(Malvern) — KMA News continues its “Meet the Candidates” series, featuring candidates running in key contested races in the November 4th city-school elections. Our latest report turns to the second candidate and incumbent running for the East Mills School Board District 1 seat, Matthew Urban.
A 1994 Nishna Valley High School graduate, Urban grew up in Emerson and attended Southeast Community College for building construction. After moving back to the area and working in the trade, Urban has owned and operated his own construction business for 25 years. Residing in Hastings with his wife, Julie, Urban has served as president of East Mills Area Youth Sports and has been involved in coaching and youth sports for several years. Urban has served two stints on the East Mills School Board. He served one year on the Nishna Valley School Board before the district merged with Malvern to form the East Mills School District ahead of the 2011-12 school year and then served as a school board member for the subsequent four years. He was then elected to his current term in November 2021. Urban tells KMA News he is running for re-election to continue helping see through facility and educational improvements in the district.
“We obviously always want to continue the academic excellence, or at least work towards it and keep working that way,” said Urban. “I have three kids in this district and I have a very vested interest in the kids. I also still coach a lot of different youth sports.”
After voters approved a $22 million bond issue in 2021, paving the way for a new K-12 complex in Malvern. The upgraded facility came to fruition for the start of the 2024-25 school year. Urban says he hopes to continue advocating for facility improvements on the school campus, particularly to the older portions of the K-12 structure.
“Mainly on the old part of the building, I would say, because when the bond issue passed, we kind of had to value engineer things and so things get taken away,” said Urban. “We were able to add quite a bit of that back, but there’s still plenty of projects to do. We just just finished up the football stadium project renovation and everything up there is new–the bleachers, track, and they just got done laying the sod. So, they got it watering right now and it looks terrific.”
In terms of facilities, much discussion has also been had over the school board’s ongoing negotiations to acquire roughly five acres of farmland adjacent to the K-12 campus for a new bus barn and handicap parking space. Urban says the new facility would help address the lack of adequate space for school vehicle storage and other assorted items scattered across the existing facility.
“We’re just really short of storage and we’re storing things in classrooms or in commons areas,” he said. “One big example is all the stuff that is stored in our shop area that’s obviously supposed to be for classes. We need to find some place else to store those things as well as house our buses. We own our buses so we want to take care of them as best we can along with 15 or 16 other school vehicles.”
Urban also emphasized that, while eminent domain is mentioned in the language of the land appraisal requested by the board for the farm land, it has never been, and still is not, the district’s intention to acquire the ground through eminent domain.
“If you’re going to make honest proposals back and forth, we need to really know what that land is valued at,” said Urban. “In the language of that, we didn’t add it, it was just in the language of what we needed to pass to be able to get the appraisal, it said at the bottom of it, ‘this could also be used for eminent domain.’ That was never our intention and we have never made steps to go to eminent domain. Like I said, we’re in negotiations right now, with good negotiations back and forth.”
Urban adds that he is also a proponent of the district continuing to fully support the new Lakin Child Development Center of East Mills in Malvern–something he says could help bring more families and subsequently students to the East Mills School District. The two other East Mills School Board races are uncontested, with Justin Zeitner running for the District 2 seat and Dana Carter seeking an at-large position.
