By David Tyler
Manlius Councilor Heather Waters, a Democrat, has officially put her hat in the ring to be the next county legislator representing the Manlius area the Onondaga County Legislature.
Her announcement comes a week after Legislator Kevin Holmquist announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection next November, and Fayetteville Mayor Mark Olson said he would vie for the Republican nomination for the post.
“I had been thinking about it for some time,” Waters said, adding that she felt a greater urgency to run following the county legislature’s decision earlier this year not to support the fair maps initiative in redistricting.
“We have right now a dynamic where County Executive McMahon really has the full support of the [legislature’s majority] at all times and the minority does not get to impact the conversation as easily as they really should have the right to,” Waters said.
Onondaga County has some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, and Waters said tackling systemic poverty should be at the top of the legislature’s list of priorities.
“This is not just a moral mandate,” she said. “It’s also what we need to do to look at our economic health.”
A lot of the county’s economic development focus has been on the “warehouse strategy,” she said, referencing the massive Amazon facility in the town of Clay.
“If the warehouse strategy is going to help us invigorate jobs and the economy broadly, well that’s interesting, but I don’t know that it’s the singular silver bullet,” she said.
She added that she’s very interested in encouraging the economic growth that can be created by green technologies and unmanned systems so that the Syracuse area is not so dependent on the higher education and medical industries.
Waters said the legislature also needs to improve its transparency, something she said the Manlius Town Board has been working extremely hard at over the past year.
“There’s some practical things we can do to just make sure people can access the information,” she said.
Earlier this year, Waters was the only member of the Manlius Town Board to support a zone change for the 3Gi inland port project adjacent to the CSX railyard. While acknowledging that the project had its flaws, she supported it because she believed that local government needs to get behind bold projects that can help local agricultural producers and manufacturers access global markets.
“To me this represented a new dream and a new vision that wasn’t strictly reliant on retail commercial development,” Water said. “It’s a really good idea. It’s a bold idea and we need to support ideas like that.”
Waters, who was elected to the town council in 2019, became involved in local politics in both a partisan and non-partisan way when she moved back to the area in 2013.
“I very specifically joined the League of Women Voters to do what I could to increase access to voting and register people to vote on all sides of the political spectrum,” Waters said. She also joined the Manlius Democratic Committee and worked as a volunteer on some local campaigns before making her own run for public office.
Waters said that her work on the Manlius Town Board has been very satisfying.
“You get feedback immediately from your neighbors and you’re held accountable by them,” Waters said. “That’s the way I want to live.”
In her professional career, Waters leads fund-raising for the school of education at Syracuse University. She previously worked in academic fund-raising at the University of London, the Columbia Business School and NYU Law School. Waters lives in Fayetteville with her husband Sterling and their son, Riley, a student at Fayetteville Elementary School.
