Restaurateur Luke Marion is one of seven candidates running for four at-large city council seats in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Chef and owner of Otto's Kitchen & Comfort in the city’s downtown core, the native Pittsfielder says he’s running to speak out about the need for housing in the community. Marion says he also supports increasing the city’s investment in mental health resources and expanding de-escalation training for police officers. He may have to convince voters to look beyond his own past. As a teenager, he faced charges of possession and distribution of child pornography between 2005 and 2007 in 2008. Ahead of Pittsfield’s preliminary election on September 19th, Marion spoke about that and more with WAMC.
MARION: I was born and raised here. I grew up here, all my friends were from here, my family is from here, my family is still here. So that's really the backstory of it. I've been invested in this community since I was born, and I doubled down in 2015 when we bought the business, and here I am, still trying to move up and not only continue myself, but make the community a better place.
WAMC: Now, is this your first run for public office?
This is my first run for public office, Josh.
What compelled you to put your hat in the ring for this contest?
So, I've been meeting with people since November, just different community leaders, different committee organizations, smart people, people who know more than I do, trying to get a sense of what the city needs. Having lived here my whole life, 34 years now, I can see where things are going, I can see things happening, I can see what people need, I think, and I can talk to people about what they need. And I can talk to other people about what they think the community needs. So, I tabled it for personal reasons, kind of in the winter. And certain things came to light, and I felt this moral obligation to run to make sure that the city and the budget are appropriated as equitably as possible for everybody in town. That's very important to me, and that's really why I'm here.
So, let's get into that, these moral obligations, these things that pushed you to come forward. What are they? And when you talk about prioritizing these things that Pittsfield needs, what are some of those big topics?
Number one for me is housing. You know, a home is where a job sleeps at night. Being pro-housing is being pro-business. So, we need to make sure that the people that are here currently can afford to live here, and even have a house or an apartment to choose from. Right now, the median income for the town does not support the median rent for the town. This is a huge issue. If you work in this town, you have a job that's full time, and you can't afford to live here, it's a huge issue. People are always worried about attracting more people, I'm worried about taking care of the people that are here already, to kind of set up that foundational security that we need.
It strikes me as a downtown business owner, you also have that perspective. There's been a lot of conversation about the city's downtown, it's become sort of a political football over the last year or two. From your perspective, do you feel like the conversation around downtown matches up to the reality that you're seeing on the street? And if not, what are the disparities that you're seeing between the public conversation and the reality?
You know, Perception is everything. So, your perception is your reality, especially if you're not, if you don't live in downtown, if you don't have a business downtown, if the bulk of your time isn't spent downtown, you might not have this great view of what's actually happening. I think downtown gets a bad rap. By the numbers, statistically – this is not an opinion, it's not anecdotal, it's a fact – we're one of the safest neighborhoods in Pittsfield, downtown. And the narrative that's pushed about downtown a lot by some people is that we're not safe, that we need increased public safety downtown. Sure, there's a lot of empty storefronts, but I don't think that crime is necessarily why those storefronts are empty. So, I think we need to figure out what's making people feel unsafe downtown so they keep coming downtown. And I think we also need to educate people and reach out to people and let them know downtown is not an unsafe place to be. As far as the business owners downtown go, myself being one of them, we try to take care of our own corners, we try to take care of our own shop fronts. So, I think that's something that we need to look at too, is getting together as a community more and not relying on the city quite as much to really make downtown what we want to see.
So, you mentioned housing as being one of the major drivers for issues you wanted to address in public office. What are some of the other big driving forces behind the Luke Marion for City Council campaign?
I mean, the second thing, and it's usually the second thing that comes up when I talk to anybody about what does the city need, and especially if you're talking about downtown, is public safety. As I already said, downtown is one of the safest neighborhoods in Pittsfield. I support expanding funding for mental health services and de-escalation services for the police, especially if we can do that within the existing police budget, which I really think we can. But we need to solve the root issues rather than reacting to the problems as they arise. You know, if you go- If you have a migraine every day your life, and you just take ibuprofen, nothing changes. You're going to get a migraine every day, you're going to take ibuprofen every day. If you go to the doctor, you can find out what's giving you a migraine, and you can fix it. And I think that's the same issue that we have in the city. If we figure out – and I mean, we know – what's driving addiction, what's driving houselessness in this in the city, if we address those root problems rather than just react to it, we can really do something to fix it.
You brought up houselessness and the unhomed in our community, that's a sort of a perennial topic in Pittsfield. What are your thoughts on how the city has addressed that community to date, and what the sort of public discourse is around that community, versus what you would want to do to address it on the council?
It's really mixed. I think there's this loud, loud minority of people, as there typically is on a lot of issues, that say, the homeless don't want to be homed. You know, they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, things like this. I don't think that's the case. I think, more often than not, and I think the numbers show it, that they need a little bit of help. Housing- And I know I'm going to kind of backup over myself a lot, but it's because everything's related. Housing is a foundational human need, and we need to fill that first before we can tackle crime, before we can tackle addiction, before we can tackle these hot button issues that a lot of people in the town seem to have. So, the town's doing a great, the city's doing a great job, I think, trying to push forward affordable housing. The one that sticks out is the West Housatonic, the proposed West Housatonic location, which is transitional housing. People are only meant to be there for a year or so as I understand it. It's in my neighborhood. There was a lot of talk about that- There's not a large enough footprint for on West Housatonic Street, there's not enough parking. But these issues were dealt with. One, I think we need to lax a little bit of the rules to get people into housing. So, if we have to say we're going to build this multi-story transitional housing unit, and we're going to say, alright, well, there's only seven or nine parking spaces there, but the DPW says there's enough parking on the street, okay, that should be good enough for us. Because we should be concerned with putting people into affordable housing. So, I think that we're moving in the right direction, but we need to get there faster.
The city council- I cover it very closely. It's a sort of a- It's a fascinating thing to look at. It's a body that constantly sort of reinvents itself and constantly is sort of having its own sort of mini drama at any given time. What are your thoughts on the leadership of the council and the way it's been operating over the last few years?
So, I have a lot of faith in the city council. There's a lot of good people on the council currently that have good ideas and do great work. I think there were some roadblocks within the council itself that could be alleviated to make things work a little bit better. And you know what, not even a little bit better, a lot better. If we can go into a council meeting and we can have a discussion that is fruitful and we're all educated on what we're talking about, and we know a goal and we have a common goal, I think we can really do a lot better for the city than if there's people that just kind of want to obstruct things because there's this feeling of federal politics that has trickled down to local politics that says, everything's corrupt, we need to stop doing this, we need to stop doing that, you know, people are on the take. It's just- Those are issues in Washington DC, sure, much less so in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. So, I think we can really streamline and make better the work that the council does.
Now, this is of course, a mayoral election, so I'm interested to ask if among the slate of candidates you've chosen to endorse anybody, or if there's anyone that you feel like best represents your politics heading into September and November.
So, I will admit, I don't know a whole lot about John Krol’s platform right now. I don't know Pete Marchetti personally very well. You know, I've met him a few times and I've certainly talked with him more than a few dozen times. But he's been working in a local bank for, I think, 30 plus years now. He's been involved in city politics since the early 2000s, and he really deeply cares about the city. He loves Pittsfield. And that, to me, is so important. So, I guess that's all I'll say about that right now.
Luke, I wanted to give you the opportunity to address aspects of your past. Certainly, in the internet world we live in, if you search, Google, ‘Luke Marion,’ some things come up. I wanted to give you a little space to sort of explain and contextualize this so we can sort of address it and move forward.
Yeah, so, when I was 18, I got in trouble. It's kind of hard to put in context or explain to people who are younger than me, especially, because you know, you say – or even people who are much older than me – you say the word LimeWire to somebody, and you're going to know exactly what I'm talking about, being around my age, but a lot of people don't. So, this was a time when peer-to-peer file sharing was huge. And I had downloaded some pictures and videos that I shouldn't have downloaded off LimeWire when I was 18 years old. I was a kid, I was stupid. Find me any 18-year-old who you would call an adult. I was treated very leniently by the court, and it almost ruined my life. But I came out of that, I think, on top. I had to come back from college, drop out, come back to Pittsfield, which is really where I started my life here. So, I went from making this stupid mistake as an 18-year-old kid to bettering my community, to contributing something, to having a family here, to owning a business here. And I know that'll never be a good enough explanation for some people. And that's okay. Because it's important to note that, you know, when the state police showed up at my doorstep when I was 18 years old, having never been in trouble before, in addition to soiling myself, metaphorically, I never told a lie. I am honest to a fault. And I continue to be honest to a fault. And whether you want to agree with me on that or not on this point, I think that that is the greatest thing that I have to contribute to city politics.
So lastly, give me the nugget, the takeaway, the elevator pitch- Marion for Council, what's the core of your campaign?
So, if you look at the issues in the city and the issues that people care about especially – crime, addiction, housing, business, especially drawing business and keeping business here – they're all connected. So, we need to take care of the businesses that are here and ensure that they can expand and survive. And more importantly, we need to make sure that the people that live here, and I don't just mean the people on the West Side, in Morningside, because obviously, they need very special attention. We need to lift those communities up. But even the nurses, the engineers who can't afford to even buy a house if they work at General Dynamics and make six figures, they can't afford to buy a house here. It's important that we take care of them and make sure they can live and really thrive in our town so we can set up this foundation where we can draw in young families and more businesses, and really just make the next 10 to 20 years of the city pop.
