Dustin Pieper: 2025 candidate for Batavia City Council Ward 4

Bio

Office Sought: Batavia City Council Ward 4

City: Batavia

Age: 33

Occupation: Engineer

Previous offices held: Appointed 4th Ward Alderman in June 2023

What is the most serious issue your community will face in the coming years and how should the city council respond to it?

Right now, I would say the biggest problem hitting Batavians is housing affordability. We're becoming a very high demand area, but local development hasn't kept up with affordable solutions. This hurts both existing residents and potential new residents.

Fixing this is a thorny issue, as many of the problems are at the national level, especially in regards to finance, where banks only really lend to either very large developments which can be disruptive to communities, or to very suburban developments, which only creates a small number of very expensive homes that take up a large amount of our available land area and infrastructure budget.

One avenue to help alleviate these problems is to try and cultivate an incremental development community in the region. This would empower local residents to add homes and infill developments in the area, rather than rely on large outside developers to build new housing. Methods to accomplish this include the city providing a catalogue of preapproved building designs to make building new homes easier, as well as zoning reform and partnering with local organizations to provide education and resources to local citizens.

How would you describe the state of your community's finances? What should be the top priorities for spending during the next few years? Are there areas of spending that need to be curtailed?

I've been pleasantly surprised with Batavia's finances, with the city’s general fund and most of its utility funds having enough reserves to function potentially for up to half a year even if all new income is somehow unavailable.

This puts us in a strong position to respond to emergencies and other issues. The one caveat is that our electric utility fund isn’t quite as strong, which may be a concern as a lot of our electric infrastructure is reaching end of life and will need to be replaced soon.

That last point may be cause for concern in other areas as well. Batavia had a fair amount of growth about 20-30 years ago, meaning that a lot of the infrastructure put in at that time is going to need to be replaced soon.

What’s more, a lot of that growth was fairly sparse, meaning that the amount of infrastructure per new household from those developments is fairly high, which means the cost itself per household is also high. Combine this with fairly limited development since 2008, and there’s a potential need to eat into reserves as services get replaced and upgraded. The best way to combat this will be encouraging more financially productive growth going forward.

What do you see as the most important infrastructure project the community must address? Why and how should it be paid for? Conversely, during these uncertain economic times, what project(s) can be put on the back burner?

One of the biggest upcoming infrastructure projects coming up will be with the electric utility. Much of the systems are reaching end of life, and increased electrification of vehicles and appliances will likely require capacity upgrades in our distribution grid. Much of this would likely be paid for through electric rate costs, which have been held constant for nearly a decade now but which are starting to prove insufficient. Options may be available to give end-users flexibility in their electric rate, however, especially for home generation and timed equipment charging.

Other than that, improving bike and pedestrian infrastructure are important as well. Much of this can be done with the existing budget, since it’s cheaper than most people realize. By comparison, a recent project to install a single traffic light and intersection expansion cost as much as 16 years worth of our entire bike/ped upgrade budget. In a lot of ways, improving multimodal transportation is the most cost effective thing cities can do.

As for projects that can be postponed, it may be controversial, but I would probably go with the dam. It's a nice to have, but can wait.

Describe your experience working in a group setting to determine policy. What is your style in such a setting to reach an agreement and manage local government? Explain how you think that will be effective in producing effective actions and decisions with your city council.

As an engineer, I'm usually more interested in finding solutions, rather than simply winning battles. In a group setting, I like to provide data to inform decision making and suggest unique ideas where possible. Ultimately, being conciliatory to different viewpoints while staying grounded to baseline realities is the key, with the two not always aligning, but still important to balance.

What makes you the best candidate for the job?

I have had a fascination with cities going back years, even into childhood, often wasting my misspent youth playing Sim City and business management games.

In my adulthood, I took a much deeper interest in local policy, planning reform, and in simply diagnosing a lot of troubles in the modern American development pattern, as well as potential ways to fix them with a more traditional development pattern.

In addition to this, there's the incumbency advantage. Being a steward of public resources and local governance has a steep learning curve to it that can’t be easily experienced in most other arenas.

Much of my first two years on council involved simply learning the proper mechanisms of action in Batavia’s civic structure, knowing who the call about different problems or to advance certain policy proposals, and just building up the local relationships necessary to be an effective representative of the people.

Frankly, it’s been an incredible learning experience that helps to grow one’s effectiveness for the job, which I hope to capitalize even further on in a second term.

What’s one good idea you have to better the community that no one is talking about yet?

At the end of the day, a lot can be done with zoning reform and streamlining of processes surrounding zoning. Ideally, this would allow for more small-scale incremental development, rather than the massive projects that seem to be the main form of development that exists today.

Some ideas along these lines is allowing for more duplexes/triplexes (especially in our older neighborhoods), making small scale commercial allowable in more places (think cafés or corner stores), and flattening more of our zoning classifications, as we have a lot more than other cities, which can make simple developments a lot harder for ordinary citizens to create.

I’d also love to see exploration of different zoning schemes, such as form-based or transect-based zoning. Rather than split everything up by use, these tend to focus more on how buildings interact with the public realm (i.e., how they front the street, and in the case of storefronts, how people enter the building and how the frontage is configured). This can go a long way toward really impacting the feel of a city, which is a major determinator of livability.