His qualifications to serve as Barstow mayor are what distinguish him from his opponents, Paul Anthony Courtney said.
“I am educated, I own and operate several businesses, I teach in the classroom and I make leadership decisions every day,” he said.
Courtney is among three challengers, including Virginia Brown and Nathaniel Pickett, seeking to displace incumbent Mayor Julie Hackbarth-MacIntyre in this year’s Barstow municipal election.
The major issues facing the city, Courtney said, are “garbage and debris in the streets, too many vacant buildings and homeless sleeping in the streets.”
To deal with those issues, Courtney said, “Citizen review groups should be formed.”
There is money in the city’s general fund to redress those issues, Courtney said. In addition, the city can acquire grants to take on those problems, he suggested.
He has previously worked in government as a law enforcement officer and has served as an elected fire board member when the Barstow Fire Protection District was independent from the city, and has other governmental appointments under his belt, Courtney said.
Courtney has lived in Barstow, “on and off my whole life,” he said. “I was born at Barstow Community Hospital on May 18, 1961.”
He attended Barstow High School and subsequently earned an associates degree in administration of justice, a bachelor of arts degree in psychology, a masters degree in business management and a doctorate in business administration and entrepreneurship from Cambridge College.
He is the chief executive officer for PACE Services Corporation, where he has been employed since 1986, and an adjunct faculty member with Barstow Community College.
Combined with his fiancée Melonie Reliford, he has three daughters and one son, as well as six grandchildren.
The political team that has formed around Courtney said it is seeking his election “to re-engage citizens in the process upon which our American representative democracy depends” and “to invigorate the political process in our city for generations to come. There should be no more not voting because you or someone else gave up. We are committed to both utilizing time-tested best practices and harnessing the energy, creativity, skills, and insight brought to bear by each individual contributor. We seek to re-imagine the political process not as a separate and distinct domain of a self-selected group of people to whom brief attention is paid every few years and who believe they are entitled to the office, but rather as an ongoing and dynamic conversation by which we individually and collectively answer the most pressing and fundamental questions about how to improve our city through new ideas and processes.
We are committed to truth, lifetime learning, and personal growth. We believe that manipulating information to achieve the desired outcome is a small and temporary victory, and instead view measurable outcomes as ‘in progress’ rather than a fixed and predetermined measure. Through this lens, we, therefore, view ‘mistakes’ as opportunities for deeper knowledge and awareness and proactively reject pigeonholing and the ‘nay-sayers’ who seek to undermine us.”
-M.G.