“Dan Camp, Community Visionary” reads the business card on the desk of Camp-the creator and owner of Starkville’s renowned Cotton District. Behind the desk sits Camp, who just came to his office after looking over the construction of “La Rue de Grand Fromage,” or, “The Street of the Big Cheese.” The French-inspired commercial and residential structure is the latest part of Camp’s vision of new urbanism in the community.
Construction in the Cotton District isn’t Camp’s only priority, however. He is also hard at work campaigning to be the next mayor of Starkville.
Camp, 63, is a Mississippi State alumnus and has been a Starkville resident for nearly 40 years. In 1970, Camp began working on a vision he had. He wanted to create a sense of community within an area that was part of a larger community. It started out with one building, and his vision has mushroomed into more than 200 buildings that make up the Cotton District today. “I was in my late 20s when I started [creating the Cotton District],” he said. “It has been the majority of my life.”
Camp wasn’t new to building things when he started out, though. He said he has always been busy building something, but now he has a new project.
Camp decided to run for mayor after the discussion of the rental property moratorium came up during a community relations roundtable discussion meeting in November.
“I got up and said, ‘No public input was allowed and they put a moratorium on something that probably nobody was going to have a demand for,'” he said. “I asked why there was no public debate.”
Camp said that he’s always had a vision for a better Starkville. “A vision to take Starkville to another level, to get rid of the ugliness, basically, and promote the quality of life,” Camp said.
Part of Camp’s extensive plan to improve Starkville includes promoting the public schools, creating a design review committee and enforcing codes more strictly.
“We have a policy here, and it’s not being enforced,” Camp said. “I would enforce codes, having the city policed to make sure that the trash has been cleaned,” he said. “That means the junk cars and dilapidated housing.”
Camp said code enforcement is no longer a priority to the city government.
“There are multiple issues that have built up some of the problems that [Starkville] has,” Camp said. “We haven’t been doing smart growth; we’ve been doing hodge-podge things. There are still citizens who, to this day, still don’t have the proper water and sewage added yet, and that’s almost criminal.”
Camp also questions the way the local government is handling its funds, specifically the $5 million bond for a new justice complex.
“[The city] wants to build a police facility and a Municipal Court facility, but I don’t understand why we have to have a new Municipal Court facility when we have a brand new one being built by Oktibbeha County,” he said. Camp said sharing the facility would save the city $1 million in capital expenditures.
He is already prepared to address the issue if elected mayor.
“We will build a new police facility, but not necessarily where the present board would like to put it,” he said.
Camp realizes that he has been a somewhat controversial figure in the community.
“Not everybody likes me; I’m not a popularly loved person in the community,” Camp said. “A true leader is someone who is going to stand up for the right things, regardless of the fact that they’ll be liked or not,” he said.
Camp thinks with 15 years on the Starkville Public School Board under his belt, he’s qualified. “I used my vision for the growth of the school system,” Camp said, “and now I would like to use my vision for the growth of the city.”
“Dan is somebody who has run a business and who has what it takes to understand the relationship of how all things have to work together in harmony to run a business,” said George Sherman, owner of George Sherman Clothiers in Starkville. He said that running a city is like running a business and added that Camp knows how to take ideas from both sides of an issue and give both parties something positive out of it.
“You’ve got to be the leader to get things done,” Camp said. “If you’re not the leader, you’re just wasting your time.”
“(Change)’s not going to be something that happens overnight, but if anybody’s going to get close to getting something done, it’s going to be me,” said Camp. “If you’ve got good ideas that you can sell to people, you can be a good influence.”
Thomas Gregory, a senior management of construction and land development major, supports Camp.
“He has, over the past 30 years, shown genuine concern for students and you can see that by his pretty much life-long project, the Cotton District,” Gregory said. “The Cotton District was just a vision, and he spent a while seeing his vision come to fruition and I think that somebody with that much vision can really do something for the city of Starkville.”