Soon citizens of Rocheport will cast their votes for town alderpersons, one for Ward 1 and one for Ward 2, along with their vote for mayor on April 4, 2023. To kick off our election coverage, I interviewed Conrad Yates, current alderperson for Ward 1 and candidate for reelection. Conrad shared his experience over the last 30 years of living in Rocheport and discussed the history and development of Rocheport along with his goals for the future of the town. As a newer resident of the community myself, I found myself fascinated by the dedication the people of Rocheport have had for their town. It is obvious Conrad considers the health and vitality of this community a personal responsibility. He has made it his mission to ensure Rocheport is prosperous and pleasant for generations to come.

Conrad recalls three decades of perspective and service

Roman: So you’ve been here since 1987? 

Conrad: We bought this property in 1987. We officially moved here in 1991. Although I was in town a lot before then. 

Roman: So, then when did you first serve as an alderman?

Conrad: I became an elected alderman for the first ward as soon as Rocheport ordinances permitted it. I had to be a resident here for one year, and the minute that happened, I ran for office. I’m still running for office 30 years later. I have only taken a 3- or 4-year break in that time. 

Roman: I’d say you’ve seen a lot of things come and go. 

Conrad: I have. 

Roman: When somebody runs for office, I tend to think there are a couple of big reasons why they want to do it. Either something’s wrong or something’s right; it means you want to change or to stay the course. Normally people don’t go in and just say, “I want to keep the status quo.” There’s usually something that needs to be fixed or made better. What are your ideas and goals for the next term if you’re elected? 

Conrad: I’ll start way back in the story. My wife and I were in the healthcare field preretirement and I had to be on call, which meant staying within 15 minutes of work. And so we were living in Colombia. We raised our two daughters there, and they were just about out of the nest, college age, so we were looking for a smaller town to live in. I grew up in the country near Williamsburg, Missouri, and my wife grew up in Kansas. And so we wanted to rebuild a historic house, and we were looking in the 15-minute range. 

I met a guy named John Ott, who is a key figure in the history of Rocheport and in saving the town. He was younger than I was, and I just ran into him on the street and told him what I was looking for. He told me he’d look around. Well, the next day John calls me and he’s hatched the plan that I need to buy this double-wide trailer and these lots and build a historic house in its place. So, I bought this lot from John. When we did, he then told me that I would have to join the movement to save Rocheport because if I didn’t, Rocheport wouldn’t be saved and it would fail like small towns everywhere. 

Many small towns are not healthy, you know. And the idea of saving a small town from decline and going away is a fine idea for all of us small-town enthusiasts, but it’s not an easy thing to do. And the stars have to align pretty perfectly to get it done well. So I joined up with that ideology. I didn’t know any better and I got on the city council. We built this house as an example of what you could do to enhance a historic neighborhood. From there, the challenge of enhancing and preserving Rocheport has never left the number one goal on my list. Everything I’ve ever done here has had quite a bit of consideration as it relates to these goals. 

Roman: So this is 2023 and communications are not like they used to be. What plans do you have for keeping communications open to residents in real time, and do you think there’s a need for a new line of communication like a Rocheport government website?

Conrad: Of course, I see it as a need. You know, we really need to have all of our ordinances online and available. We need to have a website so people can easily see when the trash is going to be picked up or if this is a holiday and when it’s going to be skipped and have an easy reference to let people know not to let their dogs run around and to explain all the city services. The challenge with that is that we have one part-time employee. Towns that are larger, such as Hallsville or Ashland, have full-time employees. And we’re not going to get more than a part-time employee here because we don’t really have the money for that, and we haven’t yet had the money to hire somebody to digitize all our public documents. We will get there; we all see that. I think everybody on the board has seen that. We need to hire somebody who has the skills to do that and make that happen for us. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate website, but it has to be a functional website, easy to read and to access the information, but perhaps even more importantly, it’s got to be easy to post information from the city government officials. 

Roman: Do you think Rocheport would benefit from formal long-term planning to blend the teaching and mentoring of the next generation of leaders and provide a vision for the town, a plan that informs the citizens what direction the board is trying to go and coalesce the community into a direction that’s been agreed to? 

Conrad: I think that’s a fine idea. You know the results of long-term planning are generally positive. The predictable part is that there would be some contentious moments in the development of priorities. And people are very reluctant to knowingly get themselves involved in a contentious issue. You’re looking at the guy in town here who doesn’t mind that much. 

Roman: Five- and 10-year plans would facilitate overcoming the challenges that exist today, meaning removing homes that are basically abandoned or derelict beyond repair and infrastructure. For instance, I know Mayor John Zondca mentioned possibly doing sewer improvements and creating a sidewalk on Highway BB/3rd Street. You mentioned flood walls and bringing more residents into the town. Then, we are already looking at the bicentennial celebration. Historically, has anything like a formal 5- or 10-year master plan for the town been done?

Conrad: As far as I know, not in my tenure. I am the alderman whose responsibility is streets and roads, and we were required to do a 5-year plan in conjunction with the county road department. Now the county no longer requires it, and so we’ve not done it. Was it worthwhile when we did it? You bet.  

Roman: Would it be fruitful to work with Boone County on issues like streets and making those kinds of plans, keeping those lines of communication open with our parent municipality government?

Conrad: We established a very good working relationship with the county commission, and we’ve maintained it ever since. And you’ll see county commissioners out here at our Fourth of July parade. You’ll see them out here a lot because we maintain a very good personal relationship with them. So one of the responsibilities of people on this board is to keep and maintain those relationships with the elected officials of Boone County that we depend on, and that goes all the way to our state representatives and everything else. You know, we never know what issues we’re going to have. We may only need information. That’s the most common. On those days when we need outside help, we really need it. We don’t really know when or what we’re going to need, but it’s coming and you know it will always keep coming.

Roman: What would you like to see in the next 5 to 10 years for Rocheport?

Conrad: We’ve got a pretty heavy load of things on our plate right now. I think in my time in Rocheport this might be the most activity I’ve ever seen the government involved in. We’re working on the old fire station where we used to house the town tractor to be a storage shed. One side of it is going to be still for Rocheport; the other side, we’re thinking very strongly about letting our civic organizations, the Rocheport Area Merchants Association and the Friends of Rocheport, use the other side because they have storage needs. We need to get the street and road planning solidified because costs are astronomically expensive. We will at some point have to resurface the roads. We got our roads resurfaced by the sales tax for Boone County roads. We got these wonderful grants. It costs a lot of money to do a street. We are resolved to get our cell tower operational. And we want to get a retaining wall system in place to prevent future flooding and the enormous cost of time and money to sandbag.

Roman: A group of local residents was talking outside the General Store on Sunday with guests staying at a local bed-and-breakfast. They asked us, “Who lives here?” Our response was, “Only the people that want to be here live here.”

Conrad: You know, here in Rocheport there are 13 former residences now set aside 100% of the time for overnight short-term lodging. That is 12% of our housing stock now dedicated to short-term residential lodging. If the board hadn’t imposed regulations on that industry, there would probably already be another five or so houses converted to that purpose. I mean, people were lined up, ready to convert homes to short-term lodging, and we would easily have hit 20%. And with that, you lose population. As a result of the lost single-family homes, we lost the ability to house around 40 people in Rocheport.

Roman: And that actually carries over to one other subject I wanted to talk about. I know this is not unique to Rocheport, but what about homes that are not utilized or appear to be condemned? 

Conrad: Well, the reason why we have not acted on some of those is it’s a difficult legal challenge we have to go through. In the end, either the owners rehabilitate the homes or we basically legally evict them, and those people really don’t typically have the means to do anything. And so what happens then, ultimately, is the city then has to pay to remove it. And then the city is compensated if and when the property is sold. So there’s a lien placed on the home and when it is finally sold, only then can the city collect back the money. The city doesn’t necessarily know when that money is coming back in. It’s never an easy subject to deal with.

Roman: Anything you want to see different downtown in the near future, like how space is utilized, or any sort of priorities that you have in terms of focusing on downtown?

Conrad: The nature of small towns, the good and the bad in one statement, is basically things are slower to change. This means it’s hard to institute positive change quickly but the bad things don’t wreck you before you have a chance to respond. So on the positive front, the coffee shop has been working toward opening retail there. The Barth Garden patio is open, and that was a grand improvement over what it had been. That is a nice place where people can enjoy sitting outside and having a coffee. At some point, the old Abigail’s will have something in it; it is a lovely place. Caitlin and Mike with Southern Provisions are doing great things with one of the historic buildings that are important to downtown. That’s huge. 

Roman: My first experience with Rocheport like many, many people back in the early 90s was Les Bourgeois winery. 

Conrad: Les Bourgeois pretty much did the heavy lifting of marketing for us. They got people to want to come to Rocheport, and then bed-and-breakfast inns opened, and the wine-drinking demographic turns out to be a bed-and-breakfast demographic. The University of Missouri’s marketing department did a free study out here one time. They concluded the three-legged stool of Rocheport was Les Bourgeois, bed-and-breakfast inns, and the Katy Trail. Everything else works around that. The local shops evolved to support this kind of economy. What works in this town is different from many small towns. If you want something to work in Rocheport as a business, it has to be high-quality goods and services. I didn’t make that up. That is what happens — high-quality goods and services like handmade violins, handmade pottery and art. You know, stuff you can’t get in the average place, that’s what gets people driving out of their way to Rocheport. They come to a beautiful town that reminds them of a story they heard from their family because their grandma grew up in a small town or something like that, and they get these heartwarming stories, and they think that that must be true somewhere. And lo and behold, it’s here. They drive around and they go, “God, this is beautiful. This is great. Look at these people. They know each other. They like each other.” And when they leave town they have to buy one or two gifts before they leave to take back to whoever’s watching the pets or house or sitting for their kids.

Roman: Anything else you want to say relative to the elections coming up?

Conrad: Oh, I could take you down through a whole lot of stuff I’ve done over the years.

We stopped riverboat gambling. 

The water and sewer service used to be a Rocheport utility. We have 110 hookups here. We didn’t have enough money to have any specialized equipment, so anytime anything broke, we had to hire to get it fixed, and with sewer costs 20 years ago, it was $10,000 minimum a crack any time something was needed. So we transferred the water and sewer to professional organizations. The maintenance for that has dramatically improved and the prices are lower. 

County sales tax for roads got Ward Street extended and Pike Street was redone. 

With the city finances, we are vigilant. We do not ever want Rocheport to be on the front page of anybody’s paper about mismanaging city finances. I’m serious about that. I mean, that is really, really bad. That’s a complete and total violation of public trust, and I will not have it.

Taken all together in a short amount of time, things are changing rapidly downtown. I am for an appropriate balance between businesses and residents. I’m not for empowering businesses over residents or residents over businesses. 

We’ve got it going on here. This is a wonderful place. I’ve lived around. This is as great a place to live as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in some places that were nice. It’s just beautiful here. Pretty much all the time people are wonderful. I’m from a small town, and I really like small towns. That’s why I’m here. I could live in a lot of other places, and I choose here. 

Find out more information about voting in Boone County

Use the Boone County Clerk’s website for more information about what is on the ballot for April 4, 2023.