05/02/2026
Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you about Walkerton! I love this community and am proud to be a Town Council member helping Make Walkerton Better!
Gene Reese: Making Walkerton Better
WALKERTON, Ind. — Gene Reese answered the phone on the first ring.
Reese is a retired athletic director, a veteran honorably discharged in 1976, and, since January of 1990, a member of the Walkerton Town Council. On Tuesday, the town of Walkerton will decide if they send him back for another term.
Reese did not ask for the questions in advance. He answered quickly, in the cadence of a man who has rehearsed nothing because he has not had to.
"The thing that probably drives me the most," he said, "is being a team leader to our great councils, a servant leader, a leader that helps other people out."
Walkerton is a town of roughly 2,000 people in St. Joseph County. It has a single high school, John Glenn, named for the astronaut and senator. It has a downtown, a few churches, and, increasingly over the last decade, a list of new public spaces: a library, a community center, a Veterans Park, a splash pad, and pickleball courts. According to Reese, those projects and others have been built with roughly $60 million in grants and private donations.
"Since I've been in office," he said, "Our team (Town Council, Town Administrator, Clerk-Treasurer) have learned how to find grants and donations and to do a lot of different projects for our town without costing the taxpayer any money at all."
Some of those grants come from the State of Indiana. The Community Crossings Matching Grant Program, administered by the state's Department of Transportation, funds local road and bridge work on an 80-20 match for towns of Walkerton's size. It is the kind of money that pays for the sidewalk extension to John Glenn High School that Reese says he wants to see finished in his next term. But most of the donations, though, come from one family.
"We have one tremendously generous family in the town of Walkerton, which is the Hiler family," Reese said. "They have been responsible for helping us build a new library, the community center, the pickleball courts, and some things at the park."
The Hilers, he explained, have ties to Walkerton through John Glenn High School and through Hiler Industries, a longtime local business. He described them as "very strong supporters of the town of Walkerton in a lot of different ways."
The relationship between a small town and a generous family is the kind of arrangement that does not explain itself easily in campaign brochures, and yet it is, in many small American towns, how things actually get built. State grants reward the prepared. Our Town Administrator has to know where to look, how to write the application, and how to keep the town's paperwork clean enough that the next award is easier to win. Major private donations require something harder: years of trust, kept relationships, a council willing to steward the money in a way that makes the next gift easier to ask for. Most of what Walkerton has built in the Reese era exists because someone made the call, followed through, then made the next call.
When asked which of the projects he is proudest of, Reese named two.
The first was the Veterans Park, dedicated in 2021. "I'm a veteran, and I got honorably discharged in 1976," he said, "I'm a strong proponent of our military and a strong proponent of our country."
The second was the community center, which opened last year. He talked about it less as a building than as a use. "It gives an opportunity for people now to have different kinds of occasions, whether it be a graduation or a reunion or a family get-together, Christmas, Thanksgiving," he said. "It gives people in Walkerton a place to go where they can have their families come in and fellowship together."
If voters return him to the council Tuesday, two priorities sit at the top of his list. The sidewalk to the school is one. The other is a new building for the Christian Community Food Pantry, which Reese said the council is helping plan. The construction, he said, will be funded entirely through grants and pantry money.
When asked what he wanted residents to know about him that wasn't on a yard sign, Reese paused and came back to where he started.
"It's way beyond politics. It's people. It's trying to help the people in Walkerton to have better communities and better places, things that they can do with their families. Just having things in town that is going to make their lives better."
**Note - small edits were made for accuracy **
