An OU student wants to know what Norman citizens care about before he reaches city hall.

Matthew Zellner, a full-time OU law student in his first semester, is campaigning for the Ward 6 city council seat against current councilman James Griffith. Zellner said he is currently door-knocking and speaking everywhere he can to get his name heard before the March 2 election.

“I realize that without a question I would be able to do it,” Zellner said. “If the race was last August, I wouldn’t have done it just because I wouldn’t have had time, but now I know that I do have time.”

Zellner said he waited to make his final decision to run after seeing how he handled his first semester of law school, but began considering running after spending the summer in London as a Dunham Scholar with the Price College of Business.

“I go just like 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.,” Zellner said. “In a lot of respects, I have a less restrictive schedule than even more full-time adults do.”

Zellner is not the first law student to run for office before graduating. John Jordan ran for District 47 State House Representative when the seat opened up in summer 2008.

“I felt I had a lot to offer since I came in with a legal mind,” said Jordan, now an attorney. “There is a difference between ‘went to law school’ and ‘being in law school.’ It is a difference when it comes to people’s perceptions.”

The question of his age, 23, has surfaced once in Zellner’s campaign, and he said it was not negative.

“I have been extremely surprised that only one time did someone actually bring up my age and that was someone supporting me,” Zellner said. “Once people realize the credentials I have, I think that the questions are answered about my ability. They see the education I am receiving, the fact that I’m born and raised here, the fact that I care about what’s going on, the fact that I actually do pay attention on issues and I want to represent the people.”

In contrast to Jordan’s run for state representative, Zellner said the cost of a city council campaign is significantly lower.

“One of the good things about city council is that it’s not nearly on the grand scale of what House and Senate campaigns are,” Zellner said. “I aspire to do that some day very soon, but right now while in school I don’t feel like I’m ready to undertake a campaign or an office that grand yet.”

With the city council elections more than a month away, Zellner said his focus is reaching out to the citizens of Norman to hear their concerns.

“It’s really not how much money you make,” Zellner said. “It’s the message that you get out to people and people will listen if they feel like you actually care. One hundred percent, without a question, I want to represent the people of my ward.”

Zellner said of all the people he has spoken with, not one has ever met or spoken to his or her current councilman.

“One of the first calls I made was to an elderly couple here in Norman,” he said. “They had literally watched me grow up in church, and I was talking to them saying, ‘You’ve been around for a long time. What are some of the issues you guys really really care about?’ The thing that they said was, ‘We turn on channel 20 and we watch the city council meetings, and we get so frustrated with some of the things they’re doing, and we have to turn the TV off because we know that there’s nothing we can do about it.’”

One of Zellner’s main issues he wants to address is the availability and communication of councilmen and the citizens of their wards, he said. Zellner is giving out his e-mail address to Norman residents so he can hear their ideas and take them to council meetings.

Dipankar Ghosh, executive director of the MBA program at Price College of Business, worked with Zellner while he was a graduate student.

“He is engaging and very personable,” Ghosh said. “He came to class prepared and has great people skills. He will do very well.”

Zellner said he decided to run for city council after lots of thought and listening to what citizens had to say about the current state of city council.

“I had contemplated many months before deciding to run,” Zellner said. “This was not on a whim or in response to something I saw or heard. As soon as people starting calling the citizens ‘they’ and not ‘we,’ we have a problem.”