By Carrie Ghose – Staff reporter, Columbus Business First
Posted April, 2019 at 2:53 PM
In his first constituent office hours as a member of Columbus City Council, Rob Dorans sat in the Hilltop branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library and met with residents.
But instead of laying out his policy priorities, he asked neighborhood residents what was important to them. Sidewalks and streetlights, they said.
That impulse to listen has its roots, Doran said, in a lifelong commitment to service and fairness. It’s what led him to cede the only closet to his future wife in their fourth-floor walk-up apartment, to donate hours as an attorney to the Legal Aid Society, and fight in his day job for construction workers to get paid the hours due to them.
“I was raised in a house that taught us if you have the ability to serve, you serve,” he said.
“My dad could fix anything that broke at the church, my mom could balance the accounts. That was their service.”
“It was something we were brought up with, and it was an expectation”
Dorans, 32, was appointed in February to fill the unexpired term of Michael Stinziano, who was elected county auditor. He has nine months until the November election, and considers that time a job interview with the citizens of Columbus.
“I think my skill set matters for the city,” he said. “It’s funny – I’ve been telling folks how to run for office for 10 years; now I have to take my own medicine.”
“It was at the Ohio State Barber College, so he told folks he when to Ohio State,” he said. An uncle got Dorans’ father into an apprenticeship at a coal-fired power plant, and he’s now a mechanic at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor.
Watching his dad land a better job with healthcare showed Dorans the value of growing up in a union household.
He started his political ambitions during his freshman year at Ohio University, leading voter registration drives as president of the college Democrats.
After graduation, he worked for a year as a legislative aide in the Ohio House, answering constituent calls in a high-poverty district, helping people find resources to keep the heat on. That’s when he saw how government can positively impact daily life.
Then he went to law school at the University of Toledo. “Pretty much the second I left Columbus, I wanted to come back,” he said.
Dorans and his wife, Lauren, returned 10 years ago when she started a doctoral program at Ohio State University.
“If you really want to make sure you’re getting married to the right person, move into a studio apartment with them in Victorian Village. On the fourth floor,” he said. “Our apartment was so, so small, when I had to leave for work I had to walk down four flights of stairs, grab my khakis and shirt (from the car trunk), walk back up four flights of stairs, iron them and go to work.”
Now the couple lives in Italian Village. His day job is chief legal counsel for the nonprofit Affiliated Construction Trades Ohio, where he helps investigate cases of union workers who believe they were shorted on their wages.
“I want to wake up and feel really good about what I do,” Dorans Said.
“I get to go to work for guys like my dad. I get to work on issues that impact people so at the end of the day it helps them to be able to make more money so they can put food on the table. I don’t have interest in doing something else.”
That carries over to his work on council, where he advocates for a livable wage and mixed-income neighborhoods.
Three incentive packages came before council in his first meeting. Dorans asked about paid leave, healthcare, retirement for workers – all of which he wants to hear before supporting a deal.
“As the city grows, you can very easily see growth is not being shared equally across all our neighborhoods,” he said. “We don’t want to wake up 10 years from now and see we’ve turned into another Seattle or San Francisco, in which a middle-class family can’t afford to live in most of the city.
Like he did at the Statehouse, in City Hall Dorans has been known to answer his own phone.
“If folks want to be in this position, you should be ready to put in the work,” he said. “We need to be responsive to citizens’ needs as we can.”
