Business View Magazine - May 2016 25
by traffic.
Number two was going to be risky. Paying for the plan
is always the hard part - but also the most necessary.
“I think, first and foremost, you can have public hear-
ings, and you can talk and study, but you have to be
willing to step out and take risk,” Payne says. “That’s
not something politicians are good at. But you have to
be a little bit of a risk taker. In the private sector, they
can take risks with their own money. Public officials
have to be a little careful about that because we’re not
risking our own money, we’re risking somebody else’s.
But, at times, you do have to do that.”
Payne took the first risk, himself. “When I took office,
we were in the middle of the Great Recession. And
three days after I took office, I proposed increasing our
insurance tax from four percent to eight percent to pay
for all this. And I thought that six months after I did
that, they were going to be looking in the Ohio River to
find my body.” But for Payne, personally, the risk has
apparently been worth it. “There were some people
that fussed about it, but there were a lot of people who
wanted something done. I actually intended to run for
one term,” he admits. “But when I ran for re-election, I
ran unopposed.”
Nonetheless, Payne is cognizant that that number
three must always a team effort. “As mayor, I can’t do
anything on my own,” he says. “And I can’t say enough
about my comrades. They stepped up - right in the mid-
dle of the recession. But we all agreed it was the best
time to do it because we created our own stimulus
program here; we put all these people around here to
work and all the contractors were very hungry. We got
the chamber behind us; we got the county government
