/ Photo By Tim Harris

Mike Reynolds talks to Janice Lockwood, the Family Resource Coordinator at Briarwood Elementary.

Rise Over Run Tell me some things about you that I would not know about your life based on your commercial or pamphlet.

Mike Reynolds I’ll give you a highlight package. First of all, I was born in Bowling Green. I’m the oldest of 11 children. My dad was a Kentucky State Supreme Court Justice for many years. My mom is still alive. My brothers and sisters are of all kinds: there’s tall ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, smart ones, dumb ones, all of the above.

I graduated from high school here, I’m the record holder of all-time leading wins by pitcher in my high school history, even today in baseball. I graduated from WKU in three and a half years. My major was history, with minors in military science and political science.

I was commissioned to Second Lietenant in the U.S. Army out of the WKU Army ROTC program. I served on active duty in the Army and came back and served in the Army Reserve. I was an officer. I served under two really well known generals: General William Westmoreland and General George Patton IV, he’s the son of the real famous Patton, but he was just the same. He was mean and ornery.

I came back to Bowling Green after the military, established a law practice. I’ve been an attorney here for 37 years. Before that I graduated from the University of Louisville School of Law. I had various and sundry cases over the 37 years- just too many to count – and most of them came out pretty well, I think, at least for the people.

I’m married with 4 children. My wife is a WKU grad, my oldest daughter is a Bellarmine grad, my oldest son is a Brescia grad, my third son is a junior at WKU and a pre-med major, our fourth child is a junior at Bowling Green High.

I’ve served a lot of civic and charitable organizations. For example, I was the chair of the Bowling Green/Warren County Bicentennial Commission in 1997-1998 that put on 170 community events, I’ve been the chair of the Bowling Green Municipal Utilities Board of Directors. I’ve been the chair of the school board here. I have and am currently on the Board of Trustees at Brescia University in Owensboro, KY. And I’m on the WKU Foundation Board – I’m in my eighth year of serving that – which is the board that oversees and manages all the money that comes into WKU. I’ve been an attorney for the Hilltopper Athletic Foundation, I was secretary of the Kentucky Advocates for Higher Education, which is a support group with over 20,000 members that pushes for the full formula funding by the legislature of the state’s public universities. You know, we’re trying to get the universities more money to operate on.

In political life, I have helped many candidates and managed many campaigns and I have assisted helping good people get elected in public office and so I decided I’d try myself because I’ve never run for anything before and I was fortunate enough to get the democratic nomination for this senate seat. And that’s me in a nutshell.

ROR Without local officials and just relying on state response, the ice storm damage would have been a much worse experience than it already has been, and in some cases, continues to be. Do you have any suggestions or ideas on improving our emergency response in Kentucky in the event of another disaster situation?

MR The inability to communicate was the whole thing. And AT&T had the worst problem with their customers. AT&T was wiped out in western and far western Kentucky. Verizon was not. The only way you could communicate by cell phone was by Verizon for over a week. And the whole deal is that there is no statute or law that requires the cell phone companies to have back up. Like an emergency generator at a hospital, for example, all hospitals are required to have emergency backup, so if their power goes out, the people on life support won’t die. The same wasn’t true in this ice storm. Frankfort couldn’t communicate with the counties or vice versa and what happened was all of the individual counties were on their own and some of the counties in far west Kentucky – like Fulton and Hickman county – they had to go down and talk to people in Tennessee in order to get up to Frankfort. That’s a joke. And that will be looked at as one of the major issues or problems of the early warning systems here.