Zone 4 candidates outline visions for city

Springfield’s current mayor pro tem, Matthew Simpson, faces a challenger for his Zone 4 City Council seat from Bruce Adib-Yazdi. Zone 4 comprises the southeast quadrant of the city.

Simpson, who is chief research and planning officer for Ozarks Technical Community College, was appointed to council in March 2018 and then elected to fill the remainder of the term the following year. He previously served as board president of the Foundation for Springfield Public Schools.

Bruce Adib-Yazdi is an architect and vice president of development with The Vecino Group LLC. He is also a multimodal transportation advocate, having served two terms on the board of Ozark Greenways Inc.

The candidates were interviewed by both Springfield Business Journal and the Informed Voter Coalition. Portions of the IVC interviews appear in this article.

SBJ: What are barriers to business leaders selecting Springfield for expansion/relocation, and how would you as a council member attempt to overcome these barriers?
Bruce Adib-Yazdi: I have recently listened to several business leaders who have expressed this sentiment. I think part of the answer is just that: listening. We need to do a better job understanding the concerns of business. But we also need to continue to work on generating a culture of business and entrepreneurship. We have been able to foster many local entrepreneurs and businesses organically over the last several decades, but we have not identified the secret sauce. I think we have a community of collaborative spirit, in the business world as well as nonprofit and governmental. We need to find a way to bottle that up, label it and pass it on to the next generations of leaders, and the world.
Matt Simpson: We must recognize that Springfield is competing with other areas for these expansion and relocation decisions and ensure that we are not just a good choice, but the best choice. That includes working with our regional partners to address key site selection factors like workforce development capacity and shovel-ready sites. We also must be willing to use incentives strategically to promote economic growth and the creation of more well-paying jobs for residents. Success also must include reducing political uncertainty around business and building processes so that those looking to invest in alignment with our community’s vision can do so with confidence.

SBJ: The city has been criticized for red tape and delays in the development and permitting process. Would you attempt to address this, and if so, how?
Adib-Yazdi: As an architect, I have experienced the red tape and delays noted in your question. These processes are in place to help protect public safety and impact on our community. With my experience permitting projects in other cities and states, I can offer a few ideas that might streamline projects that may be smaller and already zoned for the proposed use. The land development code being adopted in a text format on March 24, 2025, will create some new challenges, as well as opportunities for new development patterns. I look forward to helping our city leadership to create a process that will guide the development of a built environment we can all be proud to pass on to generations to come. I believe I am uniquely qualified to serve in this role.
Simpson: As a council member, we can and should assist individuals who have run into barriers, but the most important thing we can do is work to ensure the processes themselves are improved. The processes our residents encounter when working with Springfield must reflect council’s vision that the city is a partner to our residents and should be providing the highest level of customer service. This vision needs to be clearly communicated with staff leadership that is empowered to aggressively work toward achieving it. We should also work with stakeholders to establish efficiency measures that can be evaluated.

IVC: Several controversial zoning issues have emerged over the past few years, including the proposed Sunshine and National development and a coffee drive-thru at Sunshine and Jefferson. What are your thoughts on developing a comprehensive corridor plan for the city?
Adib-Yazdi: So those controversial projects are either in the bounds or adjacent to my own neighborhood, so I have very personal feelings about them; however, as a potential City Council person, I have to set some of those feelings aside and just look at the facts and the situations. Backing up a little bit and taking a bigger, broader picture, I feel like the controversial nature of those situations could have been avoided. There were a couple of other projects in similar nature scenarios that I feel like if, in fact, somebody from the city or a City Council members was able to sit down with the neighborhood or neighborhood associations or neighbors, as well as the development team, and help have a productive conversation that that might have been really helpful.

Absent that, I feel like one of the things I want to accomplish in my term would be for each neighborhood – not just the residential neighborhoods but also commercial districts – to develop their own long-range strategies. I feel like the city has a beautiful long-range plan in Forward SGF, and I think that each area of town, whether it’s a neighborhood or a commercial district, ought to have a similar long-range plan, and to your point, the corridors of National and Sunshine are a specific part of our community that need their own study and long-range plans.

Simpson: I think that that’s something that we have the foundation for in our Forward SGF comprehensive plan, which really is the guiding document for land-use decisions and other decisions that we’re making for our city, and part of that calls for working on specific corridors. We have through our (American Rescue Plan Act) funds that we received from the federal government – that I chaired the committee looking at allocations for – we have allocated funding to the Planning department to conduct a corridor study along Sunshine, and there are other corridor studies and neighborhood studies that were called for by the Forward SGF plan that are also in process.

I think it’s really important when you’re thinking about land-use decisions to make sure that we have clear guidance, that we have clear plans at every level of the decision-making process to follow, because I think it’s necessary to have those to make good decisions. I think it’s also something that then helps address some of the controversy that sometimes can arise with these because these are emotional decisions for people on both sides, and you know people are understandably passionate about their positions on them, and they should be, but I think we also have to think as a city that the decisions we’re making on land use ultimately affect not just the present but the future of our city.

You can’t address our housing challenges without being able to meet the need for housing that we’re currently well short of, yet we can’t address the need for need for jobs to move out of poverty unless you have those job opportunities available, which requires us to be able to grow and attract those jobs. So, we have to keep those goals in mind; we have to have good plans, and we have to make decisions based on those plans in a way that provides fair certainty that this is what we’re looking for and these are the sorts of things that we’re going to approve, and everybody, whether it’s neighbors or people looking to develop, kind of knows the standards that we’re making those decisions based on.

IVC: What stands out as one of the most urgent red flags from the Community Focus Report that needs to be addressed?
Adib-Yazdi: Wow, one of the red flags, huh? So, there are many of them; we’ve already talked about a couple of them in this conversation. I think back to a work session I attended two years ago about this same time where an organization called Better Block Springfield put together a workshop for college students and young professionals. They were given the red flag issues in Springfield to solve. There were seven teams, and those seven teams had eight hours to prepare ideas on how to solve them.

What I took away from that was that four of the seven teams selected transit as the opportunity to solve or the problem to solve. And that gave me a big clue as to what young people living in our city – it may be young people that want to move to our city – are seeing as important, and to solve transit, it’s not a matter of just changing the bus routes or changing how we do transit. It’s a matter of there’s two components that it’s going to take. One is we have to create the demand for transit – the demand for transit along corridors, along sections of our roads that could utilize that form of transportation, but also multimodal transportation with bicycles and pedestrians, making it all available and accessible to anybody. The other part of that is we have to get to a point where people don’t see the bus or transit as just for poor people. I think if we can solve those two things, and those are going to take some time, I think that’s one of the more important things to solve because it helps attract and retain young people here in Springfield.

Simpson: The first one I would note is housing that we’ve just talked about, because I think that that is essential to many of the problems that we’re dealing with, but as we’ve already talked about that, I think that another red flag that stands out to me is continuing poverty levels. We have been able to reduce poverty in the city of Springfield over the past several years. It’s gone down from about 25% to about 20%. That’s a significant reduction; it does make a big difference for the thousands of people in that category who were able to move out of poverty, but we still have a long way to go.

As you look at other problems that we are addressing in our community, whether that’s housing, substance abuse, mental health challenges, public safety challenges, if we’re going to take an upstream solution, that I think we need to address the causes of those problems and not just the symptoms that we’re seeing, we cannot be successful unless we have an upstream solution that addresses poverty. That requires, I think, a holistic approach for us as a community to address. It does require making sure that we are partnering with community organizations to provide support for people who are facing challenges in those areas, whether it’s substance abuse or mental health or being able to access housing.

We also need to make sure that we are prioritizing our work in terms of driving economic growth to attract good jobs that pay well for individuals and make sure that they can provide a quality-of-life standard for them and their families. That’s something that I see a lot in my professional job as well; I work at Ozarks Tech, and seeing people go through those trades programs and going into a good job with benefits has a hugely transformative effect on not only them but their family and their future generations.

IVC: If Springfield received a $10 million grant to use in any way that the council wanted, what would you do with it and why?
Adib-Yazdi: $10 million. Well, $10 million sounds like a lot of money, but I don’t know how far it would go solving any one particular problem. I’d have to think about how the priorities are and look at our budget, see where it could be bolstered, look at what the issues are, probably talk to some of the constituents in Springfield, some of the leaders, some of the nonprofits, and understand where it can be best leveraged. That’s one of the things I think I would look for is ways to leverage that kind of money, not just spend it. And I really think probably looking at – potentially looking at homeless scenarios to solve some of the issues that we’re dealing with, but not to just do handouts. I’d like to see some hand-ups. And I think that would go a long way, and then finding ways to help our police officers and our police department recruit and retain more officers so that we can have a fully staffed deployment.
Simpson: My thought process because we did receive something similar in terms of the roughly $42 million we received in the federal allocation with ARPA. I think you have to start when you’re making that decision by first looking at one-time uses; they’re going to be the most impactful, because any type of one-time funding, whether it’s grants or other appropriations, if you fund ongoing expenses with that, you’re setting yourself up for failure because you don’t have the revenue in the future to maintain those. The approach we took with ARPA is gathering broad community input, so we conducted surveys to see what the public priorities were for spending that one-time money.

We worked with community organizations and community partners because with partnerships, you know, there are things that – housing for example – those organizations that are already providing transitional housing have the experience, they have the expertise and they’re able to do things better than we can do trying to start doing them ourselves as the city. They also are able to provide the feedback on where to guide that spending. We collected all that feedback; we took a look at all the projects, and then we also looked at what were the areas where we can get some external matching funds, and most all of the major projects that we allocated our ARPA money from, we got matching funds from the state or other entities, so we were able to make our money go further.

So, that would be the decision process I would go through if we got the $10 million, but just today without being able to go through that process again, I would again I think identify housing as that top priority because while we were able to make record investments with that with the ARPA, there’s certainly still room to make a lot more progress, and so looking at something like Restore SGF and the Springfield Community Land Trust, where we could turn that $10 million into permanent, affordable housing, that is something that people can buy, so we keep that home ownership dream alive, is what I would look at.