There are many candidates running this election season, particularly for City Council seats, and the vast majority of them will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to advertise their names across websites, lawns, mailers, and posters plastered throughout the city.
That is, except for Stephen Bello, who recently announce his bid to run for the 3rd District council seat.
While he joins Martha Gibson-Flores, Jim Lewis, and Jack Rosenberg, the juncture at which Bello departs from his cohorts is the fact that he will not accept any campaign contributions nor will he even be using his own money.
“I talked to [current 3rd District Councilmember] Gary DeLong and [former 3rd District Councilmember] Frank Colonna,” Bello said, “and in two separate conversations, they both told me that to run a successful campaign in the 3rd District would cost upwards of $200,000. Two. Hundred. Thousand. I have a huge problem just tossing that money into the trash the day after voting.”
Bello, a long-time resident of the Shore, had a particular example as to why he is approaching his campaign sans dollar signs: Aroma di Roma’s owner Tim Terrell, previously ousted from his spot on the east end of the Shore, is now reopened in the former Starbucks on the west end of 2nd Street.
“He was walking me through this beautiful new place,” Bello explained. “He’s worked hard and he’s been through a lot, especially over the last year. He had to put somewhere around $40,000 of his own money to get him back up and running. And I thought, ‘How horrible does it sound for me to raise enough money to create FIVE of his stores to only throw it away?’ It just seems irresponsible to me and I don’t feel like I can go—with good conscience—to someone like him and ask him for money.”
This sentiment, one that can easily be described as both altruistic and risky, was not met with immediate praise. Bello even admitted that once he began tell his community of his intentions, he was met with most negative reactions; not in the sense of he was wrong, but in the sense that he was naive in the grand scheme of political gains.
However, this idea that one must play a game in politics is also part of Bello’s larger mantra: he feels that such game-playing, largely rooted in either self-interest or power grabs, has left our current City Council disconnected in a painfully obvious way.
“I want to try to get the City Council to work together and go in the same direction rather than run nine mini-cities within a city,” Bello said. “The current council doesn’t do much together; they’re not even friends or have coffee or hang out. There is no bond—and with the support of [5th District candidate] Carl Kemp, that’s something we’re both hoping to change.”
Despite Bello’s holistic approach to politics, the blatant reality of money—or how to avoid it more specifically—does come in: How does he plan on creating essential tools of communication that help voters get to know their candidate, such as website, meetings, and gatherings?
Bello’s response is simple: social media and the power of community. He plans on launching his Facebook page this week (not a website), using friends and clients he has sold homes to host meetings and forums (of which a handful have already opened their doors), and that all-too-human thing that is civic engagement.
“More importantly, I’m the right person for the job,” Bello said. “I’m fluent in the issues of the 3rd District. But even if I don’t win, I hope that what I’m doing is setting the stage for the person after me to do the same type of campaign… I am truly hoping this will snowball into the future, where instead of campaigns based on name memorization—because you’ve seen a sign on every front lawn—we have campaigns where people vote because they actually know the person.”