The city council of a Chester County municipality elected its first openly gay president last week.
The Coatesville City Council unanimously approved the appointment of Karl Marking as president Jan. 3. Marking became the first openly gay elected official in Chester County following his victory in the fall 2009 Coatesville City Council election.
His term as president is one year and he can be reelected next January. His council term expires in 2013.
Coatesville, population 12,000, is about 40 miles west of Philadelphia.
Marking is a Maryland native who moved to Chester County in 1995, settling in Coatesville about six years ago.
Marking, who earned his bachelor of science degree in business management from Goldey Beacom College in Wilmington, Del., in 1994, is currently a software-development manager at business firm Deloitte.
Marking said he doesn’t see himself as a politician but rather a community-service worker.
He was first inspired to run for council following the highly publicized arson spree that destroyed dozens of Coatesville properties in late 2008 and early 2009.
“The city was always distressed and struggling, like a lot of the other steel towns. But when the arsons hit, it gave a really bad impression of this city’s ability to manage itself,” he said. “I own a house here, I live here and I wanted to bring some of my skill set from the professional world to the table.”
He said he evaluated Coatesville’s needs and created a platform that sought to directly attack those pitfalls.
“I looked at what the current status of the city was and came up with a campaign approach that was basically cornerstoned on enforcement — whether that’s enforcement of codes or better law enforcement, because we had a lot of property codes that weren’t being enforced and a lot of drug-related crime going on and a government that was doing things in violation of Sunshine laws. My initial plan was transparency and consistent enforcement.”
Throughout his campaign, he said, his sexual orientation wasn’t an issue.
The one-and-a-half square-mile city is home to 65 churches, so Marking said he expected some opposition from religious communities, but it never surfaced.
What he did see, however, was a unified and visible LGBT community.
“As I was throwing my hat in the ring and bracing for the backlash that never occurred, I tried to get all my ducks in a row and figure out my allies. Just within a two-block radius I was able to think of 12 gay and lesbian individuals who are all out and who I knew I could count on for support, even just emotionally if nothing else,” he said. “And I consider the fact that there was no backlash a huge step forward. I’m really proud of the fact that this wasn’t an issue. This community voted for a good councilperson who just happened to be gay other than thinking of it the other way around, and I think that says a lot.”
Once he took office, his fellow councilmembers also gave him a vote of confidence by selecting him as vice president and, most recently, president.
Since joining council, Marking said he’s been committed to his campaign promise of transparency.
A self-described data miner, Marking researched, organized and published several years of council meeting minutes, seeking to bring to light numerous board and commission appointments that were made without full public disclosure.
“I wanted to devote a lot of time to this because apathy had been running rampant in the city government and in community involvement. I thought the only way to reinstill a sense of energy was to first show an effort that we were working to clean up these boards and get the best qualified people to come forward again to serve.”
In reviewing the council records, Marking also compiled a voting and attendance record for all councilmembers and has invested more than 200 hours into creating a new website for the city, set to launch in a few weeks.
Marking said he hopes the likely addition of Coatesville to SEPTA’s Paoli/Thorndale transit line will help reinvigorate the city and bring in more out-of-towners.
Also in an effort to make the city more attractive to residents and workers, Marking was part of a council committee that recently moved for the inclusion of sexual orientation into the city employment manual.
Marking served on a committee that revised the city’s human-resource policies and said he was again pleasantly surprised that his effort to add sexual orientation as a class protected from employment discrimination received “no pushback whatsoever.”
Council adopted the policy changes in December and they’ll go into effect next month.
Marking said council will be focusing on identifying a permanent city manager to take over for an interim employee, a task he’ll lead as council president.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].