By Natalie Hamren
NKyTribune reporter
This part of an occasional series about the Mayors of NKY cities
Erlanger Mayor Jessica Fette has always loved politics. As someone who grew up in Erlanger and met her husband, Jim, in the city, she wanted a way to get involved in the community. Her dad suggested that she would be a great fit for running for city council, so that’s exactly what she did.
Fette loved being on the city council but she wanted to be more involved in the day-to-day operations. Fette thought she could have more of an impact on the city if she were mayor.
“I love working with the employees and making it a great place to work,” Fette said. “I love understanding the customer service level that we provide to our residents and our business owners. I love being a part of something — a machine and making that machine function better and more efficient.”
Mayor Jessica Fette
Fette has now been the mayor of Erlanger since 2018 and there’s no stopping her. Despite only being mayor for a few years, Fette has accomplished a lot in a short amount of time. Most notably, Fette has continued decreasing Erlanger’s property tax for the sixth year in a row — two of which she was mayor and two of which she was on the city council.
“What I find so important is constantly trying to figure out how to be more efficient with your tax dollars,” Fette said. “Everybody has minimal resources, so how can we be more efficient with the resources that we have? And how can we give back to our residents or not take from them?
Fette said she looked at what the city could cut, such as software or subscriptions not being used and renegotiating contracts. When Fette came into office as mayor, she said she renegotiated the city engineer contract that hadn’t been renegotiated in 50 years which resulted in savings.
“Overall, the feedback that I get is people are energized. It’s kind of a fun place to be because we’re always trying to find something better — the next awesome thing, the next way to be more efficient,” Fette said.
Fette said Erlanger is blessed with a diverse tax revenue which allowed the city to “weather the storm financially” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The city has a Coca-Cola bottling company that employs hundreds of workers to small businesses like local restaurants.
“We budgeted very conservatively; we anticipated a decrease,” Fette said. “But it turned out, we’re not seeing that decrease because of the diversity of our businesses.”
Fette said she could not be more impressed with the fire, police and public works departments. As a thank you for their hard work during the pandemic, Fette said Erlanger gave the first responders $2,000 each from the CARES money the city received.
“There were a lot of worries, like, some people wouldn’t want to come into work. And, gosh, we never got any of that. Everybody just did exactly what they had to do,” Fette said. “From a leader’s perspective, that’s all you could ever ask for when you’re put into a really difficult situation for your whole team to just buckle down and do what they had to do.”
Despite the setbacks caused from the pandemic, Fette has major goals for the city. For the longterm goals, Fette said she has been working on parks master planning because she said it’s a determining factor if people want to live and come to the city. Even though Erlanger has 12 parks, Fette said they haven’t been properly utilized or maintained, so the city wants to update the parks.
“I like to create a roadmap,” Fette said. “So we’re not necessarily going to spend all the money at one time on this giant master plan, but we can take the master plan and know we’re starting and where we’re going, and then break it into pieces and do small incremental changes to these parks.”
In 2019, Fette said they started master planning Silver Lake, Rainbow and Misty Creek Park. Because of the pandemic, they had to pull back some of the funding and only focus on Silver Lake Park. However, Fette said in the next budget cycle — which starts in July — she wants to push for a greater dollar amount for the parks.
“One thing that I think people figured out with COVID was we needed to be outside. We needed those activities that we could still do with our family and our little family unit and be safe because so many people were trapped in their house. We need to open our parks and get them full of life again,” Fette said. “I think the reinvestment in our parks is so, so important.”
Fette said she also wants to continue advocating for tax decreases whenever she can, even if it’s only a half percentage.
“I know it’s small decreases. However, add it up, it comes out to a larger dollar amount when you’re taking this small incremental decreases over six or seven years,” Fette said.
Fette is the first female mayor of Erlanger. She said one her favorite things to do is visiting schools. During her visits, she said the kids ask her whatever they want about her job as mayor. She hopes that her position can inspire children to dream big.
“If I could help just one little girl think, ‘oh, I could be mayor,’ that’s awesome,” Fette said.
Mayor Fette is a graduate of Dixie Heights High School and Northern Kentucky University where she earned a degree in Economics and Business Administration. She worked at a local financial institution and had a career in project management. When her third child was born, she created a company, Jace Solutions, to help small businesses with effective communications and marketing. She joined the Erlanger City Council in 2016.
