Besa Sharrah feels that Columbus is ready for political change at the local level. With a father who once served as mayor of her home city in Albania, Sharrah says that she grew up in an environment where a call to public service was deemed important at an early age.
“I’ve always had an interest in being an advocate for the community, and I’ve always had a commitment to do something for my fellow man and woman,” she said. “I remember living in Dayton and driving through Columbus and thinking then about the American dream of being in this kind of city that offers so many opportunities for so many people. I have a deep connection with Columbus.”
To that end, this project engineer has turned her attention to Columbus City Council, and is currently running for election as a Republican candidate this November. Sharrah said that she believes that too many career politicians use City Council as a platform to get into higher offices without truly focusing on what’s most important to communities.
“I’ve seen people swear left and right that they’ll work for you, but then two months later they run for something else,” she said. “I’m not a career politician, and I’m not looking to establish a tract.”
The areas that Sharrah emphasized as most important for the future of Columbus include improved housing opportunities for homeless and low-income residents, city budget reform, and neighborhood improvements.
“We have major problems with homelessness,” she explained. “We’re running our reserves at our food banks, and we have other problems to address. Columbus has affordable housing for someone who makes 50,000 a year, but someone making minimum wage has to work 80 hours a week to afford rent. The answer can’t be to raise minimum wage. We have to create supportive housing that can come with services.”
While the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority has worked to decentralize low-income housing projects and spread lower-income residents into a wider range of neighborhoods, Sharrah says that those kinds of housing developments should largely remain clustered Downtown.
“In an ideal world, I would like the poor and the less poor to interact, though in people’s minds, someone who lives in a suburb might feel intimidated to live next to someone who was incarcerated,” she stated. “There’s a lot of that thinking. So what we’ve done is concentrate them all Downtown. We have so many empty buildings around Downtown, it make folks feel like they’re an afterthought.”
Outside of plans for additional Downtown homeless housing, Sharrah says that there should be more effort on building up other neighborhoods, with less of a focus on Downtown Columbus than the previous administration had placed.
“All of our focus has been on the Arena District and the regurgitating of young professionals, but when they have children, they leave the community,” she said. “We should advocate to provide incentives to go into a community like Franklinton. For 5,000 dollars you can have a home there that you can renovate. You can take care of your loan and you’ve made someone a homeowner — there’s a certain pride that comes with that and there’s a sense of community that gets built. That’s a big deal.”
Sharrah said that focusing on the city budget is of specific interest to her as well. She explained that she’s concerned with the way that the city of Columbus is spending money, stating that the model is unsustainable.
“I’m not a big believer in cutting anything — but we’re being frivolous with money,” she said. “We’re focusing a lot on parks and recreation, and I’m all for that, but we don’t charge anyone for services that come out of other communities. If someone comes from Dublin to use our parks and recreation here, like our tennis courts, we don’t charge folks for using our facilities. We need to take what today is an ok situation for us and make it better.”
As a foreign-born immigrant herself, Sharrah feels strongly that Columbus could improve immigrant relationships with various communities and provide more of a welcoming program that can assist newcomers with navigating all of the appropriate processes and procedures when becoming new residents.
“We’re not ready to receive the folks that we have in terms of services and orientation for legal immigrants,” she explained. “There’s nowhere to start when becoming a citizen and figuring out what kinds of benefits you get. Dayton has a model like that, but today Columbus does not have something that kind of centralized information system.”
Sharrah also says that transportation updates will be a major hurdle for Columbus to overcome when serving all types of future residents.
“My biggest dream is to see some light rail in Columbus,” she said. “We’re growing to a point where we need it. You have to keep in mind that the younger generation wants that. They’re not interested in car loans and all these things set everybody back in terms of finances. Ideally, light rail is an achievable dream. It’s something that is going to become a need in the next five years.”
Like many other City Council candidates across both political parties, Sharrah agrees that the high infant mortality rate in Columbus is unacceptable and needs addressed immediately.
“There was a task force with some recommendations that basically showed that poorer neighborhoods had a higher rate of infant mortality — but frankly, I think that study was very shallow,” she said. “We came out with some recommendations based on preterm babies being affected by smoking and drinking habits and if you’re poor with low access to healthcare. I agree with all of that, but we’re not addressing another category of folks with healthy lifestyles practiced by the mother who still end up with preterm babies with low birth weight. That’s not being addressed.”
Between now and election day on November 3rd, Sharrah said that she will continue to focus on knocking on doors throughout Columbus to listen to neighborhood concerns and to make her viewpoints known.
“I think that’s a big deal to people — they appreciate the fact that we’re willing to listen and we’re an alternative to the establishment,” she said. “Another big deal for a lot of folks is that I’m not necessarily a politician. I’m someone from the community who’s trying to make it better — a breath of fresh air.”
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