Mike Signer grew up in Arlington, but Charlottesville tugged on him from an early age. The 42-year-old Fifeville resident and father of two spent summers here as an elementary school student in the ’70s, taking enrichment courses at UVA.
“I remember vividly falling in love with the city back then,” he said in an interview with C-VILLE a few days before he formally announced his campaign for City Council February 11 with a launch event at the Downtown Transit Center that was well-attended by local Democrats.
Charlottesville became his home while he attended UVA’s School of Law, and he put down roots not long after, buying his Fifeville home while working as a legal advisor to Senator Mark Warner in 2005. He launched an unsuccessful campaign for Lieutenant Governor in 2009, but since then, his focus has been closer to home. He’s got a law practice and a family here—he and his wife Emily have 4-month-old twin boys—and he’s spent the last few years digging into local politics and civic life. He ran the Democrats’ 2013 City Council campaign, serves as the president of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association, chairs the board of the Charlottesville Emergency Food Bank and sits on the West Main Steering Committee and a police advisory committee that includes City Manager Maurice Jones and former federal prosecutor Timothy Heaphy.
A run for local office felt like a natural next step, he said.
“Charlottesville has this extraordinary diversity of communities,” said Signer. “I’d like to build bridges between as many of those communities as we can. And I want to bring professional, responsible leadership to the Council.”
As a lawyer and the chair of a nonprofit board, he said he thinks about fiduciary responsibility a lot. “It means you have an actual duty to think about the interests and the body as a whole,” he said, and right now, “I think that special or parochial interests take up a lot of the Council’s agenda.”
Signer’s campaign will focus on economic development, improving quality of life—including public education and public spaces—and public safety, and he plans to hold community conversation meetings on all three.
That last plank has absorbed a good deal of his attention recently, he said, thanks to conversations that have grown out of meetings of the advisory committee.
“We should be leading the country in restoring trust between citizens and the police, but we also need to make sure that the city is as safe as we can make it,” he said. He wants to see a greater emphasis on community policing, including a requirement that officers spend a block of time each month or quarter introducing themselves to people on their beats.
Signer also said he learned from the recent controversy over the renewal of the West Main ABC store’s lease. This winter, he championed a petition opposing the store’s continued presence, citing complaints about crime and littering, but the effort saw a backlash after other neighborhood residents claimed the issue was about gentrification.
Despite the flap, Signer said he thinks the issue ended in a win for everybody: The lease was renewed, and the ABC agreed to an increased security presence, among other “compromises,” he said.
“Almost every issue in public life has two sides,” said Signer. “I know that the way I’d want to be on City Council is listening to and hearing all sides.”
For the next few weeks, C-VILLE will sit down with the candidates who have announced their plans to run for Charlottesville City Council in November.