The Future of Lake City with Mayor Noah Walker

In today's episode of The Gateway Connection Podcast, Joey O'Hern is joined by Noah Walker, Mayor of Lake City. Listen in as they discuss topics that impact those who live and work in Lake City and share details about how the City of Lake City is planning for the future.

Thank you for listening today, and thank you to Security Safe for their support of the Gateway Connection Podcast! For more ways to connect with us, visit lnk.bio/gatewaychamber.

Transcript

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Laying out infrastructure where businesses want to be here, where people can move here, so that when those folks have gone to college or have gone to Florida Gateway College and they're looking for that opportunity to make money so that they can start their family, they can grow their life, that it's here and not in Jacksonville, not in Tallahassee, that they're not having to look to all these other places that they can be close to their family that raised them and start to raise their own family here. I think that's wildly important. Welcome to the Gateway Connection Podcast, where we connect you with the movers, shakers, and leaders shaping our region. I'm Joey O'Hearn, Executive Director of the Chamber, and your host. Let's get started. Welcome to the podcast, Mayor Walker. Do you want me to call you Mayor Walker? You can call me non, that's fine.

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Okay.

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So Noah, welcome to the podcast if you want to tell us your role, all you do as part of that, and we'll start from there. Yeah, so I'm Noel Walker. I'm the mayor of Lake City and the president of the North Central Florida Advertiser, which is all things visual and digital arc. And the advertiser. So you've got your hand in a few pots, a lot of free time. Yeah, a lot of fingers and a lot of different pies, a ton of free time, including, you know, because uh my other job is being dad to a toddler, which is probably the most rewarding and fun job. And when this airs, you'll still be a dad of one, but soon to be a dad of two. Yeah. That is gonna be wild. That's gonna be very wild, and I'm very excited about it, but it's gonna be wild. So, Noah, how long have you actually been mayor? Uh, I've been mayor since November 18th, 2024. And what has surprised you most about being the mayor? A lot has surprised me about being mayor. I tried to set expectations for myself going into it. One, that it would soak up a lot of time, that it would be a little bit of a beast that had run out of control for for some time. Both of those things very accurate. Right. But what has surprised me most, there are a few things, but one of them is the breadth of issues that you're called upon as the mayor or an elected official. And what I mean by that is is we have 12,500 residents in Lake City. And so I think that I've probably heard about five or six thousand different issues from people. Not that's not anywhere, but that's what it feels like. But here's the thing is every one of those residents has a different issue that they care about in town. And it's hard to anticipate all of those things, whether it's the the severity of the Gwyn Lake felon and and what our timeline is on getting that right, or whether it's the light pollution that could come off a dock that we built on uh Lake Montgomery, or it's ducks dying at the duck pond and and why that's happening. Things people don't even think about. Yeah, things that you can't even you can't even anticipate coming into it because it's not that I didn't care about them before, it's just that I wasn't exposed to those thoughts before. And so those are some of the surprises. But I think probably the hardest to deal with surprise was the some of the issues within City Hall in terms of documentation over the years and the unending issues with you know land swaps with other entities in town that the documentation went awry and everybody thought this was done, but here we are 31 years later having to go through and and check all these documents to make sure that it was done right because people over time haven't dotted their eyes and crossed their T. So that's probably been the biggest surprise is I hold myself to a high standard. I like to get things done the right way because growing up, if we didn't do it the right way, we probably ended up doing it again, again and again and again. So that has been probably the biggest surprise. For sure. Lake City is always called the gateway to Florida or Florida's gateway. How do we turn that pasture traffic into real economic growth for our community? So there's a couple different ways, right? So Gateway to Florida, because we have two interstates that run through us, we have two major railways that run through Lake City, and you know, there's about 250,000 people that travel through our city's borders every day, about 67,000 that end up saturating town that come and go. We turn that into economic growth a couple different ways. One is direct income off of that travel, right? So uh variable costs like sales taxes, gas taxes, stuff like that, to take the burden off of the people in town and put it on the people who are driving through from Michigan, from Ohio, from New York, from South Florida. Let them help us build out our infrastructure and quality of life for our families. The second thing is using that gateway moniker and in our position to attract growth. Here in the north central part of Florida and Lake City specifically, we have access to the entirety of the Southeast, all the way to basically Missouri, Virginia, South Florida, Dallas, Texas, all these places within a day's drive. Right. Right. So we are a central, we could be and should be a central hub of logistics, of business management, all these things. So laying ourselves out and projecting a future that attracts those opportunities is a great way for us to capture that economic growth. That actually leads into my next question, which is what does Lake City need to do better to attract and retain young professionals and workforce talent? I would say for young professionals, there's kind of a three-pronged approach that Lake City can and the community and the the city of Lake City can act on. The city of Lake City should work toward building a good sentiment for our youth here in town to love Lake City, love the community and want to be here. I grew up in Live Oak. I was a Latchkey kid, single mother, and I love Live Oak. And I love how I was treated in Live Oak. It's why I stayed in the area and you know, like a rattlesnake, never really went two miles from home. But they had programs for me after school, the latchkey program for me after school. The rec department was phenomenal over there. We stayed involved as kids, even with that family structure, all year long, with people who, with city officials, county officials that were that were guiding those departments and making sure that we had a safe, fun place to be and learn and grow. And I think that that's an important thing that we should and we we've kind of abandoned here in town. So one of the things that we're working on now is just restructuring and redeveloping our parks, giving a place where youth can go at the very basic level from three to 12 years old, start building memories of having fun and loving Lake City. That's quality of a life issue for those things, but more importantly for those who call Lake City home. Yeah. But that would be the very basic thing that we can do and then that we're executing on now. Other things, building opportunity. So going back to that last point, laying out infrastructure where businesses want to be here, where people can move here, so that when those folks have gone to college or have gone to Florida Gateway College and they're looking for that opportunity to make money so that they can start their family, they can grow their life, that it's here and not in Jacksonville, not in Tallahassee, that they're not having to look to all these other places that they can be close to their family that raised them and start to raise their own family here. I think that's wildly important. And then the last thing would just be having an opportunity for them to be together. Nothing attracts young professionals like young professionals. And so about a decade ago, I felt like I was one of 10 young professionals in this area. Right. And so anytime that we got together, it was a wonderful opportunity, but there was a huge feeling of isolation there as well. But what kept me in this area was organizations, and this is where the community comes into play, is organizations giving me the opportunity and asking me to get involved, like the chamber, like rotary, like all these other things, inviting me to come in, volunteer, help the community, build a sense of purpose here in this community and start working toward a better future. People started coming or just kind of attracting themselves to that environment too. And here we are. I feel like we have a not a not a full young professional population in town, but we have a more robust young professional population in town, I think, than we ever have, in my experience. Completely agree. But when you talk about young professionals, oftentimes that conversation then pivots to housing. Is there a real plan from the city or how the city can help, frankly, the local housing issue? Yeah, so that's uh that's a great question. The way that the city, in my view, should help with housing is we should provide an environment that makes it easy for housing to be built and developed, right? I don't, and this again, this is my personal view on on government. I don't think that we should take money in terms of avalorum tax or taxes from anybody and put it toward somebody else's personal expense. Right. And housing is a personal expense. But what we can do is we can incentivize builders by laying out sewer and water and making it easy for them to go vertical with homes quicker. We can also work through the permitting process, lower permits, or have pre-permitting systems in place where they can build those quicker and at an affordable rate so that they can lower their prices. We can also have pre-approved designs for housing, which these are things that we're working on now, right? So we're decreasing our lot size so that more folks can build in a smaller area. We are working on our ADU policies here in town so that folks can build on to their existing homes in town with what they call a granny suite or a graduate suite so that somebody can move home, live with a kitchen with us basically an efficiency, or a one-room, one-one on their family property and operate from there. But what we want to do is we want to give builders and companies the opportunity to build out so that those homes are available for young professionals. That seems to be going well. I think that we have about a thousand homes permitted and being executed on within a two to three mile radius of Lake City. So there's yeah, it is. So there's one that I get asked about a lot is from Southside Sports Complex. Yeah. Some of those homes, there is a small portion of those homes that are going to be conjoined townhomes, two-story townhomes. It's going to be 335 homes. And that's just one of the developments. There's a couple of developments of duplexes that are going up too, but all this is private investment, which is really the way that it should be. Again, because we should never take money from somebody to put it toward the personal expense of another, where it's not a grant process where they don't qualify, etc. The Gateway Connection podcast is presented by Security Safe. And whether it's your home or your business, protecting what matters most is a top priority. Security Safe delivers customized solutions for every situation, from smart home systems and 24-7 monitoring to commercial surveillance and access control. With mobile access and real-time alerts, you're always in control. And when you need help, you'll talk to a real person ready to support you. Security Safe. Peace of mind, day or night, home or business. Visit securitysafe.com today to schedule your free security assessment. I want to pivot just to talk about downtown as it's an important part of our identity as a community. But it seems like downtown in the last few years has had somewhat of a resurgence through various events done by the city. But what will really help downtown take off, thrive, be successful? What will help downtown take off, thrive, and be successful is good growth. Good growth and occupancy. The worst thing that could happen is for an entity to come in, an irresponsible entity to come in and really bomb downtown with homeless issues and stuff like that. So we have to work on cleaning up that that homeless issue. But also, we just passed a CRA development grant that allows businesses in downtown to fix up their properties. It's uh, I believe an 80-20 grant. So the city will put 80, you can achieve up to 80% of your cost, up to $25,000 to work on a building. So this saves a lot of small businesses, and small businesses are the backbone, not just of our community, but of the nation. Absolutely. Um, helps them control their cost and build out what they need to build out to attract customers, to build an environment that's thriving downtown. And I think that's wildly important. So the more businesses that we can have downtown, the better it'll be. We're as a city working on right now cleaning up our own properties. The net's coming down off City Hall, very excited about that. It's costing a couple hundred thousand dollars, but worth them, but it's important. Yeah, I mean, that's a beautiful old building and it's a centerpiece. So if that looks like garbage, then the rest of downtown starts to lose hope on what it looks like and what it can look like. So we need to set the standard in downtown, and that's what we're trying to do. What would you tell somebody about getting involved, getting plugged in in the city that they call home? Yeah, do it. Do it if yeah, it's it's easy. There are very easy things to do to make yourself feel good about involvement. And most of those happen behind a keyboard, and that's I would discourage that. Trashing your community or voicing an opinion that's negative about something instead of getting involved and trying to fix it is the wrong thing to do. I would encourage everyone to find something that they're passionate about and find an organization that deals with that thing, whether it's dogs, whether it's children, whether it's recreation, whether it's beautification, whether it's historic preservation, all these things. There's an opportunity for all these things. And there's uh organizations that cross a bunch of these things Rotary, the United Way. Get involved with them. They need, they need people, they need connection, they need lifeblood at these events that they put on to make a community great and and feel great. And that's what we always push. You know, I always hear, you know, how did this happen? Why did the city pass this? Like, you know, the comment is like, well, did you go to the meeting? Yeah, did you reach out to the mayor? Yeah, did you call anybody? The uh my phone, I get calls on my phone. That's another surprise that was I got a city phone and it rings a lot. But I, you know, but I enjoy it. And sometimes people say, Yeah, I'm I'm sorry that I'm calling so much. And I always tell them, Don't be sorry. It's very important that voicing, yeah, you're voicing your care about whatever this issue is. And if you didn't and nobody else cared about it, it wouldn't be brought up. And you know, 10-15 years down the line, it might progress to be a real issue for everybody else. So and I think it's worth noting that being the mayor is not your full-time job. So a lot of times you do need people to kind of bring those issues to your attention. Like you said, that you may not have new or existing. I'm not a masked Avenger that's sitting that goes out at night looking for the issues of Lake City. I prefer that they come to me via email, Facebook, or phone call or text or whatever, so that I can help triage them to the right departments and the right department heads. If we sit down again in a few years, what has to be true for you to say your time as mayor was a success? I always say that Lake City is a great place for families and businesses to grow and thrive. And I want it to be a great place for families and businesses to grow and thrive. So for me to say that Lake City is a success, I would say overall, I want to see a bunch of families, bunch of families thriving in Lake City. I want to see a bunch of businesses thriving and growing in Lake City. But I also want people to speak well about the community. I I think that over the last 20 years, 10 years at least, you know, the the sentiment of Lake City has has gone down. It's not a safe place. There's nothing to do here, there's this and that. Uh if I'm successful and the community is successful, if the community is successful, because it's not uh me lift, I've right I'd probably die of a stroke trying to lift it all by myself. But if the community is successful, then people will say, this is a great, this is a beautiful city. This is a great city. There's a lot to do in this city. I love that my kids are growing up in this city. I thrive here. I'm going to work and I love going to work in Lake City. That will be a real hallmark of success. For sure. So, last question, we ask all of our guests this question before we wrap. What is one business or leadership tip you live by or had to learn the hard way? One leadership tidbit I live by is never ask somebody to do something you're not willing to do yourself or that you haven't at least tried. So before, and this is probably a detriment to me as well, is I try to fix things before I call someone. So it leaves me covered in water a lot of times with with plumbing issues, or it leaves me frustrated as a carpenter. I know what I'm not good at, but never never ask somebody to do something that you think is below you. Don't think that you're above any action. Be willing to jump into the trenches with anyone on any task that needs doing. For sure. Well, Noah, thank you for your time. Great talk. Absolutely. Absolutely. I really enjoyed this and I appreciate the chamber. Love the chamber. I'll put a plug in for you guys. I was a board member for a long time. I think it's a very important organization and the cohesion of our community. You guys play an important role in helping businesses. And like I said, small businesses is the backbone, not just of our community, but of the nation. And if you're not involved in the chamber and using it to benefit your business, you should be. I'll take that plug. Thanks, Noah. Thank you again to Security Safe for their support of the Gateway Connection podcast. And until next time, don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share with a friend. For ways to stay connected, be sure to visit the links in the show notes, and we'll catch you here next time on the Gateway Connection Podcast.