Ezra Nanes Brings a Passion for Fairness, Justice and Equity to His Role as Mayor of State College

Ezra Nanes will be sworn in as the 11th mayor of State College on Monday, to serve a four-year term. Nanes was elected with more than 3,100 votes on Nov. 2. As mayor, Nanes hopes to strengthen the relationship between the State College Borough Council, Penn State, and members of the local community.

Nanes is also the director of business development and account management at AccuWeather and plans to continue working in this role during his term as mayor of State College.

Originally from New York City, he graduated with distinction from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history. He later earned a Master of Business Administration in marketing and finance from the Penn State Smeal College of Business in 2012.

He serves on the committee of the Osaze Osagie Memorial Scholarship Fund at the Centre Foundation. He is also a member of the Congregation Brit Shalom Social Action Committee, the Community Diversity Group, the Centre County Democratic Executive Committee, and the Nittany Mountain Biking Association. He resides in State College with his wife, Mieke Haeck, and their two daughters, Mila and Raffa.

Town&Gown founder Mimi Barash Coppersmith sat down with Nanes via Zoom to discuss what he hopes to accomplish as mayor of State College and what motivates and keeps him focused in his personal and professional life.

Mimi: The first words that come to my mind when I think of you are unique, open-minded, fair, and motivated to make life inclusive for all. Do you have any idea when your drive to excel and serve entered your bloodstream?

Ezra: I think I can draw some connections back to my childhood, my Jewish heritage, and faith. But this is on reflection, after some decades of thinking about what motivates me. When I was a child, for some reason, I cared a lot about getting good grades. I really tried very hard to get A’s or check-pluses or hundreds in my classes. That always mattered to me.

Mimi: Do you think that’s because you enjoy recognition?

Ezra: It started with my mother and father. They were like lights shining in my life, the warm glow of being loved by your parents. And I just wanted them to be proud of me. I think that extended into the world that I lived in. At some point, I also realized that the desire was coming from within me, and I wanted to do it because it meant something to me.

Mimi: What gave you the courage not only to be yourself and serve for the good of others, but also to achieve excellence in all that you do?

Ezra: I was born less than 30 years after the end of the Holocaust, an event in the 20th century that changed the world. And it affected the Jewish people, particularly in Germany and in Europe. Growing up so close to an event like that, with such a profound impact, and hearing stories about not only the Holocaust but the oppression of the Jewish people in more recent times, I think it just planted in me a passion for fairness, justice, and equity. And that really inspires me every day.

I’ve always felt that my father and mother were very kind people. My dad literally could not kill a fly. We lived in an apartment in Manhattan on the 17th floor, and if he would catch a little spider or even a mouse, which was very infrequent, but if he would, he could not kill them. He had to go and find a way to release them. I learned about kindness in the way you interact with other people. And that’s from a very young age. It was instilled in me.

As an adult, I made a lot of conscious efforts to get to know myself, and I do a lot of reading. I read a lot of books to learn about the world and myself. I meditate. And I do a lot of things to try to understand what’s going on inside of me so that I can be the best person and be true to what’s there.

Mimi: You appear to be a wonderful father. You have two children?

Ezra: I have two girls. My youngest child is transgender. She was assigned male at birth but at a young age knew she was a girl. And it took my wife, Mieke, and I time to understand what that meant. Because as a parent, you want your children to be happy and to love themselves. It took us time to understand what these expressions from our youngest were. Much credit to Mieke; we had so many conversations and met other families. And we came to understand that just unconditional love and support was the way to help her, and just to embrace who she was telling us she was. And since we’ve done that, she’s been happy and thriving as herself, and she really hasn’t changed. She is who she is, and she’s always been that way. Our older daughter has been an incredible supporter and defender of her younger sister as well. We love our children; we’re very fortunate.

Mimi: You and I first met at a fundraiser for your election when you had the courage to challenge a popular incumbent state senator (Jake Corman, in 2018). You lost. But you didn’t let that stop you. What makes Ezra Nanes run, literally and figuratively?

Ezra: I remember when we first met. Your words of support and feedback were really inspiring and uplifting to me. I want to thank you for that. You’ve been someone that I’ve looked up to, and your support meant a lot on an emotional level. I’m a believer that political campaigns are the work of politics as much as serving in office, because you spend a year or more, sometimes two years of your life, listening to people and really connecting with the community and understanding what matters to people. And if you do that with sincere intention to understand and try to frame the issues so people can be inspired to take action, well, there’s no such thing as a losing campaign even if you don’t win the election. I realized that during that campaign. We connected with a lot of people and learned a lot, and people were uplifted. So, we just continued to be involved.

Mimi: What are your goals for the borough? Can you pinpoint areas for change or advancement, especially regarding some of the “progress,” in quotes? The progress that disturbs the environment of our wonderful college town?

Ezra: We love State College. That’s why we live here. That’s why we’re raising our children and building careers here. I ran for mayor because I love this town. Let’s start with what I think is the most important: That every person, regardless of age, gender, sexual identity, race, religion, national origin, ability, should feel loved, valued, respected, empowered, and protected in our community. I think that is the key to unlocking the potential of our wonderful place. We’re making incredible progress toward that. The borough is hiring a director of equity and inclusion. When you talk about equity and inclusion, just learning about other people can really give you a greater degree of empathy for them. And that makes us all better people when we can connect with each other.

Mimi: It opens doors to genuine progress.

Ezra: Diverse inputs to decision-making processes also make for better decisions. I work for AccuWeather and there’s a thing in meteorology called consensus forecasting, which says that when you take the average of a group of forecasts from a set of experts, that the average of those will always be less prone to error than the best individual forecast. So, it’s this idea that when you bring more inputs into a decision, you get a better decision out of having more diverse inputs.

Downtown is the center of our community; it is so important to folks. It is, without a doubt, the thing I’ve heard most on the campaign trail. When I knock on somebody’s door or at an event, when I ask, “What matters to you?” “Well, downtown. I want to make sure we don’t lose the character of our community here.” And so, I think that as we grow, which we want to do, we want to make sure that our growth is aligned with our values. And those values are of having communal spaces, green spaces, walkable and bikeable areas, being inclusive in terms of housing, including affordable housing, and being sustainable so that we can continue to have a healthy relationship with our natural environment. These are some values that I think we must make sure are tied into our growth.

Mimi: The university and the community need to be partners in progress. What ideas do you have to strengthen a relationship with a new university president on the horizon?

Ezra: The first thing I’ll do as a newly sworn-in mayor and even as mayor-elect – I have plans to meet with President Barron as well – is to build personal relationships. When you have a partnership, a symbiotic relationship, we are parts of a whole. We are two parts of one thing, which is State College. So, I think having relationships where we can be straightforward and honest with one another is very important. I would like the president of the university to think of the borough as a partner, an ally, in creating this community that we want to and fostering the environment at the university that’s needed.

Mimi: Under President Barron’s leadership, the university has shown a huge interest in entrepreneurship with the LaunchBox and the new facility on Burrowes. Those are exciting things with tremendous potential. We need new ideas to replace the businesses that aren’t coming back.

Ezra: Absolutely. Businesses need talent; businesses need innovative ideas that serve the community. And those exist in such an abundance at the university. The university, the student body, and the intellectual contributions they make to the world are huge resources for our community. That’s why I put so much emphasis on creating an environment where people feel welcome, because we do have so many people here, and what we want is for some amount of people who come to Penn State to choose to stay and live and build their business.

Mimi: The Centre Region is a complex place to govern. In modern terms, the borough and the five contiguous townships have separate governments, which make regional planning and development decisions that sometimes conflict with our dreams. Do you think conversations for consolidation should begin to prepare us for our combined future and avoid expansion that conflicts with the beauty of the area?

Ezra: This is something we all really should be asking ourselves. We have a great organization in the COG (Council of Governments), which shows us the value, the monetary value, of aligning our resources and our needs together.

Mimi: Take a look at Toftrees. An elegant project by two late men with vision who got a separate act of the legislature to create an elegant suburban community with a State College address. More recently, Patton Township allowed some construction that steals from the beauty of the original dream. How do you view the borough’s life in COG or the prospects of consolidation? We have six separate governments.

Ezra: Yes, and that adds complexity. I’ll give you an example. Something that I think is really important to our future is finding alternative ways to get around. We need our cars; we love our cars. But we need bike infrastructure, for example. And the COG has a bike plan, a master plan because we need arterial transportation so people can get on a bike and go somewhere quickly, efficiently, and safely. It takes cars off the road and makes it easier to get places. It’s healthy; there’s a lot of benefits for us. However, in order for that plan to be put into place, each individual municipality has to find the political will and the finances to build each piece.

Mimi: These are the days when we need to think about those things, because we’re coming out of a pandemic, which has punished us with major injuries overall.

Ezra: Absolutely. It’s interesting that you mentioned this because there is an unprecedented flow of money now from the federal government, which is going to help many communities like ours not only recover, but build to a new level and to realize some of the dreams that we have with funds that would be hard to access otherwise.

At Borough Council, this came up, and we were talking about community development block grants and building inclusive, affordable housing. One of our leaders in the borough said that they had never seen this kind of money available. So now is the time to have a vision. What do we want to achieve? And to go after some of that federal money to take advantage of it and build things that would be hard to build otherwise.

Mimi: Are you determined to start the process?

Ezra: I am, absolutely. Through this campaign, the whole idea is that it’s important to create a vision that we can point toward. And that’s why we talk about infrastructure. There are huge projects that are being planned, and we need to make sure that when we plan them, they’re planned with the community’s priorities in mind. So that’s pedestrian safety, green space, and shared spaces. Development that is in harmony with nature and sustainability.

Those are the things that our community really wants and needs. And we need to make sure that large developments, whether it be transportation or residential developments, include those things. After all, we’re building toward the things we really want.

Mimi: How do you manage to do it all? You have earned election to a tough part-time job. Any thoughts about how you’ll be able to sustain your amazing record? You, your family, your AccuWeather record, and your sanity? It’s not enough to be able to meditate, exercise, and explore. How do you keep yourself focused on all those very important challenges?

Ezra: I believe you’ve said the word, focus. And sometimes it does take time, when you just ask yourself, “What is the thing that we need to focus on right now?” There will always be a lot of things moving around, and I’ve come to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Even from my former days as an actor, you learn to be in situations where things may be dynamic, or shifting, or even unknown. And you’ll learn to get comfortable being in that situation; even if it doesn’t feel very comfortable, you learn to deal with it.

When things get really busy, when there’s a lot of things in front of me, I’ll take a deep breath, I’ll take a walk with my dog, I’ll go for a run, I’ll talk to Mieke. And we’ll just have a conversation, and we’ll try to understand what we really know deep down is the thing we need to focus on. Or I’ll go out and seek input, counsel from you, from members of the community, and inevitably, there will be clarity.

There was a poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. And he wrote a book called Letters to a Young Poet. One of the pieces of advice this master poet was giving to this young poet was to learn to love the questions. So, you must learn to love sometimes living with big questions. And also, problem-solving. If you don’t love problem-solving, then this may not be the job. I love taking on things where I can help make something better.

Mimi: Is there something you’d like to say that I didn’t ask you about?

Ezra: I want to express gratitude to you, Mimi, and the community for the support and the faith that everyone’s given to us to play a public role. My role is mayor. I see myself as a member of the community playing a role. That role is to be the voice, so I’ll be doing a lot of listening in the coming years, trying to understand what I’m hearing, and synthesizing it into something that we can all share inspiration around. We want to point ourselves in a direction and go after it. And the clearer we can be about that, the better.

Mimi: I’d like to close this interview with a Yiddish wish for only good things: Zei gezunt.

Ezra: Thank you, Mimi. That’s a wonderful closing and sentiment.