With last Tuesday being the deadline to vote, politics has taken over my school. Quite a few of my friends are working the polls, advocating for their candidate of choice and of course voting. And while the national elections are always talked about, the local elections are generally shrugged off by my generation. This shouldn’t be the case. If anything, local elections have a closer to home impact, and as citizens, we should take pride in our communities. Last year, Josh Huddlestun ran for the 2nd District City Council seat and has been serving the Hobart area since.
“I’ve always wanted to be in public service, it’s something that I knew I wanted to do, I just wasn’t quite sure how it was going to come about,” Huddlestun said.
Huddlestun was a lifetime Hobart resident, which made him familiar with the needs of the city.
“Obviously, everyone’s roads need to be paved and there are drainage issues within the city, but one of the things that I’m personally trying to help with is to revitalize our downtown and find ways that we can bring businesses downtown. Whether it be more foot traffic, food trucks; anything that goes to the revitalization of the city. We look for opportunities that way.
While in office, Huddlestun currently helps to develop plans to revive the downtown area, in hopes of bringing more visitors and residents to Hobart.
“We have a beautiful lake in downtown Hobart and if we were able to kind of make the lake more useful, the revitalization of Brickie Bowl, bringing Brickie Bowl back to life will draw people downtown and the more people we have downtown, the more amenities that they’re going to use,” Huddlestun said.
Being a millennial, Huddlestun also understands the importance of technology and the place it holds in society and especially for Hobart residents. Huddlestun hopes to bring more of this technology to the residents of Hobart.
“It’s the wave of the future and one of the things I would like to see is an application that’s city specific. An application where Hobart has an actual mobile application that gives us alerts for things like bad weather and events. Technology is definitely the wave of the future. I know that at Hobart High School, all the kids have iPads so technology is definitely a huge component moving forwards and I think it needs to be tapped into in order to grow,” Huddlestun said.
While Huddlestun is a politician and a man who loves the City of Hobart, he is also a family man and one who holds a deep love and appreciation for his biggest supporters.
“My family is a huge component of me, any success that I have; they’re a huge component of that," says Huddlestin. "They’ve been super supportive of me, and they’ve just been my backbone. That’s one thing that's obvious when you talk about Life in the Spotlight. There's a lot of the things you don’t see is when you’re at meetings and you’re not at dinner and those types of things go on without you. I think it’s very important that my family has been so supportive."