By Melinda J. Overstreet / Glasgow News 1
One thing is sure about the outcome of the Nov. 8 general election: It will bring a new Glasgow mayor. Harold Armstrong, as he committed when he ran for city government’s top seat, did not seek a second term.
Keith Rowlett, 63, and Henry Royse, 65, are vying to take over that leadership role at the first of the new year.
Each man met separately with Glasgow News 1 this week to be interviewed in person without having seen the questions in advance.
Glasgow mayoral candidate Henry Royse
Melinda J. Overstreet / Glasgow News 1
Glasgow mayoral candidate Keith Rowlett
Melinda J. Overstreet / Glasgow News 1
Helpful experiences
Rowlett and Royse were first asked to name two to three educational, work and/or life experiences that were useful in preparing them to take on this role.
Rowlett, a Baptist minister, said, “I’ve been pastoring for 26 years, come Nov. 1, dealing with people in general, and pastoring teaches you how to be a servant. And I worked at R.R. Donnelley – which ended up at the end of the day called LSC [Communications] — for 42 years. With my job, I always served the people. I was a forklift driver and material coordinator that served people. I waited on people. That was my occupation, and as material coordinator, I was over people.”
He supervised approximately 15 to 20 people in that capacity, he said.
In his years working and, later, living in the city, “I watched Glasgow rise, and I have been watching Glasgow fall.”
What he called rising was having industry booming where it wasn’t necessarily in other places, considering the size of the town.
“People from all over, surrounding counties, flocked into Glasgow for a good-paying job that was normally farmers’ kids, and since that time, we have lost a lot of our industry and people now are struggling with trying to find a good-paying job here in this area.”
Originally a Hart County resident, Rowlett said he’s lived in Glasgow since 2010.
“But by pastoring here for 26 years and working here for 42 years, I have seen a lot,” he said.
For 13 years, he and his wife, who is from Glasgow originally, owned the Annie’s Country Cooking business along Ky. 1297, but decided to close it at the beginning of 2022, and they still operate a food truck.
Rowlett also has been in several church-related leadership positions, including having a current role as second vice-moderator for the Liberty District Association of Baptist Churches, which owns the Liberty District Ralph Bunche Community Center; currently being president of the ministers’ council of that association; and being a former president of the Baptist Unified Christian Leadership Conference, which he said educated more than 860 churches throughout the commonwealth.
Royse, on the other hand, grew up in Glasgow but has a similar take on the phases the city has seen.
“I saw it done the right way. I benefited from being able to go to school in Glasgow schools, to go in a well-developed Little League program and to live in a town that took care of it’s own with opportunities. That has given me the foresight to see the kind of things that make for a good community,” he said.
Royse earned a degree in mass communications from Western Kentucky University and said he’s used that “quite a bit.”
“I came home and bought my hometown radio station in 1988. It was a dream come true,” Royse said. “It was WKAY. I changed the call letters to WCLU.”
He picked those letters to represent his children’s names.
Jumping forward a few decades, Royse began to think about a succession plan for the station, as his children have other things in mind for their futures, and he’s now into the third year of a five-year lease marketing agreement with Forever Communications that shifts ownership to them in August 2024.
“I also have been, for 24 years, on the board of directors of T.J. Samson hospital. I spent one year as interim CEO,” Royse said.
It’s the town’s largest employer, so being in charge of that for a year that was also what he described as “a very difficult time in healthcare,” gave him the chance to learn out to straighten things out that weren’t exactly going very smoothly,” he said.
“And I guess the third thing is, for 35 years, I’ve been promoting good things going on in this community,” Royse said.
That wasn’t just through his radio work, as he served with the Glasgow-Barren County Chamber of Commerce all the way up the scale, he said, including as president and ditto with the local Rotary Club, and he’s served in a variety of city and/or county appointments, including on the county’s ethics board.
“And just kind of got to see how things ought to be done and how they’re dealt with when they’re not done,” Royse said. “So those things right there have put in a really good position.”
Preparing to be mayor
With neither candidate having served even on the city council before, they were asked what specific things they’ve done to prepare for the possibility of being in the mayor’s seat.
“I have spent a lot of time listening to people. I am so encouraged by how interested the people in this town are about the future of the town,” Royse said. “They are so open about what they’ve seen that needs to happen and what they’ve seen that hasn’t happened yet, and so I have really enjoyed talking to people, learning what their concerns are, and I’ve really been amazed at how close attention people are paying to where this city has been and where it’s going. … There’s nobody giving up on Glasgow. Period.”
He said he’s been making a tremendous amount of notes about possible things to do if he’s fortunate enough to win, but he also recognizes that he’ll have to pace himself because no one can fix everything in the first 100 days. He’s also been researching the city’s relationship with the Kentucky League of Cities and the Barren River Area Development District, he said.
“If there’s an asset right there, I want to be in the best position to jump on it,” Royse said.
Rowlett ran for a city council seat two years ago, because he wanted to learn more about how the system worked, he said, but the run happened to coincide with the year the council size decreased. He said he made the cut within the top 12, but not the top nine. To prepare specifically for the possibility of becoming mayor, he’s been going to council meetings and “watching, observing, listening, asking questions,” he said.
He’s also been learning about the various positions within city government and how they relate to one another, he said.
“I feel like I’m fresh, and fresh means I really don’t have no agenda, as far as somebody talking into my ear or whatever the case may be. I just feel like I can see from a different viewpoint,” Rowlett said. “My platform is serving the people and the city. People come first, because without the people, you don’t have a city – and truly serving the people.”
Some make that latter claim, he said, but only do so as it fits into their own agenda, he believes.
Jobs
Each of the mayors of the incorporated cities plus the county judge-executive are nonvoting members of the Barren County Economic Authority by virtue of their respective offices, so whoever wins this election will be part of that team responsible for recruiting new businesses and retaining the ones already here. With that backdrop, Glasgow News 1 asked each man what he intends to do individually toward those goals.
Rowlett said he’s been thinking and praying about learning the logistics of what it takes to bring industry and businesses to a location.
“I’m not trying to be like Bowling Green. I’m not trying to be like Franklin, or other surrounding counties, but learn from them and see how we can use that platform they’ve been using to help us reach out. They have something going on that we don’t, and you can see it from the outside,” Rowlett said.
He said he’s also heard there are conferences around that state that our local officials don’t attend that would help them learn more about the process of getting businesses here.
“If you keep doing the same thing the same way, you’re going to keep getting the same results, and as it’s looking, we are getting the same results,” Rowlett said. “I’m Bible. … The Bible says iron sharpens iron. We learn one from another.”
Continuing on that vein, he added.
“When I ran for city council, this person told me that I shouldn’t mention the Bible. Well, at the city council meetings, the first thing they do is pray. Now, if the Bible’s not important, we shouldn’t be praying at the city council meetings. Amen. So I think that God is in control of everything, and I think the more we involve God in our thoughts, our planning, our lives, the better off we can become.”
Back to preparing for the office, he said he aims to visit with people in other locations to learn what they do that works, but he also wants to make sure that those already in place to work on economic development are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, “to make sure we all have the same mindset and reach for the same goal, because the only way we can actually move forward and get anything done, we have to work together.”
Royse said he’s been fortunate, through his experience with the chamber, to be familiar with the economic authority, at least in earlier iterations, and he called the economic authority that formerly used the acronym IDEA as its name “a brilliant idea,” because it provided some autonomy to those focused on recruiting industries but it also had the support of the city and county governments.
Royse said he got to be part of the team that helped bring in Akebono and what was then known then as ACK.
“I want to make sure that the City of Glasgow does its fair share economically, supportwise, and to try to make it a team element [among all the local governments plus the authority itself],” he said. “Getting people here is a really, really, really intricate operation. They don’t want to be pushed; they don’t want to be revealed. They want to come in on their own terms. You have to be careful … Every single one of those has so many challenges to making them happen.”
Redirected to the question itself, he said he wants to be very involved with the Barren County Economic Authority.
“I really, really, really feel like we need to spend more time in Frankfort, staying on top of people who are looking, and I feel like that needs to be done sometimes in a group [or] sometimes it just needs to be a couple of individuals,” Royse said, and they can find out what needs to be done to accommodate representatives of those businesses. “Sometimes, the mayor is the best salesperson that you have, even though you’re on a team of good salespeople, sometimes it’s the individual. And I’m willing to spend the time necessary to sit down and talk with potential industries. As far as the jobs go here, we need to take care of the jobs that are here. … You’ve got to make sure that the people that are here are happy and the people that are working here are happy. And I really feel like that part of that is going to be in providing a quality workforce. Sometimes I feel like that’s really going to be one of the first things we’ve got to do. To make us more attractive, we’re going to have to have a work-ready force, and that might involve, certainly the city being involved in training, the city being involved in working ahead with some of these industries: ‘If you make a commitment, we can do some things to get your employees ready for the day that you get here.’”
No. 1 priority
“My top priority is we need to learn how to work together to accomplish one goal,” Royse said. “My observation, from talking to people, is that everybody is tired of nobody getting along, and everybody is concerned that it doesn’t look like the city is working together with themselves to get things done. My goal is we sit down [and] we conduct the city’s business with respect for each other and respect for the people that put us all in office.”
To achieve that, he intends to revamp how council meetings are done, with a deadline for agendas they will stick to without topics dropped in the middle that nobody’s had time to think about, he said.
“We’ve got good, good people on the council, I just hate to see us shoot ourselves in the foot and not get anything done because we’ve got a different expectation,” Royse said. “And I think it’s realistic. I don’t think it’s automatic, but I think it’s realistic, because who doesn’t want to be a part of good things that are happening?”
Rowlett’s No. 1 priority: “Industry.”
When advised that desire was covered with the previous question, he stayed with it.
“That’s my main focus,” he said.
Rowlett said he would like to see fewer people needing to commute to jobs elsewhere.
“Growing the city, that’s what I want to accomplish,” he said.
When asked for more specifics, he said, “business and education.”
Rowlett said he had sought several years ago, when the Liberty District bought the Bunche center, to bring Campbellsville University here to provide “a broader perspective on education. They bring a different twist, with theology and all the things it brings with it. … We’re missing that.”
Compliments/critiques
Each candidate was asked to name one thing either the mayor and/or council had done that they were pleased to see handled the way it was, and one thing they should have done differently.
Rowlett said he was glad to see the council finally decide on a land deal for the justice center.
“People have been asking about that for a pretty good time,” he said. “I thought that was really unique that we finally got it through.”
On the flip side of that, with the same project, he believes the council dragged its feet too long.
“There was too much I, I, I, but yet they were saying they were doing it for the people, but it seemed like there was more concern about I than there was what was best for the city,” Rowlett said. “The whole holdup was the council members.
He said what he would have done differently is to have met with council members to see where their hearts really were on the issue. Glasgow News 1 reminded him that such meetings have to take place within the limits of the Kentucky Open Meetings Law.
Royse mentioned another issue that occupied a lot of time with the council two to three years ago.
“I was glad to see the electric plant board issue resolved. I don’t know who to give credit to for that. … We’re not airing out our dirty laundry for whatever reason that we did,” he said, and he’s hearing from other people they are glad we aren’t “blasting our weaknesses” in the meetings, which are streamed and recorded for future viewing online.
On the other side of the coin, but definitely still the same coin, Royse said, “On more than one occasion, I have seen the agenda hijacked and I have seen things that occur in a meeting that’s to be conducted with respect to the city bylaws and respect to the ordinances. I’ve seen hurdles jumped to get somewhere that we didn’t have enough exposure. … I don’t like the fact that nine really smart people who are putting the amount of time into it that they should be are being forced to make a decision about something because it came on the agenda an hour and a half before the meeting. That’s just wrong,”
One minute
To conclude, each candidate was given 60 seconds to say essentially whatever he wanted.
Royse: Glasgow is a tremendous place that so many people have grown up and enjoyed raising families in. We have met the needs for families who needed a good place to work, who needed a good income. We have met the educational needs. We have done so much right to make this a place that people look up to when it comes to a small city that’s well run. We have an obligation to try and pay that forward by making decisions that are consistent with the kind of decisions that have been made in the past that built Glasgow to the pedestal that it is on.”
Rowlett: “If I’m elected as mayor, I will try my best to work again for the city and the people to make things as best and fair across the board for everyone in need, and those not in need, that everyone will have an opportunity to work, serve, live in the city knowing that it’s a city that’s trying to move forward.”
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