GOSHEN — After more than two decades of service to the city of Goshen, longtime Goshen City Councilman Everett Thomas will officially bid farewell to his 5th District seat at the end of this year.
Thomas, a Democrat, is concluding his 24th year of service on the council this month. He was first elected to the seat back in 1991, and went on to become one of the longest serving council members is Goshen’s history, serving six consecutive four-year terms before finally announcing his decision to retire from the council back in January of this year.
With his retirement from the council, Thomas will be replaced by fellow Democrat Adam Scharf, who successfully secured the 5th District seat in this past November’s municipal general election by defeating Republican challenger Brent Randall 1,075 votes to Randall’s 560 votes.
A Goshen resident for the past 47 years, Thomas first became interested in running for a spot on the city council after witnessing what he considered to be a general lack of understanding of the uniqueness of Goshen’s south side by the city’s leadership at the time.
“We have 90 percent of the industry/manufacturing in town, we’ve got the airport, we’ve got the hospital, we’ve got four schools including Bethany Christian, Goshen College, and then of course my favorite element is the geriatric economy with Greencroft and two other retirement communities,” Thomas said of the city’s Fifth District. “So I wanted to be able to represent the unique nature of the Fifth District that has some resources that are different than the rest of the town.”
His tenure
Looking back on his many years on the council, Thomas said he has seen all manner of controversial issues or topics come across his desk, though there are a few in particular that really rise to the forefront as some of the most memorable of his political career.
“Early on, the changing attitudes about things like quality of life issues, including things like bike paths and recycling, we had a really stiff headwind for many years, and just persisted,” Thomas said. “And I would have to say, the last mayoral election was evidence that after 20-some years of fighting those headwinds, the conventional wisdom in this town has completely shifted 180-degrees, so that we had a mayoral candidate on the Republican side who was supporting all of the kinds of things we were saying for 20 years. So that really feels good to leave office knowing that we have that kind of a consensus among both parties.”
More recently, Thomas noted that perhaps the most unpleasant experience he ever encountered on the council happened on Sept. 1, 2009, when the council held the second reading of a proposed update to the city’s Civil Rights Ordinance that would have added the words “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the city’s list of protected classes.
“Chick Lantz, the Republican sponsor of the ordinance at the time, ended up changing his vote, and we had to sit through all kinds of ugliness for six hours in the Goshen High School auditorium before that was eventually defeated,” Thomas said. “So probably that would have been the worst experience. But we also had what I would describe as some unpleasant posturing by some city council members along the way that bordered on demagoguery, and a lot of that was people fighting the vision that first Mike Puro and then Allan Kauffman had for the kind of town that we had become. And that all sort of went away in the last five or 10 years, and I would have to say that the current council is probably one of the most civil and respectful councils that we’ve had in my 24 years.”
When asked what he is most proud of when it comes to his past work on the council, Thomas pointed to his work over the years trying to take care of some of the east/west traffic circulation on the south side of city.
“My primary focus for 20 years has been traffic across the south side of town, and getting the Waterford Mills Parkway built,” Thomas said. “Knowing that that’s finally going to happen leaves me really proud.”
Thomas also pointed to his efforts over the years to make the council more accessible to city residents interested in expressing their views on city-related topics, even if the council doesn’t share those same views.
“I’ve tried really hard to do what I can to help create a culture of civility and respect, not just between each other as council members, but respect for people that come to the microphone and say things that we think maybe are ill-informed, or frankly just stupid, and to listen and acknowledge the fact that people cared enough to come and talk to us. So I’m really proud of the culture that we have at the city council.”
As for what he’s going to miss most about his time on the council, Thomas pointed first to Goshen resident and frequent city council attendee — and vocal critic — Glenn Null.
“Glenn and I are friends, and I appreciate the fact that he cares enough to come and be a self-appointed watchdog,” Thomas said of Null. “But beyond that, I think being in a place where I can help shape the direction of the city. It feels like we’ve got a good momentum in the direction we want to go, but you never know.”
Going forward
So what’s next for Thomas once he takes his final leave of the council at the end of this month?
“I’m retiring from the council, but I’m not actually retiring,” Thomas said of his future plans. “I’ll be working a couple days a week for the Greencroft Communities Foundation, which actually serves seven retirement communities in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, each of which now has a foundation. However, none of them have a foundation as robust and mature as Greencroft Goshen’s foundation. So I and my staff have a lot of work to do on each of those campuses. And then of course I plan on doing a lot of traveling. So I’ll be keeping busy.”
