The long and winding trail

For the last three months, Iolan Bruce Symes has traveled door to door across Allen County’s crowded third district, introducing himself with this simple opener: “Hello, sir/Hello, ma’am. My name is Bruce Symes and I’m letting folks know that I’m running for county commissioner.”

Since announcing his candidacy in mid-May, Symes has made a dedicated attempt to visit the home of every registered Republican and unaffiliated voter in the district. At this point, with slightly more than a week to go before the Aug. 7 primary, Symes, a Republican, has already knocked on more than 700 doors, and he’s still going.

The Register trailed the candidate on one of his canvassing jaunts earlier this month. Iola was in the midst of a heatwave at the time and the temperature that afternoon was a touch cooler than the burning center of an active volcano. But Symes never complained. In fact, despite having sweated through quite a few good shirts in his mid-summer attempts to introduce himself to the citizens of District 3, Symes seemed to acquire more energy and more enthusiasm with each resident he encountered.

Symes, who was a reporter at this paper for 23 years and has been for more than a decade now an educator and tutor at Allen Community College, faces current county commissioner John Brocker in the Republican primary. Brocker was appointed by Republican precinct members in March to fill the seat of outgoing commissioner Jim Talking-ton. The winner of the Republican primary will face Democratic candidate Steven Henderson in November’s general election.

ONE OF SYMES’S first stops on that muggy Tuesday afternoon was at a home on North Fourth Street. A silver-headed man, maybe in his early 60s, sat in a deck chair out front. The candidate approached.

“Sir, I’m Bruce Symes…”

“Ohh,” said the homeowner, a genial, instantly likable man with a high, gravelly voice and enough American flag bunting on his porch to decorate a parade float. “So, you’re out campaigning.”

Symes laughed and handed the man his card. “Yes, sir, just doing a little politickin’.”

“Well, shoot yeah,” the man said, turning the card over in his hand. “I’ve seen your signs. So, Bruce — what’s on your agenda?”

The two men fell easily into conversation. Symes is a deliberative speaker and a patient, interested listener. The pair talked taxes, economic development, schools. The man had recently retired from Gates Manufacturing after 35 years on the job. Today he works as a custodian at one of the local grade schools.

What are a commissioner’s obligations to his constituents? This was a topic of their chat, too. Symes told the man about his idea for developing a strategic plan for the county.

“If I have a plank in my platform,” Symes has said elsewhere, “this would be it.”

THE PLAN would be a sort of blueprint for county business, and would look at Allen County’s projected needs and its projected finances three, five or even 10 years down the road. The details of the strategic plan would be shared with the public. In fact — by inviting representatives from the county’s various governmental, business, and civic entities to be a part of the planning phase — the public would in this way be able to influence its content.

The idea is modeled on a similar strategic plan recently developed by Symes’s employer, Allen Community College.

“I’d like us to put some thought into how we’re going to spend this blessing we’ve received from the [Enbridge] pipeline and from the wind farm,” Symes told the man on Fourth Street. “We may be prosperous right now, but we have to make sure that the money we’re spending is a good investment.”