EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio — Gregory Bricker was always confident in his write-in candidacy for mayor of his down-on-its-knees hometown.
“I felt pretty good halfway through the process because I was listening to what voters were looking for, which was a real change in direction, and that was evident in every conversation I had,” said Bricker, who launched his bid for mayor in late August, too late to qualify for the ballot, so he decided to run as a write-in.
His gut wasn’t wrong.
Bricker easily defeated incumbent Mayor Ryan Stovall, a Democrat, who only received 20%. A blowout win as a write-in candidate is astounding when you consider how much work it takes to get people to care enough to write you in for the job.
When Bricker looks out at this crumbling town, he envisions a trail along the waterfront with the Appalachian Mountains in the background as people rent kayaks and bicycles to add to their recreational experience.
Now Bricker hopes to bring this vision to reality, while, of course, fixing the roads, cutting the bureaucracy that has kept small businesses from opening up in town, and tackling one of the highest crime rates in America for cities its size. The problem in East Liverpool, as in most small towns in Middle America, mostly stems from methamphetamine and heroin.
So, why did voters take a chance on Bricker, and what are the lessons other communities should learn from him?
Well, it’s not that complicated. Because everything is local, politics at its best is about community, schools, how your neighbor is doing, how the churches are doing, and how well that entire combined network of tiny moving parts is functioning for the greater good.
“When we think about American democracy, the ideal remains local politics, where voters know both the candidate and the issues,” said Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University.
“Party labels still matter to some degree, but you don’t tend to see the intense partisan hatred that we see on the state and national level because it is hard to caricature your neighbor, or the person you sat next to in high school, as some evil monster,” observed Sracic.
East Liverpool was once the pottery capital of the world. “In many ways, it is a smaller version of Youngstown,” Tom Maraffa, geography professor emeritus at Youngstown State, explains. “Dependent on a single industry. And [the city] suffered decline with that industry — as evidenced in the condition of the downtown, housing abandonment, and the social ills. Unlike Youngstown, there was no ‘black Monday,’ in which hundreds of jobs were lost at once, but instead a gradual loss of jobs and income.”
Fifty years ago, East Liverpool’s population approached 25,000. Now, it barely hits 10,000.
Like Youngstown, the echoes of past wealth are visible in the size and design of buildings downtown, the size of the downtown itself, and the beautiful park on the north side of the city that was developed from land donated by a pottery magnate.
There is also a prosperous suburb, Calcutta, to the north that has become the focal point for local retail and development.
“The challenge for East Liverpool,” Maraffa says, “is how to become the best smaller version of itself and make use of its assets — which include the downtown, the Ohio River, and its proximity to Pittsburgh, particularly the area around the airport.”
Like most cities in the region, its citizens have a strong sense of community and pride in their place despite what has happened to it.
“You don’t abandon a friend or relative who is hurting. You try to get them back on their feet,” Maraffa said.
“You don’t abandon your city. You try to bring it back. Greg Bricker spoke to those aspirations in a way the incumbent didn’t,” he said of Bricker, recognizing the city reached a tipping point where the status quo of passively watching their home deteriorate was no longer acceptable.
The blight of the shuttered storefronts and abandoned homes is starting to creep up from the center of the city as you drive up Ravine Street, where Bricker and his wife Katie live; the beginning of the end is what Bricker wants to stop.
Bricker and his wife just bought his grandparents’ home and moved in a month ago. The view of the Ohio River below is like something out of a National Geographic photo shoot, with the winding Ohio Valley hundreds of feet below. Chester, West Virginia, is across the river, and Midland, Pennsylvania, is two rolling mountains due east.
“They call this the armpit,” said Bricker, half-joking, half-annoyed.
“Oh, and they call us river rats,” he says and pauses. “I’m going to do my part to change that.”
