Unabridged Beth Ann Rosica Interview

This article is part of an ongoing series of interviews with West Chester mayoral candidates.

What made you pursue a life in politics?

I wouldn’t say that I’m actually pursuing a life in politics. I have lived in West Chester for 19 years. I’m an Alumni class of ‘91 from West Chester. I feel passionately about our town and our community, and I thought that it would be great to run for mayor to try to make a difference in our community. I became active in politics, I wouldn’t say I was ever really active in politics, but I became active over the last two years really trying to advocate for students to get our schools reopened, so that really got me interested in politics. I decided that I would run for mayor because I feel passionate about West Chester.

What were you doing prior to entering the mayoral race?

I have spent my career working in the health and human services field. I worked for an agency for 26 years advocating for marginalized, underserved and disadvantaged kids all over the country. I left there about four years ago and I started my own consulting business, that’s just my name Beth Ann Rosica LLC, and I work with human service programs all over the country helping them to identify evidence based programs that they could implement to help better serve the kids that they work with. I also help them in terms of reorganization, fiscal responsibility, being more profitable, and being better to better serve the kids and the families that they represent.

Educational Background?

I have a Bachelor’s Degree from West Chester University in English Literature, and I have a PhD in Educational Leadership from Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan.

The University of West Chester is a very big economic driver in the area. How would you want relations to progress between the borough and the university and its students? 

Well this is actually one of the things that I’m really passionate about and I have spent a couple of weekends walking around and talking to college students. So Labor Day weekend I went around and talked to some of the kids. I was here at homecoming last weekend talking with kids, really trying to get their perspective about how they feel about the relationships that they have in the community, and also talking with the residents, particularly those that live in the area where the off-campus student housing is. I have heard that there are challenges and issues between some of the residents and some of our particularly off-campus housing students. So I really wanted to drill down and figure out really what those issues are and what we can do to improve that. It’s interesting because I spoke with the council person Mike Stefano, who represents the ward where the college students live, and there’s a lot of different opinions and a lot of different issues about what goes on. From my perspective, I think that we really just need to open up the lines of communication between the university and the Burough. I know that there is going to be, voted on this month, a sub-committee to focus solely on the relationships between the university and the burough, because I don’t think they’ve always been stellar in terms of communication. So I think that that’s a good first step, but I have a lot of ideas about what we could do to help improve that. Because, from my perspective, we absolutely need our college and our college students. They are, as you said, a vital part of our economy and without the students, the town will suffer. We will not be able to support the businesses we have, let alone try to bring in new businesses. And I think that it’s great to have a university as the hub of our town; it brings so much in terms of the arts and the community and it’s a great opportunity. I have kids; we come and watch the football games, we come and watch the basketball games, they go to camp, they do the summer basketball camp and I think it’s a great way to expose kids in particular to college. So that, when they get to be of age to go to college, they have some experience with what a college campus is like. I love the fact that this is a college town. I think that there has to be good communication between the University, the students and the residents. Because, from a residents perspective, I get it. I’m older, I get up early in the morning. So if somebody’s playing music at one in the morning and keeping me awake, I could appreciate that that would be annoying for me. But at the same time, I also understand that the students are here to have fun in addition to getting an education. And you should be able to have a party, you should be able to get together with friends and not always have the police called on you. So I think that there really has to be a balance. And the kids that I talk to, the students that I talk to in the off-campus housing, I would say, without question, they all want to be good neighbors. Nobody said without question, ‘I don’t care what the residents think.’ They all expressed to me that if somebody asks them to turn down music, they would absolutely turn down music. They want to keep things clean and try to pay attention.

Now, I’m sure that there are a handful of kids that maybe aren’t always respectful. But by and large, all the kids that I’ve talked to have talked about wanting to be really good neighbors. So I think that it’s a matter of building those relationships between the residence and the students, so that, if there is a problem, it’s always better to talk to somebody first. Where I live, I’m not in college housing. If one of my neighbors or somebody was being overly loud and it was annoying me, my first move wouldn’t be to call the police. It would be to go and talk to them and say, ‘Hey listen, can you keep it down? I’m trying to get some sleep,’ and what I’ve learned from the police department is that a lot of the complaints that come in about the college students come in as anonymous calls. And the people aren’t actually talking to the kids and asking them to turn down their music first. So I think the first thing that I would look at doing, an idea I have on my website, is at the start of the school year doing some block parties. So that, on the blocks where we have college off-campus housing, we close down the street for two hours, we bring out the residents and the college students and we have dialogue and discussion about ‘what does it mean to be a good neighbor? ‘What are your expectations? What are my expectations?’ I don’t believe that we have to legislate how people behave. I believe that most people, given the right circumstances and the right encouragement, will choose to do the right thing. And I think that if the kids and residents get to know each other, let’s say somebody has a baby, so one of the family says, ‘You know what, we just had a baby, we’re trying to get this baby to sleep, if we ask you to turn things down, will you turn things down?’ I believe, based on the kids that I’ve talked to, that by and large most of the kids that I’ve talked to would be responsive and work with them on that. So that’s one of my ideas, to do these block parties at the beginning of the year. I also think that it’s a matter of working with the University to figure out ways that we can set expectations at the beginning of the school year around what’s reasonable and what’s not reasonable. If Friday night at 9 o ‘clock you want to have a party and you live on High Street, you should be able to do that. Now, if it’s Monday night and It’s two in the morning, then that’s a little bit different of a situation. So I think setting those expectations when the kids come back and move in is really important, and I think that there’s some work that we could do to improve that situation. 

Moving on to budgeting, There are a couple of preliminary budgets that were put out at the beginning of the year, both of which are predicting a 1 to 2 million dollar deficit in the West Chester General Fund for 2021. This degree of loss is expected to quintuple in the next five years. Based on your personal analysis, how do you intend to approach this situation?

Well the mayor does not have overall responsibility over the budget. However, I believe that the mayor can influence and affect positive change in terms of the budget. Especially in terms of supporting or not supporting where particular borough council members are coming from with what they want to do with the budget. So you are absolutely correct, in 2018 there was a Pell report that was completed that basically predicted that by 2022 the borough would be broke, and there are a lot of reasons for that. One of them is that there is a lot of non-profit property, including the university here, that doesn’t pay taxes to the borough. So while the taxes have gone up last year, they are proposed to go up again this year, there’s still not enough money to cover everything that we need to do. So I do think that there needs to be some more conversation with the university about how the university can partner with the borough to be able to provide the services that need to be provided in a particular way to support the university. And that is one of the things that I think that the new committee will have an opportunity to do to have a voice at the table with university officials, to work through how we can do that. In terms of the overall budget, the biggest expense is the police department, that’s the biggest expense. The borough has a lot of capital projects that they would like to do, but realistically they are not going to be able to do most of them, like putting in new picnic tables at the parks, which is a great idea, but right now based on the current funding system there’s not a way to do that. One of the things that I have experience in with my consulting business is identifying and applying for grants through the government or private industries to bring in additional dollars. So I would really like to look at what grant opportunities are out there, so if we want to do a beautification project, we may be able to get a one-time grant to be able to do things like that. I also would like us to look at community service, community members to help provide some of the things that we like to do. For example, most of the fall activities that the borough has have been cancelled this year, like the Halloween parade and the Christmas parade, are not happening in-part due to funding issues and in-part due to not knowing where things would be months ago in terms of right now. But the Halloween parade, they’ve had to cut back on parks and rec. We used to have a more robust parks and recreation department, right now we have one person who’s in charge. And so it’s kind of like, ‘Well, maybe that one person can’t manage putting the entire parade together. But I could see us putting out a call for volunteers and there are community people who are really interested in bringing back the parade who’s interested in helping us put the parade together. I think that that would be another great way to partner with the university. I’m sure that there are students who would be interested in doing community service, the sororities or fraternities, that could help assist with the execution of those kinds of activities. 

Your campaign website you mention wanting to create an environment that would encourage businesses to come to the borough. Can you describe some of the actions you would take to help promote that environment?

I think that being pro-business means trying to make it easier for businesses to operate, and I’ll give you an example. I was talking with one of the art galleries in town and the owner was sharing with me that he used to have a jazz band come out on Friday night from 5-7 to play right outside of his gallery, and that attracted people. People like to come and listen, walk through his gallery, the gelato place next door, people would sit outside and eat gelato and enjoy the music. And then all of the sudden the borough said, ‘You have to have a permit to be able to have this play for two hours.’ I think we need to look at some of our policies and some of our practices to make it easier for businesses to be able to conduct business in the way that they want to. You’ll see that my campaign theme is “Liberty over Bureaucracy.” I think that we have a lot of bureaucratic mechanisms in place that make it difficult for businesses to conduct their business. I talked to another business owner who said that he had a sign made for his business and it was, like, an inch too big according to the statute and he had to pay all this money to have it redone. I recognize that we need certain rules and regulations in terms of safety, but I also think that sometimes we go too far with mandating actions that make it difficult for our businesses to operate. So I am about supporting our businesses to be able to operate in the way that they see fit based on their employees, customers, and bottom line. And I think that that has to all be taken into consideration.

On your campaign website you also accuse current leadership of “fiscal irresponsibility”, would you care to delve into what this entails?

So the borough has been broke, and like in my house, we have a budget and we have to live within that budget. If I can afford to pay my mortgage, then I can afford to redo my kitchen. I have to take care of the basic bills before I can go into the pet projects, or the things that I’m interested in doing. So for example one of the things that I would say is that we’ve put some money into analyzing the railroad to see if the railroad is viable, and I don’t think that the borough has the money to invest to take a look at whether that’s a good idea or not. Those kinds of pet projects are great if we have the money. But if not, then those are things we are not in position to be able to do.

In that case what would you define as the three basic needs for the borough?

Well the biggest expense for the borough is the police department. We have to look at having a police department that can service the needs of the community and respond when we have crisis situations, so that’s to me number one is public safety. We have to have an infrastructure that supports the running of the business. The borough is a business, we have a borough manager, we have HR people, we have fiscal people. So we have to have that infrastructure to support the dealings of the borough. So those are the top two most important things that the borough has to be able to do to conduct business, and then I think everything else would be really nice to have. One of the reasons that I love living in West Chester — my husband and I moved here 19 years ago — is we love the borough and we love all the activities and what they have to offer, but it’s a matter of prioritizing what we have to do and what we want to do. And if we don’t have the money to do the things we want to do, as I said, how do we either recruit volunteers or find other sources of revenue to be able to do all of those things. And you know maybe it’s fundraising, maybe it’s, ‘If everyone wants the Christmas parade to come back and we don’t have the money to support it, or we don’t have sponsors to do it,’ then let’s do some sort of fundraising to see if we can raise the money to make that happen. There are things that are great to have, and I don’t diminish that, but we are running a business, the borough is a business, and it has to be fiscally responsible and we have to do the right thing.

So West Chester is often a home for civil protest among any number of causes, particularly the police department in the past year, does this especially strong, usually student originated demonstration affect how you would intend to administrate the borough?

One of the things that I am most passionate about, in addition to the college students, and it’s related to the police, is improving the relationship between the police and the local community. So one of the programs that I’ve worked with nationwide across the country is this Youth and Police Initiative. So this is a program that brings together police officers with at-risk kids and it has also been used with college students, to do a five-day, two-hour a day, program where the police officers and the kids or college students, engage in role playing activities and exercises that they begin to explore each others implicit biases, because we all have implicit bias. And by the end of the five days, both groups, the police officers and kids, have a very different perspective of what the other person does and where they are coming from, and what the program has been shown to do is that it improves relationships dramatically between the kids and the police officers, and then overall with the community. So particularly with our at-risk kids, they go home and tell their parents, ‘I just spent a couple of days with this police officer, and he or she is not a bad guy, this is an okay person.’ So when the parents start to hear that, things start to change in the community, because residents don’t see the police as the enemy and the police start to see the kids and families in the perspective of where they are coming from, where they live and the challenges they are dealing with everyday. So I really am passionate about bringing this program to the borough, because I think that it could address so many of the issues that you are talking about.

I understand that many people have a different experience than the police than what I have. I am a white woman, I have two white boy children, and I get it that for my friends that are African American, they have to have different conversations with their kids than what I have to have with my kids. So I tell my kids, ‘You can put on a hooded sweatshirt and run through a town and probably nobody is going to think or say anything about that. But your friends, who are African American, they might not have that same experience and you have to be cognizant of that. That’s the awareness that we have to raise. I think that I’ve met a lot of our police officers and I think that they are good people with good intentions who are here to serve and protect our community. Do I think that they could do a better job of being more cognizant of the families and communities that they’re serving? Absolutely. I know that the borough invested some money in a diversity task force to try and recruit more minority officers. And while I think that that’s a noble goal, to try and bring in more officers that reflect the racial balance of our community, it’s really hard. First of all there’s a nationwide police shortage, given the current environment very few people want to become police officers, let alone minorities. A lot of people don’t want to go into policing. So it’s hard to recruit people of color that want to come into police. So what we need to do is to bring a program like this to town where we can improve those relationships between police officers that we have, and the community at large.

Any Closing statements?

So one of the initiatives in my brochure is to try and get the vote out from the college students, even if they don’t live here full-time. They live here enough of the time that they should be actively involved in what the politics are in the borough. In order to vote in the Nov. 2 election, everyone needs to be registered by Oct. 18. Whether you live in a dorm, or whether you live in an apartment, anyone here is eligible to be able to register to vote. And I really encourage students to get out, register and do their homework. There are three candidates. Look into who they think will best represent their views. There’s going to be a debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters on Oct. 18. Get out and vote on election day. The decisions of the borough impact the students. So you guys should all be involved in electing the next mayor.

For an interview with Lillian DeBaptiste click here.