“Cornelius is a very special place. My family has been genuinely blessed to live here.  Since being approached to consider serving as a Town Commissioner, I have spent the last couple of months seeking advice from neighbors, town officials, and community leaders.  Their perspective and guidance have helped me better appreciate this incredible opportunity to give back.  Importantly, it also confirmed whether my participation could make a positive, constructive contribution to the election process.  These are the reasons I’m stepping forward and officially filing my candidacy today.”

“Cornelius is a great town with great people.  Yet, I know there is frustration and a concern of losing something of our way of life.  Traffic congestion, road expansion delays, and new development are on all our minds.  It seems to me most everyone has a similar vision for our Town, but we’re having difficulty seeing how to get and stay there.”

“My campaign will, first and foremost, offer practical solutions with the potential to make progress immediately.  You will hear less about ‘what I would like to see happen’ and more about ‘how we make it happen’.  In the business Lisa and I owned, when confronted with a problem, we’d say ‘OK, it’s time to turn lemons into lemonade’ and then work with our team building on each incremental improvement.”

“If given the privilege to serve our community, I will work with the Board, the Mayor, our incredible team of Town professionals, and each of you to design and implement real solutions.  Stay tuned…we have some exciting, innovative ideas we hope you’ll like!”

About Bob Menzel

Menzel was the founder and CEO of KODIAKOOLER®, a national manufacturer and distributor based in the Lake Norman region.  A pioneer in the development of sustainable packaging materials to protect temperature-sensitive products, KODIAKOTTON® was designed to replace foam coolers (aka Styrofoam).  Environmentally and economically sustainable, KODIAKOTTON® insulated shipping containers have been adopted across the medical and food industries, including some of the largest mail-order pharmacies in the U.S., thereby removing millions of foam coolers from municipal disposal streams.

“As a business owner and entrepreneur, our team worked every day with customers and vendors, not just talking about problems, but to solving them,” Menzel continued. “And those solutions had to be responsible and achievable – solutions that met our customer’s expectations and got delivered.  If elected, each and every person in Cornelius will be a customer to be valued and served.”

Menzel presently serves on the Board of Directors of the Peninsula Property Owners Association and served two terms on a local school board. He is an Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), past President of a local chapter of the National Kidney Foundation, and has led multiple missions trips to Central and South America.  Among Menzel’s many passions is supporting young people in our region who wish to serve our nation in our Armed Forces.  He has served as an Admission Liaison Officer (ALO) for the United States Air Force Academy for the past 15 years. In this role, Menzel mentors high school students in a three-county area through the Academy admissions as well as the ROTC college scholarship process.

Bob and his wife Lisa, married 38 years, moved their family to Cornelius in 2000.  They have a son, Rob, a Major in the United States Air Force, and a daughter, Liz, a Physician’s Assistant with a local oncology surgical center. They are the proud grandparents of two grandchildren.