because Rundle has been on the winning side of big issues.

On the biggest controversies of recent years — numerous abatements, rezonings for “big box” stores and getting less stringent floodplain regulations than he wanted — Rundle, along with Commissioner David Dunfield, has been on the short side of numerous 3-2 votes.

Those losses are more rare than you’d think, he said.

“We’ve had numerous 5-0 votes,” he said.

Running again

There was never much doubt that Rundle would run for re-election.

“I just see so much potential for Lawrence,” he said. “Sitting on the sidelines and watching things plod along, it’s hard to sit back.”

Rundle pledges that he’ll be a supporter of economic development — he proclaims himself a fan of Lynn Parman, the Lawrence Chamber of Commerce’s vice president of economic development — but also that he will say “no” to some projects.

“The chamber never wants to say no to anything,” he said. “The Planning Commission never wants to say no to anything.

“That’s not how you move forward in a progressive manner,” he said. “You have to have standards and stick to them.”

Like other candidates, he promises to bring the entire community into the decision-making process. There will be more consensus-building along the lines of the Horizon 2020 and ECO2 processes, he said.

“We sit down, agree to the plan, then move forward,” he said. “We have to be nimble. We can’t be nimble if we’re fighting about every single issue.”