Peggy Lehner will give up the mayor title at the end of the year, but not her commitment to the city.
“This is what I’ve learned, at the local level you get things done, you can see what happens with them and you can track them and continue to have influence on things,” she said.
“The state legislature is very different from that. And it’s a constant give or take, and it’s all tied up in politics. It’s very discouraging, frankly,” she said. “You can still make a difference, but boy, it is really hard.”
Summing up her life experiences and work, the 75-year-old mother of five and grandmother of 14 said: “I wouldn’t take back a day.”
Public office
A Catholic conservative, Lehner was president of Ohio Right to Life from 1984-88 and active at St. Albert the Great Catholic Church in Kettering, where she served on the parish council from 1984-1987.
In 1991, she was appointed by Gov. George Voinovich to the Ohio Ethics Commission, where she served until 1997.
She credits U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, among others for encouraging her to run for Kettering City Council, where she served as an at-large member from 1998-2008.
She followed Husted to the Ohio Statehouse, where she was elected to the House seat he vacated. Before taking office in the House, Lehner was appointed to the Ohio Senate to fill out the last month of Jeff Jacobson’s “lame duck” session in December 2008.
She served in the Ohio House from 2009-2011, then returned to the Ohio Senate in 2011, again to replace Husted who was elected Ohio Secretary of State. Lehner served in the Senate from 2011-2020.
She quit following Husted’s political path because he went up too high, she joked, serving as Ohio’s secretary of state and lieutenant governor before his appointment to the U.S. Senate to fill Vice President JD Vance’s seat.
“Peggy is the definition of a true public servant. She leads with heart, cares deeply about others, and has dedicated her career to improving and saving the lives of children through her work in education and health care,” Husted said when Lehner announced her retirement. “Tina and I wish her and Jim all the best in a well-earned retirement.”
Lehner returned to the city of Kettering, succeeding her longtime friend Don Patterson, the city’s longest-serving mayor who spent 16 years in the role.
“Peggy was impactful on everything she did,” said Patterson.
Making a difference
When Lehner was first campaigning for Kettering City Council and knocking on doors she was struck by the number of senior citizens who were, as she called them, “trapped in their own homes.”
They would answer her knock at the door and were happy to have someone to talk to.
“Very frequently, I became aware quickly that this person did not have adequate food or transportation, socialization, any of that,” she said.
Kettering’s Lathrem Senior Center offered a plethora of recreational and educational opportunities, bridge and other activities, but that is for active seniors.
Lehner made it her priority once in office to do something about the frail elderly in Kettering. She put together a committee with the support of the city manager at the time of anyone in the city who might touch the lives of an elderly person.
Credit: Tom Gilliam
Credit: Tom Gilliam
Within a year, Kettering set up a frail elderly task force and hired a full-time employee, believed to be the first in the state whose job was to address the needs of the frail elderly, she said.
They set up a lunch at the senior center several days a week for the frail elderly program, set up a transportation system with volunteer drivers. That program is still in effect.
“I met a woman recently who obviously had many, many issues to deal with,” she said. “And with one call to the senior service coordinator in the city of Kettering, they dealt with some health issues in her house, transportation, Meals on Wheels, got her set up with all this.”
On Kettering
Lehner and her husband, Jim, a retired orthopedic surgeon, have lived in Kettering for 45 years. It’s where they raised their five children.
“We just love the community. We’ve never had a complaint about it,” she said.
The Lehners first moved to Dayton for Jim Lehner’s residency at Miami Valley Hospital following his graduation from medical school at Ohio State University.
What made Kettering attractive was not just that it was close to the hospital. It had good schools, although they already had planned to send their children to parochial schools, the city had nice neighborhoods and was family-oriented. They also found a home parish in St. Albert the Great.
“I think Kettering has remained a lot of those things,” Lehner said.
But there are issues.
“Housing is a big one, where we’re landlocked so we have no new land, really, or very little to build newer homes on. So our homes tend to be starter homes, and we would love to be able to keep people in Kettering. But that is a challenge. I would say it’s the No. 1 challenge facing Kettering, frankly.”
Another challenge the city faces, according to Lehner, is term limits.
A ballot measure passed by residents in 2012 limits officeholders to no more than two consecutive terms of four years each for at-large and district council and the mayor seats. An officeholder must sit out one four-year cycle before an appointment or run for office after serving two consecutive terms, according to the city charter.
These new term limits “have been disastrous,” Lehner said. “It just assures that you have inexperienced people in the mayor’s seat.”
While not all communities have term limits, Kettering is the only one known in the region to have term limits that leap from the council to mayor positions. Typically, an officeholder would be limited to two consecutive four-year terms on council followed by two consecutive four-year terms as mayor.
“It’s absolutely critical to the future of the community, I think, for people to have a deep understanding of budgets and programs, the value of different programs. You’ve got to be very multifaceted when you’re a member of council. You’re going to be asked one day to be solving an issue with parks and rec, and the next day senior services and the next day, the budget.”
Mayor-elect Bryan Suddith has just completed two years of his first term on council.
Lehner said she considers Suddith a dear friend and backed his candidacy. Suddith has said he is grateful for her friendship and access to her as he leads Kettering’s most inexperienced council since the city’s formation in the mid-’50s.
Education committee, children’s caucus
In the Ohio Statehouse, Lehner played a key role in education policy and started the Ohio Legislative Children’s Caucus, a bipartisan, issues-based group.
“We just got behind any legislation that improved the quality of life for kids, not necessarily just education,” she said.
“People tend to unite around children’s issues, but at the same time they ignore them, which sounds like a total contradiction,” Lehner said. “So our our job was to raise awareness of them and promote those things that we thought made sense.”
As a state senator, the Republican in 2015 unveiled a bipartisan bill to overhaul Ohio’s charter school system to bring more accountability and background checks. She also co-sponsored a bill requiring schools to notify parents within two hours if a child doesn’t show up for school.
Vouchers for Catholic schools and other private schools entered halfway through those eight years she chaired the Senate education committee. Then-Senate President Matt Huffman’s goal was to have every child in the state eligible for a voucher.
“My position was the system wasn’t built to pay state dollars for every kid who was in a private school, that it was not affordable to do that without getting it a lot more money,” she said.
In the legislature, there was a growing sentiment, which she did not share, that the state already was spending too much on education.
“We had a plan that had been worked on by legislators for a long time to try to reevaluate how we paid for schools. … The debate for three or four years there was that plan versus the voucher expansion. Eventually, the voucher expansion won out."
‘Things have to change’
Education was always near and dear to Lehner. She lived in a schoolhouse for several years as a child.
Her father, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, and her mother, who majored in French, opened their own school named for Lehner’s maternal grandmother, Mary Reid Cleland, who was a teacher in North Carolina.
“Our family lived on the third floor of this beautiful old mansion and my mother ran the school,” she said. “I used to love to sit up in my bedroom and listen to conversations in her office down below, particularly when it involved a friend of mine or something who was in trouble. It was through the laundry chute that I could hear, so I kind of got a laundry chute education on how to run a school.”
Discussions around the dinner table had to do with how to make a school work and work well for children.
“It was a unique childhood. There’s no question about it. My childhood revolved around education.”
It wasn’t easy, especially when her parents lost two children. Of Lehner’s 10 siblings, three did not make it to adulthood, including a 2-year-old who drowned before Lehner was born. Two more died of leukemia at ages 7 and 8 when Lehner was between 3 and 5.
Lehner recalled her father wondering aloud how were they going to go on, and her mother telling him, “that little school will be our salvation.”
“I remember that as a kid, and I saw that. They took a horrible situation and made good out of it, and I think it’s always just sort of led me to believe that you get people involved and committed and they’ll, they’ll do good.”
“One of my biggest concerns right now about the future is that commitment, I don’t see people engaging in community building in recent years,” she said.
Negativity, hatred and partisanship as a nation is of great concern to Lehner.
“I have lots of worries, lots of fears because I don’t know how you undo that, how you bring the good out in people,” she said. “We have got to get over our hatred and our suspicions and animosity towards each other and get back to the spirit of rebuilding.”
“If we’re going to have successful communities at the local, the state, or the national level, things have to change,” she said.
Peggy Lehner’s career
1984-1988: President of Ohio Right to Life
1984-1987: Served on parish council of St. Albert the Great Catholic Church
1991-1997: Served on the Ohio Ethics Commission
1998-2008: Kettering at-large councilwoman
December 2008: Ohio Senate, finishing former Sen. Jeff Jacobson’s term
2009-2011: Ohio House of Representatives
2011-2020: Ohio Senate
2021-2025: Kettering mayor
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