Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a nine-part series of stories on candidates for the Lawrence City Commission.

Michael Limburg makes his living driving a factory forklift.

You know: Up, down, up, down. Put this box on that truck and that box on this truck.

In other words, he says, it’s good training for the Lawrence City Commission. Limburg, one of nine candidates for the commission, said a career of working in a factory has taught him two qualities that the City Commission could use more of: efficiency and simplicity.

“People take some of the simplest things and make them more complex than they have to be,” said Limburg, who works at Lawrence’s Amarr Garage Door Group. “Just cut to the root of the problem and get it done.

“A lot of the things that commissioners have done in the past, it seems like they don’t really want to take responsibility. They just want to create committee after committee to look at it. Just be a little more simplistic.”

Take the library, for example. Limburg said he’s having a hard time understanding all the talk and hand-wringing over building a new $30 million downtown library, when there are so many empty buildings in town already.

“I don’t know why they keep talking about tearing it down,” Limburg said. “It is a good library. What we really need are satellite branches. Maybe put all the children’s books in the empty Carnegie building. Buy the empty Mason’s Lodge downtown, or buy the empty Food 4 Less building on South Iowa. Instead of destroying what we have, let’s figure out how to use what we’ve got.”

Real talk

Limburg said the commission could use his expertise as a blue-collar worker. Although, city commissions have spent a lot of time talking about how to attract companies that create the type of jobs that Limburg has, the commission doesn’t have much of a history of actually having those types of workers on the commission.

“I honestly don’t know if commissioners understand the viewpoint of the blue-collar working class very well,” Limburg said. “It is about doing your 40 hours a week and going home with your family or having a beer and relaxing.”

Limburg, 38, said he thought he could add a different perspective to the commission. He’s largely self-educated after graduating high school in St. Joseph, Mo. He said he’s an avid reader with topics ranging from philosophy and ethics to science fiction. His current reading includes Nietzsche and “Bubbas of the Apocalypse,” about a virus that decimates the planet except for rednecks who live in trailer parks.

“I kind of hate to admit that I’m liking that one,” Limburg said.

But then again, Limburg said he just tries to tell folks the unvarnished truth. When asked about what brought him to Lawrence, he tells people it originally was the music scene but he also liked the late-night atmosphere.

“If you ended up having a few too many and couldn’t drive, you could almost always find someone who would let you crash at their place, and they really wouldn’t even know you,” Limburg said. “I just thought it was great that people trusted you so much. I thought that was a good sign.”

That’s unusual to say during a campaign, but Limburg said he was not striving to be a perfect politician.

“I would make some mistakes as a commissioner,” Limburg said. “I know that. But I would just say ‘hey, that was a bad idea on my part. Let’s just drop it and move on.’ A lot of times, commissioners won’t let go of a bad idea. They will try to patch and repair and fix instead of just dropping it.”

The issues

Limburg said he also thinks the city government has been guilty of overreaching at times. He pointed to the smoking ban as an example of how the government has taken its role of protecting the safety of people too far.

“You are going after a small guy whose one cigarette is not going to do that much damage compared to a huge smoke-billowing factory that is putting it out 365 days per year,” Limburg said. “If you want to do something, why not go after the people who are putting chemicals in our river that we can’t eat the fish?”

On other issues, Limburg said:

¢ The city’s growth is not well-planned and often is bland.

“You have houses going all the way out to Clinton Lake now, but there is basically no retail out there,” Limburg said. “And there’s nothing out there that makes that area unique. Maybe have an old-style English neighborhood with gaslights or something. Something to make it unique.”

¢ The city may want to consider doing something to create more union jobs in the city. He said that likely would be the best way to raise wages in the community because otherwise many companies, even in the manufacturing sector, will continue to hire college students.

“The problem is that the college students already have the money,” Limburg said. “They have the grants or loans or parents. They are not that worried if they make $15 an hour or $7.99. They just want a little extra spending money.”

The primary will be Feb. 27, when voters will narrow the field from nine candidates to six candidates. Voters will elect candidates to fill three at-large seats on the five-member City Commission when they go to the polls in the general election April 3.

Other candidates in the race are James Bush, a Lawrence minister; Jake Davis, a local musician and data entry operator; Rob Chestnut, a chief financial officer for Allen Press; Mike Dever, an owner of a Lawrence-based environmental consulting firm; Sam Fields, a Lawrence bail bondsman; Commissioner Boog Highberger, an attorney for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment; Carey Maynard-Moody, a retired school social worker; and Commissioner David Schauner, general counsel of the Kansas National Education Association.