It’s not often you see local businesses in a purple town taking a stand in politics. Most entrepreneurs figure that in a city like Wilmington, there’s no point in alienating half your potential customers.
So it stood out this summer when signs for Kelly Roberts Jr. appeared in window after window along Front Street, sharing support for a political newcomer to Wilmington, and the only Republican not to receive his party’s endorsement.
Kim Parenty, manager of Outdoor Equipped, said she supports him because. "he’s a local, he lives downtown. He's passionate about our area, and he wants to make a difference.”
There’s a sign for Roberts in the shop's front window: it says, “enough is enough!”
"There's been some additional crime happening here," Parenty said. "We just want the people to feel safe, to be able to shop. And honestly, the homeless issue has become, you know, a little overwhelming lately. So I just, I feel like he understands that, and he just wants to make a difference.”
Other business owners agreed, like Brian Westly, who owns Commodore on North 4th, along with two other businesses.
He likes, "his platform on cleaning up the problems that we as business owners have been experiencing downtown, with homelessness, panhandling, the increasing crime, property damage, and it's been getting progressively worse over the last few years.”
Both Parenty and Westly pointed to panhandling as a major issue downtown that’s impacting their business. And they’re not alone: A dozen different businesses, ranging from restaurants and bars to boutiques and beauty shops, have posted signs supporting Kelly Roberts Jr. in their windows and on their doors.
Some business owners spoke off the record, but said Roberts is a downtown regular, and they supported him as a personal friend. But they all agreed that his platform appealed to their needs as small businesses.
Travis Weiss runs Fox’s Hole in the Wall, and is Westly’s business partner. The three businesses they run together also support Luke Waddell, but they’re really excited about Roberts.
"I think his attention to the downtown, to getting the vagrants cleaned up and the drug use cleaned up and the crime, because crimes gotten pretty bad over the last couple years," Weiss said. "Some people are scared to go out. They're scared to come down on Princess Street on a Saturday night at 12 because there's kids drunk laying in the middle of the street and stuff like that.”
Roberts is the only candidate getting this kind of support from downtown business — though one shop also has a sign up for Chakema Clinton-Quintana.
Why did Roberts get this kind of support, when no other candidate has? He says it’s a matter of understanding the problem.
"I've been here for five years downtown," Roberts said. It's a small community. You get to know everybody, and eventually we kind of saw things getting worse and worse, and chatter on the street was like, who's going to do something about this? Well, I raised my hand up, and people kind of supported me.”
He said he didn’t ask for these bars and restaurants to put up his signs. "Now they all call me. So the one that I just put up at Port Cheesesteak, called me. Outdoor Equipped was, was kind of special to my heart. That's all female staff, and I know for a fact they've had some instances where homeless people came in there, harassing customers, knocking over clothes, and they couldn't get the correct police help.”
So what does he plan to do about it? Roberts advocates for social workers to be the first on the scene when there’s a call about a homeless person. And he wants to institute a loitering statute, so it’s easier for police to tell someone to move along.
But he also said that downtown just needs more police presence, and that downtown businesses should have a special call line for the police. "A police car is a deterrent. And I want to be very clear, we're looking for crime prevention, not crime prosecution,” he said.
Roberts wants to increase pay for police officers to help with retention, since the department is currently very understaffed. And he’d like to put a premium on those who work downtown — extra pay to incentivize a tougher beat. That’s all a big appeal to the downtown business community: and they’ve shown overwhelming support for this outsider candidate.
