Greene County voters will have choices on the ballot for county supervisor in the Nov. 6 general election.
Patti Naylor and Melissa Frederick were selected as candidates by unanimous votes at a special convention called by Greene County Democrats Tuesday evening. Naylor will face incumbent Republican Dawn Rudolph in District 2 (primarily the northwest quarter of the county), and Frederick will face incumbent Republican Tom Contner in District 3 (primarily the southwest quarter of the county).
Naylor grew up on her family’s farm in Guthrie County and graduated from Bayard High School in 1974. She earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics education from Iowa State University and then spent 30 years away from Iowa, working as a substitute teacher and a nutrition educator, as well as traveling and volunteering.
She returned to Iowa in 2010 and taught three years at Greene County Middle School. She farms with her husband George northeast of Churdan and substitute teaches.
“The voters do need a choice,” Naylor said. “When we don’t have a choice, we don’t get to talk about the issues,” she said during a brief pre-nomination speech. Her primary reason for running is the changes she saw in family farming when she returned to Iowa. She mentioned the decreasing number of farm families connected to the land and their animals, a decrease in rural population, and “the exploitation of industries looking to profit from these situations.”
She does not support confined animal feeding operation nor placing wind turbines on property on which the landowner does not live. “These are issues we need to talk about, but we need to talk about them carefully. We don’t want to alienate people that we want to bring together,” Naylor said.
Melissa (Bosshart) Frederick graduated from Jefferson-Scranton High School in 2009. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with a chemistry minor at the University of Iowa. She worked for Continental Manufacturing Chemists in Madrid doing quality control, and has worked almost four years in the lab at Louis Dreyfus LLC in Grand Junction.
She and her husband Bill live on the Frederick family farm in Franklin Township with their four-month-old daughter.
She said that as a nearly lifelong resident of Greene County she knows where the county has been, where it is now, “and being part of a farming family now and starting my family here I have great interest in seeing where Greene County goes in the future.”
She also said that with 50 percent of the county’s population female, and 60 percent of the workforce being female, having more than one woman on the board of supervisors would be appropriate.
She said there has been an effort to bring young families and people who will start families to the county. She said that as someone who chose to come back to the county and start her family here, “I can provide a little insight that is not currently on the board. It’s a different generation that’s currently on there. I can provide a little insight to how our generation feels and how we can merge that with keeping hometown values.”
