Patch Gets To Know Marietta's Mayor Josh Schlicher

MARIETTA, OH — Josh Schlicher has been Marietta’s mayor for 15 Months. He was born here and has lived here his whole life. He graduated from Marietta High School in 1995 and went to Washington State Community College.

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Aside from being a small business owner here, he’s also been a member of the traffic commission, a city councilman, and the city council president. “I could see a lot of stuff that needed changed.” Schlicher says now he’s here, and committed 100% to the job, “I knew I’d like it, I didn’t know I’d like it this much.”

One surprise for Schlicher is the sheer amount of support he’s gotten from the community. “It’s very rewarding to sit here and hear the stories just off the street, or someone calling in, or sending emails.” He gets letters from his constituents all the time. “It might be a thank you for fixing my sidewalk or trimming my tree or returning my phone call.” The mayor says the love he gets from the community drives him to work harder for the community. “Ultimately we work for the public. So if they’re happy and we’re doing the right things, that makes coming to work all that much better.”

Schlicher doesn’t sleep as much as he used to but laughed saying that he makes it that way. “This could be a job where you come in, answer a few phone calls, go to an extended lunch, come back in the afternoon, do a few more things, and go home at three o’clock.” But he says he’s always out doing stuff in town, to the point he catches himself driving around, checking out parts of the city, and dropping in on some of his departments.

Mayor Schlicher says his first 15 months have been really good, except for Covid. “I was in for about three months, then we had a bit of a derailment.” He’d planned on hitting the ground running, until the pandemic hit. “This is something I couldn’t have planned for coming in. Just reactionary, it had to be dealt with.”

The mayor said this was regrettable because he’d planned on moving away from governing in a reactionary way. “Under the past leaderships we’ve had, the administrations, it’s been reactive. Wait until something breaks then deal with it, or wait for a complaint, then deal with it.” He says things had gotten stagnant and status quo under previous administrations and he came in gung-ho ready to crank projects out, only to come face to face with a once-in-a-century (hopefully) pandemic.

Moving forward, the mayor is working feverishly to tackle a huge list of projects. Things on that list include changing how they maintain roads (shifting towards more preventative maintenance), sidewalk work, maintaining city parking lots, tree trimming, new signs around town.

Schlicher says they started a program last year they plan on continuing this year, called all-out rollout. “That’s when I held the first staff meeting in 16-years with all the department heads.” He told everyone that they were going to get together as one big team to tackle things like roadwork and parks to get it done. “First year went good, but we’re going to improve some things this year to do it even better.”

One of the biggest projects in the works is a six-million-dollar monument at East Muskingum Park. It’s still in the planning phase. “It’s going to be over several years and we’re hoping to get the first phase started this year.”

Schlicher says there’s no shortage of projects for his office. He says there are years of catching up to do in general from previous administrations. “Whether it be someone not giving it the attention it needs, or deliberately not doing something because of money, or non-creative ways of doing something.” He says that’s been a big problem. “People just saying, ‘oh we don’t have the money, so let’s just ignore it.’ We’re changing that, so instead of ignoring it, we’re being proactive and keeping up with things.”

His priorities lie not only in city facilities and city assets, but also neighborhoods, “We got a lot of sidewalks. It doesn’t have to be a big building, it can be in someone's front yard. Between the curb and the sidewalk is usually our responsibility.” He says they want to maintain what we have as well as possible, “because if we can’t, it’s hard to go out and sell another six miles of bike trail and try to maintain that.”

Now, Schlicher says he wants to move city hall into the 21st century. “Things hadn’t really changed much around here for about 35-40 years. The last Republican mayor here was 1991.” He says he could see from the outside that the city was starting to look antiquated.

“All of our policies are 30-plus years old so we’re updating all of that.” He says the city has never had a comprehensive operations plan or safety program. Also, they’ve been long overdue for website updates. He says some of his priorities include allowing online payments for water, sewer, and permits.

Predictably, the pandemic forced the city to adopt newer technologies. “This medium (Zoom) has taken over how we do meetings now.” Schlicher says this isn’t just for meetings involving the public, “Internally with departments now we can have a Zoom meeting and we don’t have to drive all over and get everyone together. They can be at home on a vacation day and still make the meeting.”

Some municipalities didn’t fare particularly well through the pandemic, but Marietta doesn’t seem to be one of them. “We put together a contingency plan, we thought were going to have to furlough employees.” The mayor says they tightened their belts and did some budget work, “we got down to what we really needed and what we could do without.” He says they didn’t cut out things Marietta needs like concrete and asphalt, “it was primarily like if it was surplus we didn’t really need.” He says being fiscally conservative helped Marietta to the point that they had one of the best years they’ve had in a long time.

Even after the era of Covid is over, we’ll be seeing lasting effects for years. “Marietta’s proven to be very resilient, and the economy’s been very stable.” Schlicher credits this to the city’s diverse and strong tax base, “We have healthcare, education, good top ten employers. They were stable, no major layoffs.” He says only with their help and stability, was the city able to weather the storm.

But the mayor is confident that Marietta will come back stronger because of what we’ve learned this last year. He says he wants to get people into Marietta, “To spend the day, to spend the night. Whether they’re a weekend traveler or just passing through town. We want to make them feel wanted and welcomed and want them to want to come back.”

“Broadly I’d say we are working every day to deliver the best services we can with what we have to work with.” He says resources may not always be readily available, they have to balance the budget after all, “We can’t spend money we don’t have.”

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