12 years of Campana: Republican mayor’s tenure ends

Williamsport Mayor Gabriel J. Campana leaves office after 12 years content.
The photographs of his larger-than-life heroes – Rudy Giuliani and Sylvester Stallone — that were hanging in his office — have been removed.
Incoming Mayor-elect Derek Slaughter has chosen not to occupy the third floor, according to Janice Frank, city clerk.
A name plate with Slaughter’s name is in an office on the second floor.
“I love the great city of Williamsport,” Campana said, a phrase he coined to break the ice at special occasions.
As he spoke, janitors removed piles of his materials from the hallway outside his office.
The materials included whiteboards listing more than 160 goals and projects he tackled in a dozen years at City Hall.
Most of the projects were accomplished. Some of them were unfinished, went unfunded, or didn’t gain steam.
The finality of the transfer of responsibilities to Slaughter was resonating with Campana.
“I tried to do my best,” he said, breathing in deep.
He said he brought $600 million in commercial development over the years.
He said he saved a total of $1.2 million in salaries and benefits, had the city continued to hire a public safety director, as the previous mayor did.
“I took on criminals with various police tactics and improved life for families and children at parks and playgrounds,” he said.
As a city mayor, he acknowledged the job had highs and lows.
As an example, Campana held ribbon-cuttings for a Kohl’s, a successful downtown department store that continues to remain an anchor destination for shoppers in the city and region.
But he also stood behind yellow police tape at homicides, five of which took place in his final year in office and watched as flood waters caused damage to houses because of Grafius Run overflows.
“I wish him well,” he said, of Slaughter, who is expected to take the oath of office on Jan. 6.
“You must have a pro-business and anti-crime philosophy in order for a modern city to work,” Campana said. “You have to exude positivity.”
Parental guidance
Near Campana’s desk were pictures of his parents, the late Dr. Louis Campana, an obstetrician-gyneocologist, and Rose, his departed mother.
His eyes widened when asked about their influence.
“Oh, my father told me to always be a service to others,” he said. The elder Campana died in 1996, the year his son began to serve on City Council.
“My mother told me to never give up,” he said.
As a fifth-grade school teacher, living in the Campana estate on Louisa Street, a few blocks from what is today Stevens Primary School, Campana didn’t have far to go to get to the classroom, where he taught a self-contained class and was assigned to help first-year teachers get adjusted to academic life.
Campana said he took his parents’ advice in his political career, too, laying the groundwork for what became 24 years in local politics.
It began on council, where, he said, he gained insight on how city government worked.
Learning checks
and balances
Over those years, Campana sat across the table from Mayors Steven W. Cappelli, Mike Rafferty and Mary B. Wolf.
Campana said he used to speak on occasion to retired Mayor John Coder, a fiercely independent mayor, and the first to operate under a strong mayor-Council form of government in 1972.
He also confided in ex-mayors Stephen J. Lucasi, who oversaw a downtown that started to lose shoppers to the Lycoming Mall and big box stores from 1980 to 1988, and in Philip Preziosi, a retired city police lieutenant who remains active as a volunteer on city committees and was mayor from 1992 to 1996.
When Campana decided to run for mayor, he said, he surrounded himself with ex-politicos, local legal and business executives, including former Lycoming County Commissioner Richard Nassberg, an attorney, who had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
But Campana also brought in blue-collar workers and neighborhood volunteers from the community. Moms, grandmothers, aunts, uncles and youth. He had the support of those from all walks of life — most of them expressing their interest in safer neighborhoods and in bringing vibrancy back to the city, especially the Central Business District.
First campaign
He recalled his political platform and how it had been a year when criminals were making their mark and the downtown economy was faltering.
“Wolf was in office and had brought in a nice cinema but there was not much other energy,” he said.
In other neighborhoods, opioids such as oxycontin were being misused and addiction was increasing across the U.S.
“Williamsport was no different,” Campana said, as it was within five hours of New York, three hours from Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
To garner potential votes, Campana’s team made billboards that screamed an unusual anti-crime message — “On Day One You’re Done,” a warning to anyone selling drugs and profiting in the city from it.
The message tickled enough of the voters’ ears, and did the trick, and he defeated Wolf in the 2007 primary, but it would become an undeliverable promise.
That year, Campana said he faced a formidable opponent — former Council President Thomas P. O’Connor, who ran a write-in campaign.
He also would have to defeat biologist, William O’Connell, who had a fairly strong Democrat following.
Campana said he feared O’Connor the most.
“O’Connor’s wife, Peachy, was as popular and sweet as her name sounded,” Campana said.
The couple ran Ed’s Market on Franklin Street and it was a destination as a convenience store in the city’s East End, where people caught up on the latest news of the day, ordered hot soups, salads, sandwiches and, the most popular — hoagies or subs.
While he narrowly defeated O’Connor, in early January 2008, on the Friday before the inauguration, the city erupted in multiple incidents of gunfire, shattering the spirit that had been felt over the holiday break.
Soon, the mayor-elect would discover the ‘Day One’ campaign slogan would come back to bite him that year and in years to come.
“Seven or eight shootings took place before I took the oath of office,” Campana said.
Campana was taken aback. He quickly assembled his police administrative team and held a news conference, partly to allay fear and reassure residents he would oversee a department bent on ridding the city of thugs and drugs and in hopes criminals might see it and leave.
Looking back, Campana called it, “a Giuliani moment.”
Larger-than-life heroes
He’d met Giuliani at an event in Montoursville, after the tragic crash of TWA Flight 800, which claimed the lives of 16 high school French Club students and five of their adult chaperones in 1996 en route to Paris, France.
The former mayor of New York, who accepted the Montoursville community into his heart and prayers, and who five years later would become the nation’s mayor, guiding the largest city in the U.S. and inspiring hope with his bravery following 9-11-2001, would be one of Campana’s larger-than-life heroes.
Inauguration day was warm, with temperatures approaching 60 degrees.
It was Jan. 7, 2008, and the thermometer was supposed to be below freezing.
Instead, it was as if spring had arrived a month before Groundhog Day, he said.
“My mother, Rose, paid for a carpenter to build a platform,” he said. “We wanted to make sure people knew this was a city and I would be a different kind of action-oriented mayor,” Campana said. “It was not a township or a borough, but a city.”
Rafferty told me before my inauguration that “‘it would be alright,'” he said.
Preziosi said, “‘if it is good for the city do whatever you have to do to get it done,'” Campana said.
The administration’s accomplishments in the first term included getting a grant for purchasing a records-management computer system for police, a technology that remains used by police to this day to track and plot crimes.
It also was able to secure a police hiring grant, to cover expenses of officers in their start-up years, and a $450,000 grant for the infrastructure and surveillance cameras for use in city parks.
“I always thought that was wrong to relegate them (cameras) to parks,” Campana said. Council did that by resolution in 2010, he said.
“I wanted the cameras on streets deemed high crime by police,” he said.
Council leadership said the amount of cameras was not sufficient to put on streets. The city bought 13 in all and the infrastructure to run it. They were expensive but they could pan, tilt and zoom. Some on council also felt cameras posed a privacy concern that could end up with lawsuits against the city.
Campana said after cameras were put in the parks, he turned his attention to economic revitalization.
“We had always wanted a civic arena,” he said.
He also wanted to see expansion of the Central Business District and help businessmen such as John Albarano II, who built Basin Street Shopping Plaza, who felt areas east of Market Street were being neglected.
For families, Campana brought back the annual Easter Egg Hunt, this time at Brandon Park.
Christy Haberstroh, his executive assistant, got the Easter event in the park going again.
Over the early years, Haberstroh, was his helping hand.
“She had organization skills that helped me keep pace with all my goals,” he said.
Campana also had renamed the holiday parade to Billtown Christmas Parade, working closely with various advertisers and businesses for sponsorships to make it larger-than-life for children leading up to the holidays.
Campana said his children came up with the concept of “Williamsport Welcomes the World,” a street festival meant to bring those visiting the Little League World Series, and taking part in it, to downtown to eat, walk, shop, sign autographs of ballplayers and take a break from the competition across the river.
None of the first term foundation could be possible, he said, without his trusted department heads.
They included John Grado, an engineer and community development director who’d been with several administrations and Joseph Gerardi, a veteran codes professional, from neighboring Loyalsock Township, who worked with the mayor to remove blight, inspect rental properties and begin an aggressive campaign to ensure the building codes were up to standard.
This happened during the height of the natural gas drilling.
Jobs and activity in the Marcellus Shale play were plentiful.
Wages were driving the cost of rental properties, where only those working in professional roles or who were gas drilling workers could afford it.
“We were having a second boom like the lumber era,” Campana said.
To capitalize, Campana said he had his codes and zoning office look at adding more entertainment districts. They would be in Newberry, along Washington Boulevard and in the Central Business District. It would be a program that worked with the state Liquor Control Board, he said.
But with the natural gas boom and the rentals’ leases out of touch for most people, the city needed hotels.
One of the major developers in town, George Tsunis, a builder of hotels, told the mayor there wasn’t enough parking downtown to keep pace with the growth and to build hotels.
“I told him we were in the process of building another 350-space parking deck,” Campana said.
One day, Campana said he and Tsunis walked behind the Penn Towers building on West Third Street. The developer looked around and then promised to build hotels if there was a parking garage.
“We shook hands,” he said. Tsunis funded the construction of the Holiday Inn Express and later the Marriott TownePlace Suites and Marriott Residence Inn.
The city also constructed the parking garage along Church Street, which provided first-floor space and amenities for Susquehanna Trailways.
Kohl’s comes downtown
Through 2009 and 2010, as the city continued to benefit from Marcellus Shale exploration, Campana said he began to think about bringing a department store into town.
“The genesis of Kohl’s was an idea by Dr. Tony Cipolla,” Campana said. Cipolla, a dentist, who today is chairman of the Williamsport Parking Authority, had heard Kohl’s was interested in siting a store at the Lycoming Mall.
To get Kohl’s to the city, Campana said he and his team had to negotiate with seven separate property owners.
Contact was made with the governor’s office for state grant dollars to make it happen, he said.
Cipolla, Campana, William E. Nichols Jr., general manager of River Valley Transit and city finance director, also took a flight out to meet Kohl’s management in Wisconsin.
“We sold the city to them,” Campana said.
It took a year and some challenging council meetings, but the site manager with Kohl’s contacted Campana.
It was just before Christmas 2010, he said.
“We shook hands and he said, ‘Merry Christmas, you’ve got yourself a Kohls,'” Campana said. “It was the best Christmas gift I ever received.”
Housing needs fulfilled
In 2011, Campana defeated Councilwoman Gerry Fausnaught at the primary.
“The race stopped there,” he said.
He said he then turned his thoughts to residential and housing needs, especially for senior citizens.
He worked with his brother-in-law, George Hutchinson, who operates Sanctuary Apartments along West Fourth Street and Providence Place, an apartment complex reconditioned from a previous cloister for nuns, at Divine Providence Hospital.
Campana said the city was open for business and he reached out to builder Robert Yoder, who had constructed affordable housing at Nichols Place and the city graciously accepted the assistance of officials with the SEDA Council of Governments’ for senior citizen housing at Grove Street Commons, Campana said.
“You can’t just build downtown,” he said.
The work coincided with removing blight, conducting rental inspections and improving safety for tenants living in rental properties.
“City efforts, including those of council, included the transition of a Brownfield site, at the vacant Brodart warehouse, that was demolished and became Memorial Homes, 40-unit apartment building at 1690 Memorial Ave., which provided nice housing and brought back a neighborhood that was experiencing distress, he said.
Campana ensured Gerardi and codes officers would put pressure on owners of poorly maintained residential properties, either owner-occupied or rentals.
These “absentee landlords,” many of them living outside of the city and state, received enforcement warnings and fines, and the city placed liens on properties, he said.
“This work coincided with bringing in a stronger landlord-tenant ordinance,” Campana said.
But the controversial rental ordinance had a section in it that gave city police the authority to shut down rental properties if it was discovered there was clear evidence of drugs or illegal firearms.
Much of it was driven by the pleadings of good-intentioned police administrators, but these individuals didn’t see the fine writing on the wall.
Despite council approving the ordinance, it was challenged over the years 2013-2015.
One challenge occurred six months after it was signed, when a New Rochelle, New York, landlord filed civil complaints at the state and federal court levels.
The landlord argued that he could not possibly know the actions of his tenants and if an apartment was shuttered for six months, he lost money and a livelihood without due recourse to appeal.
Eventually, a judge at U.S. Middle District Court ruled the landlord was right and the ordinance was unconstitutional, according to the court findings.
Campana said he felt it was a good ordinance despite the removal of its “teeth,” but he feared that would lead to the same conditions allowing drug sales, use and illegal firearms.
A city under siege
Undeterred by the amended ordinance, Campana continued to work with police and neighborhood watch groups because the drug epidemic was flourishing.
Tainted heroin, laced with fentanyl and other factors, were leading to daily overdoses.
Campana organized crime summits, bringing in law enforcement, addicts’ families, first-responders, police and law enforcement and the treatment community to discuss the issue.
Campana tried to send a visible message by having a utility vehicle retrofitted into the “heroin truck,” which had portraits of those whose faces showed the toll of drug addiction over the years.
Campana worked with Williamsport/Lycoming County Crime Commission and Williamsport Citizens Corps Council.
Police administration tried different tactics, too, including having special operations officers wearing all-black uniforms, for effect and intimidation, he said.
Economic development
On parallel paths of crime defense and economic development, and not content with Kohl’s as the only major win for the city and region, Campana wanted to make a bigger splash.
“I saw other cities our size had some family entertainment facility downtown,” he said.
Campana said he recalled asking Cappelli, who was at the time a representative in the state House, to include $3 million for Redevelopment Assistance Capital Project grant dollars for an arena in Williamsport.
Every day, Campana could look down onto the existing YMCA on Elmira Street, which also had an entrance at the parking lot. It was the perfect location, he said.
Former YMCA executive director David Fagerstrom said the organization was going to either update the existing building or build anew, Campana said.
“I wrote the idea on a napkin,” he said.
If the site could be torn down; it was another way to expand the tax base,” he said.
Campana said he spoke to Steven Johnson, CEO of UPMC Susquehanna, and Fagerstrom.
Campana said he told them it was a way to increase taxes, get a new location for the YMCA and fulfill the objective of providing venues for youths and families to exercise and hold shows.
“It was the city’s responsibility to find someone to buy the block or it would become a white elephant for years to come,” Campana said.
That’s when developer Daniel A. Klingerman approached the city, Campana said.
“I told him (Klingerman) about the $3 million that Cappelli had secured in the state capital budget,” Campana said.
With added assistance and support from the Williamsport/Lycoming Chamber of Commerce and former President and CEO Vincent Matteo, the idea gained momentum.
“He was pro-business and it was a good working relationship,” Campana said.
Klingerman also had a vision of a sports arena, after an air-filled dome in Muncy Township collapsed during a February ice and snow storm.
Campana called his concept, “Destination 2014,” because it would be a go-to-place and he gave himself a deadline of that year to get things done.
The destination idea developed into an arena for sports such as baseball and soccer.
To fund the infrastructure it also included the successful receipt of a $3 million Redevelopment Assistance Capital Project grant and the continued funding stream for a second Trade and Transit Centre.
Campana told Klingerman it was his dream to have a type of pizzeria and restaurant inside where children could play video games and have birthday parties.
Through working with Penn Strategies Inc., a city economic development consulting firm, council approved the use of the grant in 2014 and construction began in 2015. Among his advisers were Jason Fitzgerald, who worked for the consulting firm. State Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Loyalsock Township, was instrumental in forwarding the grant to the Department of Budget, Campana said.
At first, there was a gymnasium and trampolines for jumping on. Klingerman has since added a family entertainment center to the arena, he said.
“Wer’e so blessed,” Campana said of the arena, which features an attached restaurant, bowling alley, arcade and laser tag.
“Very few communities have such a facility,” he said.
Campana’s political steamrolling continued. By 2016, he had defeated Councilman Bill Hall in the primary election for the party nomination and then faced Emily Gale in the general election.
Campana, however, acknowledged that during this time he became embittered as council voted against a casino. He also tried to get a lump sum payment from the Williamsport Municipal Water and Sanitary Authority, who he asked to join with the city in a lease agreement, similar to what took place in Altoona.
Campana said he watched Altoona get out of fiscal distress but council and the authority put the brakes on the idea.
“I tried, but it didn’t fly,” he said.
Overcoming struggles
In 2015, as an approach to remove litter and stop what he said were gangs attracting youths to sell drugs at Memorial Park, Campana had streets and parks employees remove basketball courts. In doing so, he lost half a community’s support and when he had the courts that were in Roy A. Flanigan Park locked and then opened them, the community expressed its dismay.
During one afternoon, Campana stood in the rain in black loafer shoes offering to play a game with the boys and girls.
During the lead up to the rental ordinance changes, Campana walked with families, including young children, to rental properties that were under suspicion of illegal drug activities. He called it “Team Williamsport,” but it involved citizens and they were too close for comfort to what could potentially cause them harm, or place the city in legal jeopardy.
In 2016, Campana also was accused him of alleged misgivings, specifically turning in alleged questionable receipts for reimbursement.
The district attorney’s office took the request from council and the controller and forwarded the report to the state attorney general office. To date, there has been no information on this.
When that happened, the mayor became dismayed and sought another career as a superintendent at Montoursville Area School District. He kept it quiet until it was revealed through a news report and he acknowledged he had to think about supporting himself and his family.
Through the heights and the dips, Campana remained an “overtime” mayor, Reed said.
“He kept doing his job,” said Reed said. “He would visit sick and hurt city employees at the hospital and at home,” she said.
During recent years, Campana said the city and county has seen the East Third Street/Old City Gateway Revitalization begin to take shape.
He had Stephanie Young, community development director, proposed a plan for Park Avenue neighorhood improvements. The target area is along the avenue and south on Little League, north along Rural Avenue, east at Hepburn Street and West to Campbell Street.
Baseball love
Campana barely spends a day without wearing a baseball cap. His favorite team is the Pittsburgh Pirates.
He said as a fan, the upgrades to Bowman Field are critical. The stadium is owned by the city.
His favorite development has been Major League Baseball and Little League Baseball getting together.
The entities hold the MLB Little League Classic, which brings professional baseball teams to play a game in front of participants of the Little League World Series and their families.
It is one of the toughest tickets to get in baseball, said Marc Schefsky, a spokesman for River Valley Transit, which provides transportation for the big league and Little League players.
Ice cold idea
Campana is not so dour as to acknowledge some ideas that he had that turned cold quickly.
Among those, inviting the Outlaws, a Federal Hockey League team, to play outdoor semi-professional hockey team at Bowman Field.
Originally, it was a hot idea. The city was eager to see it.
An ice hockey rink was put down during his first term in office.
The first game was packed, with 1,800 or more spectators.
The team held meet-and-greet party and distributed team merchandise.
Williamsport had its own professional hockey team, Campana said.
But in subsequent games, the tickets were getting put out free of charge.
It was discovered in city finance committee meetings that the team was not paying for utility costs and other losses incurred.
Baseball diehards also were concerned the field would never recover from the ice hockey rink damage.
Before skipping town overnight leaving the city with the bill, the Outlaws disappeared off the map.
The city filed a lawsuit and recovered the cost of utilities unpaid, he said.
In his three terms, Campana has often repeated how the city should be “Operated like a business,” and he was “Williamsport’s CEO.”
“I still think if we could have brought the games under roof inside it would have taken off,” Campana said.
“We brought in $600,000 million of commercial investment,” he said. “I’ve met wonderful people during this journey.”
Other political aspirations
Most recently, Campana ran for the Republican Party nomination for Lycoming County Commissioner. He came in fourth place.
In October, he launched an 11th-hour write-in campaign for reelection.
“I was not successful,” he said. “I accept that.
As he ended the interview, Campana said he was no longer upset about political rivals.
“I hope that he succeeds,” he said of Slaughter and the three new members of council — Adam Yoder, Vince Pulizzi and Jon Mackey.
Campana acknowledged he now wants to put his life into a lower gear.
“I have Thursday night to watch Seinfeld reruns,” he said, laughing.
But he also wants to remain available for any city volunteer positions, similar to what Preziosi does on city boards and in his neighborhood.
“I admire him,” he said.
“A former mayor has value.”