I and my family’s endorsement of Drew Farrell to represent us as our 4th Ward Delaware City Council member is 31 years thick with humble gratitude. Thirty one years ago, my family and I invested our entire life savings, our joint professional careers, and our personal hopes, dreams, and heart-felt civic commitments to become lifelong neighbors of what we came to know as the 4th Ward of Delaware. We have never regretted our commitment to the 4th Ward as a community in which we have grown as a multi-generational family, but we also have we grown in this time in our multi-generational appreciation of the family of Drew Farrell.

Our youngest daughter and her family now live in the first home we bought here in the 4th Ward 31 years ago, and my wife and I now live in the our historic “forever home” built in 1857 on North Franklin Street. Throughout this last decade, our whole family has grown to become friends with, educated by, and deeply blessed by, the Farrell family.

Given our family’s life commitment to the 4th Ward of Delaware, we are pleased as a family to enthusiastically endorse Drew Farrell to be the next city council member from our 4th Ward neighborhood. We do not make this endorsement lightly. Our family has known Drew and his amazing wife, Whitney, since they were first students at Ohio Wesleyan University years ago. We helped nurture them through their OWU years, and they were not only superb students here, but also beloved Bee Hive Bookstore employees, very active neighbors in downtown Delaware, and more recently very impactful educators to our grandchildren and so many others in our greater Delaware and Delaware County community. It was a great honor for me to officiate at their wedding, and then to serve in recent years as one of the many “Grandpas” for their precious and precocious daughter, Nora.

I and my family, and so many of us in the Delaware community, know Drew Farrell as a solid, thoughtful, non-partisan, fair, balanced, level-headed, calm, reflective, disciplined, deep listener, deep caring, just the real-deal civic-servant soul we need on the Delaware City Council. Given these personal attributes, Drew Farrell will not be influenced by flashy realtors, out-of-town developers, or any partisan politicians from either party; neither is he seeking this position as a step to higher political office. He is just quietly, simply, and honestly the real deal.

Rev. Jon R. Powers

Delaware