Matthew Bentley and Scott Sessions advance to the November election.
Courtesy | Robyn Beck
Both candidates advance to the November election amid M-99 “road diet” tensions
Ward 3 Councilman Matthew Bentley and former Mayor Scott Sessions earned spots on a November ballot for mayor of Hillsdale after winning a citywide primary earlier this month.
Sessions finished first in the Aug. 5 primary, earning 37% of the vote. Bentley followed with 30%. Ward 4 Councilman Robert Socha came in third with 16%, and Cathy Kelemen received 15%. About 17% of registered voters participated, compared to 25% turnout in the 2022 mayoral primary.
Students registered to vote in Hillsdale can cast a ballot in the mayor’s race on Nov. 4. The elected mayor would finish the current mayoral term through 2026. To serve longer than a year, the mayor would then run in the August 2026 primary and November 2026 general elections.
Sessions served as mayor from 2013 to 2017. He told The Collegian he was running to end the “negative culture” that some councilmembers, including his opponent, have created for city staff.
Bentley grew up in Hillsdale and returned from Ann Arbor in 2020. He told The Collegian he would bring more control over city policy back to the city council and prevent the city from installing bike lanes downtown.
The city’s main political issue this summer has been the proposed “road diet,” according to Mayor Pro Tem Joshua Paladino, who is not running in this election. The proposed M-99 road diet would slim down Broad Street from four lanes to three, with the middle lane acting as a turn lane, and bike lanes on either side of the road.
“There were three city council meetings that focused pretty much exclusively on the road diet,” Paladino said.
The city council voted 5-3 last week to move forward with the road diet plan. While the state government will cover most of the project, the city will contribute $135,000 to the project, with $250,000 being provided by the Tax Increment Finance Authority — which collects revenue from downtown businesses — and $10,000 by Hillsdale Renaissance.
“The recent vote changes the road ahead for those of us who oppose the road diet,” Bentley said. “The people have no choice now but to take matters into their own hands.”
That road ahead likely runs through a ballot referendum, Bentley said. He would support one to prevent the council from approving the road diet.
“While there’s certainly no direct power for the mayor to veto this plan, I will continue to agitate against the plan and support the people’s voices in any way I can to defeat the road diet,” Bentley said.
Sessions said he opposes the road diet for safety reasons, since a biker riding in the bike lane could hit a person coming out of their car parked on the street. But now that the city has approved the plan, he said it would cost just as much money to stop the plan as to go through with it.
“By the time it would go on the ballot, the city would have engineering costs to the state of Michigan, and the costs of an election might be close to what the city will have to pay anyway,” Sessions said.
Sessions said he thinks Paladino and Bentley have created a hostile work environment for city staff.
“The negative culture needs to stop,” Sessions said. “We must stop the extreme exodus of the Hillsdale city staff. As mayor, you are the CEO of the city and responsible for everything that happens in the city.”
If elected mayor, Sessions said he would ask councilmen to send their questions for city staff through him. This chain of command, he said, would help create a less hostile work environment for staff.
“Right now, it’s a free-for-all with the mayor pro tem and a couple of new members of the Hillsdale City Council,” Sessions said, referring to Paladino, Bentley, and Ward 1 Councilman Jacob Bruns.
Bentley said he thinks the council has ceded too much control to the city staff.
“He means to protect the powers that be from negativity, as he labels it — or from my perspective, accountability,” Bentley said. “So it seems to me that he is the candidate for the status quo.”
Send tips to the City News team: collegiancitynews@gmail.com
