Council member Jeff Longwell touts experience in mayoral race

It’s 4:45 a.m. on a Friday, and Jeff Longwell is playing basketball with a group of guys at the Northwest YMCA.

Three days a week, 10 to 15 men gather before dawn to shoot hoops.

Sneakers squeak. Shouts echo.

Longwell, 55, jokingly describes himself as a “prolific three-point shooter.”

“I don’t think WSU is going to recruit me,” he says, worn out after the game.

The guys say that if Longwell is elected mayor, he still has to play with them.

He agrees.

Teamwork is his style, he says, and not only in basketball.

A longtime west-sider, Longwell served 12 years on the Maize school board before winning the District 5 City Council seat eight years ago.

Now he is running for mayor against retired advertising executive Sam Williams. He topped a field of 10 primary candidates to replace outgoing Mayor Carl Brewer, drawing 500 more votes than Williams.

“The work’s not done yet,” Longwell says of his campaign. “I still have a vision for Wichita.”

A large part of that vision is greater collaboration as a key to growing jobs.

He touts his experience in both the private sector and in government as the right combination. A mayor without that experience would have a steep learning curve, he says.

“I’m not sure this city has the opportunity or can afford the time to get there. We have too many issues that need to be addressed now,” he says.

“I’ve tackled a number of tough issues already and found solutions for them. At the same time, I’ve had a very successful career on the private side understanding what it takes to grow a company.”

A ‘people person’

Longwell has lived in Wichita most of his life.

At 13, he started working at his family’s service station and mechanic’s shop at Second and Athenian. By 17, he was running it.

“What gives me pride was working in that neighborhood for several years and building those relationships,” he said. “Ten years after I was out of that business, I would still get calls from former customers saying, ‘We know you’re not in the business anymore, but my car is doing this thing and we trust you and would like your opinion.’”

A West High graduate, he attended Wichita State University, taking classes off and on in general studies and political science over the years as he worked.

When he was in his early 20s, small-business owner Roger Bowles hired him to work at Thermal Trade Graphics, which created graphics and decals for businesses.

“I tell people I hired him because he had a smile on his face and he had grease underneath his fingernails. To me, that meant he had a positive attitude and he was mechanically inclined,” Bowles said.

Longwell started in the printing shop, but Bowles moved him up front to work with customers not long afterward. Eventually, he became general manager.

“His big strength is being a people person and the relationships he has built over the years. … He may not know all the answers, but he knows people that do know the answers,” Bowles said. “If he can’t intelligently find the answer, he’s going to ask somebody and get it taken care of.”

Longwell proved he was a hard worker, Bowles said, and he never shied away from fixing mistakes, traveling to customers to figure out what went wrong and making price adjustments.

“That’s what loyalty is all about,” Bowles said.

‘Nose to the ground’

Bowles encouraged Longwell to become a Maize school board member in the early 1990s. He was appointed and then elected.

During his 12 years on the board, the Maize district nearly doubled in size, Longwell said.

“We had years where our assessed valuation would grow 18, 19, 20 percent,” he said. “We were adding new teachers, new technology, increasing teacher pay. We made it a goal that to impact the classroom, we needed to hire the very best teachers and to do that we had to pay them.”

“Every year we improved on the way we built a relationship with our employees and it got better and better. My last year at Maize, we negotiated the contract with the teachers in under one hour. So we went from impasse to slowly improving the relationship. You don’t get there without building an incredible amount of trust with the folks you’re sitting at the table with.”

Longwell married his wife, Susie, 34 years ago. They have a daughter and twin sons, and one grandchild. He grew up in the non-denominational Assembly of God Church, then converted to Catholicism in the early 1990s. Susie Longwell teaches religion at their parish, St. Francis of Assisi. Longwell is also a member of the Knights of Columbus.

“Everything that you do in life affects you in some way or another and provides the foundation for who you are as a person,” he said.

Around 2010, Bowles sold Thermal Trade – which had grown from five employees to 75 – to a company in Dallas. He started a printing business that Longwell then took over.

The company, now called Ad Astra Print Resources, connects printing clients to suppliers. It does a couple of hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue and has two full-time and several part-time employees, Longwell said.

Nearly every Saturday, Longwell meets Bowles and others for breakfast at Neighbors Restaurant in Twin Lakes.

“I think that’s good because he’s keeping his nose to the ground. He’s not losing what brought him up,” Bowles said.

“If I have car trouble or something like that, it is never beyond him to come over and help fix it, even as a city councilman. To me, that’s saying quite a bit. … Of course, I loan him my rototiller, too, and he never brings it back. But that’s OK,” he jokes.

‘Rebuild that trust’

Philosophically, Longwell sees the benefits of running some things in government more like business. But that doesn’t mean government should be completely run as a business, he says.

“I think there’s certainly opportunities and components to do that but at the same time, the reality is government is designed to be somewhat cumbersome and bureaucratic. … You have to allow a representative government to get input from its citizens. You have to understand what’s most important to everyone. You have to have relationships with all of your colleagues because at the end of the day, it’s the collective moving forward to get things done.”

Longwell was the only one to vote no when the council put the 1-cent sales tax question on last fall’s ballot.

The tax proposal, rejected by 62 percent of voters, would have collected about $400 million over five years for streets, transit, long-term water supply and a jobs fund.

“I tried, obviously not convincingly enough, to change the mix of items in the sales tax,” he said. “I wish we would have had more quality of life opportunities in there and I wish it wasn’t bundled.”

“My concern is that as we move forward, we have to rebuild that trust with the community before we’re going to be able to tackle some of those issues,” he said.

“As good a job as this council has done managing the budget, there are just too many items in there that we can’t do within the confines of the budget today.”

Economic future

Longwell has put a big emphasis on collaboration with his jobs plan, which would support Wichita State’s Innovation Campus, focus more on exports and use information from the Blueprint for Regional Economic Growth, a proposal for area leaders to focus on building job “clusters” to diversify Wichita’s economy beyond aviation.

The economic future of the state is largely tied to the economic future of Wichita, he says.

“I am concerned right now with where we’re at with our state finances. … We’ve got to figure out a growth plan for not only Wichita but we recognize also that Wichita is the economic engine often for our state,” Longwell said. “But the state isn’t going to tax their way back to prosperity either. I get that.”

“I take a lot of pride in the fact that (the city has) been able to balance our budget locally and still accomplish the things we want to accomplish,” he said. “We have over $25 million in emergency reserves.”

Longwell says he has focused on three west-side issues since he joined the council: flooding, public safety and building out core infrastructure in an area that has grown rapidly in the last decade.

The city is close to “curing” west-side flooding with a series of dry detention ponds, he says. A new fire station at 21st and 135th was also built under his watch.

One of the projects he is proudest of is the work on the 13th Street bridge over I-235.

The City Council had initially decided to build a bridge at 25th Street. Longwell convinced the others to reconsider, saying the 25th Street bridge should be added someday but would not alleviate traffic congestion at Zoo Boulevard.

The city pulled out old studies, set up cameras and looked at traffic movement.

“What we found out was … if we were to build this bridge, we could eliminate almost one-third of the cars,” he said. “It took a team of folks to do that, but we were able to find a solution.”

Taking a position

In recent weeks, Williams’ campaign has questioned Longwell’s votes on projects that involve campaign contributors.

The council has seven members.

“It takes four votes to do anything and you can look at my contribution list and it’s not much different than Sam Williams’ contribution list,” Longwell said.

He rejects the idea of backroom deals at City Hall.

“I’ve never had anyone say, ‘Well, I gave you $500, I want you to do this.’ It has never happened.”

He says the council has a clear conflict-of-interest policy and members are advised by the city attorneys when they need to abstain.

“I certainly can appreciate and understand the need to not vote on items, but sometimes you just simply, as tough as it is, you have to take a position,” he said. “I don’t know any better way to explain it. It’s part of the responsibility of being elected to do a job.

“When our name gets dragged through the mud, that’s not a fun time,” Longwell says.

“But the job’s too important to simply sit on the sidelines and say, ‘We’re not going to be involved’ because we’re afraid of campaigning or what other people are saying. We truly believe in the mission and the vision for Wichita.”

Longwell said he hopes that in the next two weeks before the election, people can focus more on issues and not personalities.

“Too often campaigns seem to digress into something far removed from the issues,” he said.

“We have a plan that’s going to move our community forward. We’re going to focus on that plan.”

This story was originally published March 21, 2015 at 4:07 PM with the headline "Council member Jeff Longwell touts experience in mayoral race."