Politics revamped: A Q&A with Shayne McKinney, mayoral candidate for Fort Smith
Shayne McKinneyCredit:Derek RiggsShayne McKinneywears a lot of hats. Besides currently running for mayor of his native Fort Smith and organizing a petition to let residents vote on changing from a city. . .
Shayne McKinneyCredit:Derek RiggsShayne McKinneywears a lot of hats. Besides currently running for mayor of his native Fort Smith and organizing a petition to let residents vote on changing from a city administrator-board of directors system to a mayor-council system, he’s a real estate investor, a landlord and a digital creator with overhalf a million TikTok followersand a couple hundred thousand more across other platforms. He also appears to be a vampire. McKinney’s campaign website isVampireMayor. com. One of his campaign slogans is “Revamp Fort Smith. ” In his most-viewed TikTok video, McKinney’s reflection doesn’t appear in a mirror as he gives a house tour of a vampire-themed Airbnb he manages. He even has visible fangs. Taking all of that into account, I, perhaps naively, went into my interview with McKinney, 44, as if I were talking to not just a mayoral candidate, but a real vampire. I genuinely wanted to learn about — in addition to his policies — what it’s like to be a vampire living and working in society in 2026. But when my questions veered toward his vampirism, McKinney bared his teeth, not wanting the spectacle to overshadow the grassroots campaign he’s been building since last Halloween (when he, fittingly, officially announced his mayoral bid), and his ambitions to deregulate Fort Smith, improve its infrastructure and increase transparency in its government operations. The following is taken and edited from my late June conversation with McKinney, who described himself as “libertarian leaning” and “independent. ”How did your vampirism start?Fifteen years ago, I was bitten by a bat. It was close to Halloween, and there was a bat. It was in a cage, and had been handled by me and others many, many times. But I startled it one morning, and it bit me. Many years later, people continued to identify me as a vampire — not myself identifying as a vampire — but other people began to see me as a vampire and say, “You really remind me of a vampire? Are you a vampire?” … Much like you just accept at one point that everybody talks about you as though you are a human. At some point, there is no value in arguing anymore. Let people see you the way they are already seeing you anyway, and embrace that. When you want to educate somebody about something difficult to understand, like the inner workings of a municipal city as complex as Fort Smith, Arkansas, the subject is inherently boring. People don’t pay attention. The best way to educate someone is to become more interesting than the problem is difficult to understand. If my vampirism causes people to pay attention long enough to become educated, then that seems like a valuable tool that I should use. What made you want to run for mayor?I wouldn’t say I want to run for mayor. Sometimes you see a problem that needs to be fixed, and if you don’t take action to fix it, if you think you know what could be done to fix it, you are now contributing to that problem. The primary problems we have in Fort Smith are communication- and operations-related. In other words, in Fort Smith, we have many different committees that have good purposes and do good things individually, but often don’t communicate what they’re actually doing to the people effectively, or to organizations or businesses that could benefit from the services. This leads to redundancies where the same thing is done by multiple different people. There’s a significant lack of leadership in our city. There is no clear “this is the person that’s in charge. ” When I started this campaign to change our form of government, less than four out of 100 people even knew we had a city administrator that was supposed to be in charge. In the past 19 months, we haven’t had a city administrator. They haven’t been able to fill the position with someone qualified. Tell me about your policies. Politically speaking, I am in favor of the people having as much freedom as possible. That means when in doubt, err on the side of the citizen can do whatever the citizen is trying to do. The city of Fort Smith is notoriously — infamously, I would say — difficult to do business with. I’ve started numerous businesses in Fort Smith over the years, and it’s always a fight against the city itself. This isn’t unique to me. People literally give warnings about dealing with the city of Fort Smith. From a business perspective, that is not what we want for a city. That hinders economic development because that warning could have been to the next major employer coming here. My policy is to reduce the impact of our city’s inspectors on building and planning, and publicly advertise that Fort Smith has changed. If you’ve tried doing business with us in the past, give us another shot. We will be much easier to work with from this day going forward. “What can we do to help you when you call us?” will be our motto — not “What are you doing wrong? What have you messed up?”The major policies relating to the citizens of Fort Smith are our city not taking responsibility for major infrastructure expenses, to the tune of almost a billion dollars between our consent decree and our water system. That has been kicked down the road for five decades now, and it’s totaling more money than our city can put together, which has to be addressed. My first actions in office would be starting with cameras. I livestream my life and my real estate development and other things. I intend to livestream city meetings and to increase the live-action access to information about what’s happening in what meetings and who’s doing what. … If something is relevant to a citizen, the city needs to be proactively going to that citizen and saying, “Look, this is relevant to you, and this is why this is a project we’re doing in your neighborhood. ”Bonus questionsFavorite books?“Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter, “Varney the Vampire” by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, and “The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. TolkienFavorite Fort Smith area restaurants?21 West End, Piatto and The Vault 1905Favorite movie?“Harvey” (1950)