Editor’s Note: This is the fourth segment of the Face in the Race series.
With the walls lined with guns and guitars, the small pawn shop at 523 NW Third Ave. hardly looks like the ideal place for a campaign headquarters.
Yet for Richard Selwach, the owner of Best Jewelry & Loan Pawnbrokers, the shop serves as his platform for engaging people to tell them his mayoral campaign plans — whether they want to hear it or not.
“People don’t want to hear the truth,” he said. “I’m here to tell you the truth.”
Selwach said he’s offering simple solutions to some of Gainesville’s biggest problems.
For students, Selwach wants to keep local bars open until 4 a.m. while requiring them to stop serving drinks at 2 a.m. He argued that this revision would give patrons a chance to sober up before leaving.
If elected, Selwach, a self-described libertarian, vows to balance the city’s budget by eliminating programs he sees as wasteful, such as the Office of Equal Opportunity and the Communications Office.
“We need to go back to the basics,” he said. “Anything that’s not essential is up for the chopping block.”
He also opposes plans to build a biomass plant, which he said will burn an unnecessary amount of trees.
Coinciding with his stance on decriminalizing marijuana, Selwach offered a solution of burning hemp in place of the trees.
“They can put it in their biomass plant and smoke it,” he said.
Selwach is no stranger to bold statements, especially when it comes to the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance, which modifies Chapter 8 of the city’s Code of Ordinances to include protection from gender discrimination.
The ordinance allows citizens to use bathrooms that suit their gender identity, defined as “an inner sense of being a specific gender” as opposed to biological sex.
Selwach said that his opposition to the bill stems from what he described as sloppily written language, not an underlying prejudice toward transgender people.
“I’m not here to take any rights away from anyone,” said Selwach. “I’m not going to gamble with the safety of the children... a 10-year-old girl doesn’t need to see some guy’s penis.”
For Selwach, the anti-discrimination ordinance is such an important issue that he told Gainesville City Commissioner Craig Lowe, one of the other mayoral candidates who assisted in the ordinance’s passage, that he would drop out of the race if Lowe modified the language in the ordinance.
“I pulled him aside and told him ‘Craig, I like you, and if I wasn’t running, I’d vote for you,’” he said. “Sometimes it gets really heated but that’s politics.”
According to the latest campaign financial reports, Selwach has contributed $2,900 to his campaign.
He is not accepting campaign contributions.
As the March 16 election nears, Selwach insisted that if elected, he would use his role to serve and protect the people of Gainesville.
“In my life, before I go, I want to do the right thing,” he said. “You don’t want a guy like me to give up... I’m here to do my job.”
