Meet Your Candidate for the 2025 Mauldin City Council Election

Meet Mauldin City Council Candidate Jason Kraeling. Your vote is so important for the 2025 election! Please take a listen and share with your neighbors.

How the interviews worked:

All candidates received the same question at the time of their invitation to join us, and they were given 10 minutes for their interview. Candidates were allowed to bring along a companion, such as a campaign manager, family member, or friend, and to record our session themselves. There were no edits made to the interview.

Candidate links:

• Jason Kraeling

Katy Smith: On Tuesday, November 4th, 2025, there are elections in all six cities within Greenville County. I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and we are pleased to bring you interviews with most every candidate in contested races. Today, we feature the city of Mauldin. But first, a quick primer on elections in the city of Mauldin. In odd-numbered years like this one, Mauldin holds elections for half of its city council members, and in every four years, its mayor. Mauldin has six seats on council and all of them are at large, meaning all voters in the city can vote for them. Seats that are up for election in Mauldin are seat one, held by Taft Matney, seat three, held by Jason Kraeling, and seat five, held by Frank Allgood. Taft Matney and Frank Allgood are running for re-election unopposed. For seat three, Commodore McCrary has filed to run against Jason Kraeling, but he has since shared with us that he has decided to withdraw from the race, but his name will still appear on your ballot. As such, we recorded an interview with Jason Kraeling because you have a choice when you go to vote. All the details on how these interviews worked are at the end of this episode and in the show notes. But in short, know that each candidate had the same three questions and 10 timed minutes to respond. To find links to each candidate's campaign information, please check the show notes. I'm pleased to be here with Jason Kraeling, who is running for Mauldin City Council. Thanks for joining us, Jason.

Jason Kraeling: Well, thank you.

Meet the Candidate: Jason Kraeling

Katy Smith: Well, tell us about yourself and why you're running for re-election.

Jason Kraeling: Well, first of all, to introduce myself, I moved to Mauldin 17 years ago. I've lived in the upstate since the 86, 87 timeframe. I'm an engineer from Clemson University. Go Tigers. And I work for GE Vernova.

My job is I'm a value stream leader, which basically, if I was trying to explain to somebody, is kind of like Doge without the cutting of a lot of employees. What I do is I take lean methodologies and how Toyota works. And I put to use those tools, the thought structure, those types of things. We put that in practice and then we help the efficiency by getting rid of things that don't need to be done. So if it's something the customer is willing to pay for or something we have to do, we keep it, we try and maybe streamline it, but in any big business, you're going to have waste in your processes. It says, "Hey, we don't really need to be doing it." "Why are we doing it?" "Well, we've always done it." Which government of course is very similar to that, probably worse. But that's what we do. That's what I do. I've been doing that for, I've been with GE for 26 years, beginning of October. I've been there, I'm ruined as we joke about if you've been to GE long enough.

One of the reasons, I guess, telling you a little more about me. I do have two children, 15 and 19, happily married. Same woman for 17 years. She's put up with me most of that time.

Katy Smith: What do you believe are the biggest issues facing your constituents?

Jason Kraeling: Probably some of the big issues. When I joined the council, I really went to run, we had a problem. We had some zoning issues. We're putting in some businesses that didn't fit right outside my neighborhood. So I went to council meetings and the council at that particular time, knowing what I know now, the mentality at that time was, "let's get heads in beds" was a quote. Let's get as many people in the city as possible so that we can attract businesses. Which of course, if you live there, that's not a very nice thing because you'd like to have the restaurants, you'd like to have those things, but you also don't like the traffic. You'd like to have some peace and quiet.

So there was a lot of push for high-volume housing, new zoning changes. So basically, I went to council meetings, to some of the committee meetings, said my piece about, hey, we shouldn't have this business here or this particular development changing the zoning. And it was pretty much pencil-whipped in that they would go ahead and do it. And so that kind of upset me. And so I decided, hey, I was going to run for office. I did lose the first time against somebody who was pretty popular, but I did pretty well. And actually, she and I are friends. So it's not like it was a mean race, hopefully. But we ran. Then the mayor had beaten the previous mayor, or our current mayor beat, he was on council. And so I went and ran for his seat the next time, a special election because he was moved up to mayor and that seat was vacant. COVID hit and I had to run multiple times because every time we'd get ready to have the election, they'd put it off. And so I joked that I've run more for a seat than most people have.

But I joined that really to look at that. And there's the other issue with stormwater. And so with stormwater, the problem is, and I learned this after getting on council, the legal team that basically represents the city said, "Hey, don't touch stormwater. It is just a nightmare because things haven't been done. You touch it, you own it." And as we investigated as a council, and I ran because I knew people's houses were getting flooded during some of these storms and it's just, what can we do? And some of it was because we weren't even maintaining the stormwater because it was quote-unquote "county." Well, county will tell you that they do the EPA work, which is expensive and important. Those are all reports and how stormwater works. But nobody truly owned stormwater for a particular area, so nobody was responding to it. And that wasn't just Mauldin, it was also mostly upstate. It was just a mess, because over time, things weren't maintained, and even the things that were designed originally weren't designed for today.

So we, as a council, we made the decision, and this is the newer council that we currently have today, said, "Hey, we're going to try and resolve this issue." And not everybody's in 100% agreement on how much we were going to put into it, but we did say, "Hey, this is an issue. We're going to take this on." We then put in a, we asked for a third party to do a review of our stormwater. And the first six projects they looked at was over $10 million.

That's six projects. They're the worst in the city. But if you actually look at the total amount what we'd have to do to get the city right, it's probably closer to 20 million. And that was a couple of years ago.

So, how do you go to tackle that? And that's the, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? So we have a great city administrator and our public works director, they went after grants. And we did get over a million dollars worth of grants so far. We put in probably a total of over $2 million to go attack the stormwater. Again, it's a small bite. We also bought equipment. We have $100,000 in the budget each year just to pour stormwater, cleaning ditches, cleaning out, repairing some of the infrastructure that we have today for stormwater. We're not fixing everything, but we're making it better. We're still going after grants, still looking at other opportunities. When we have surpluses at any time, we're going to look at, hey, can we use this for some projects? What can we do? Looking at the designs. I'm an engineer. I have looked at some of the fixes proposed by engineering firms. And is there something we can do to make it better? Again, we're not putting in the big expensive stuff. Maybe we can dig this ditch out a little better or make this hole a little bigger, put in a little bigger pipe. Those things will make it better, but it doesn't fix everything for everybody, but it does make it better. So we've taken that approach.

And those are the things that we do face from a city. The stormwater is still going to be an issue. We do look over, the county does a pretty good job of looking over designs. New developers, they come in, they put in their catch basins and their ponds to slow the water down. And generally, the designs I've looked at, most of them just do two acts of what's required. So there shouldn't be adding a whole lot to the stormwater problem. A lot of the problems are already existing and things just get, they've been made worse over time. A lot of people think it's because of all the new development. From an engineering standpoint, looking at it, most from what I see is not. I've seen a few things done in the last 10 years that I would have raised my hand for, but currently, most of the developers are just doing twice as much as they need just to be on the safe side. But it's still facing us problems we still got to go after. Go for those grants, see what we can do to make people's lives better.

Katy Smith: Thank you. What would be your priorities if reelected?

Jason Kraeling: Continuing the development and going back to some of the growth. I didn't bring this up. I'm kind of very conservative when we do change zoning for developers. I have a no-harm rule that I try to follow. If somebody wants to be annexed into the city, if they want to annex into the zoning they have for the county, they want to move to the city, generally I'm okay because there's no harm done. But if somebody wants to take a piece of property that can house 20 homes in its current zoning, and they want to move to the city and they want to put in 100 homes, I have a problem with that and I'm almost always a no, unless there's some advantage for the people of the city.

But moving forward, I'm still going to continue with the stormwater and with the zoning and keep pushing it. But there's also, I like to look at moving forward to the city of Mauldin, we have the Swamp Rabbit Trail coming through there. We've got to make sure we get that developed, built correctly, useful, go throughout the city as best we can. There's a lot of opportunities for that. There are some things that I think could be even better if we were able to get some property for the Swamp Rabbit and to work with all the different companies and stuff along the railroad. It's just an awesome opportunity for the city. Also, we have a lot of, I'm trying to build some partnerships with some of the businesses in this upstate, in particular, like the stadium, around parks. Let's get some partnerships to really help build the city, some of the infrastructure.

Katy Smith: Well, thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for your willingness to continue to serve.

Jason Kraeling: All right. Well, thank you.

Katy Smith: Thanks for listening to the candidates. Here is more detail on our process. All candidates received the same three questions at the time of their invitation to join us shortly after the filing period closed. And they were given 10 timed minutes for their interview. Candidates were allowed to bring along a companion, such as a campaign manager, family member, or friend, and to record our session themselves. There were no edits made to the interviews. We've put links to the participating candidates' preferred internet presence on the episode page.