Wedged between Gulfport, downtown St. Pete and Pinellas Point, with a northern boundary that zags from Fifth Avenue North to Central, District 7 comprises predominantly African-American neighborhoods, some rich in history. It’s an area troubled by crime, poverty and failing schools, but also empowered by hope, as local leaders seek to redevelop areas like the Deuces along 22nd Street South, where St. Petersburg College recently opened a campus, and to work for better education, food access and relationships with police.
City Councilman Wengay Newton, known for his outspokenness, represents the district, but is leaving his seat due to term limits.
For the five people running to succeed him, it’s not just about seizing a rare open seat; it’s about guiding the city through a community redevelopment plan (CRA) aimed at building up the area and making sure the voices of the district’s residents don’t get drowned out as affluent parts of town redevelop with gusto.
CL is not endorsing anyone in the election for this seat, which takes place August 25 in the district. (If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a citywide runoff in November.) But we did want to get to know the five candidates. So we sat down with each (one was a phone interview) over coffee — lots of coffee — to see what they had to say.
Oh, and if you're wondering how the candidates feel about the Rays stadium issue, we did an entirely separate piece on that, given how much weight some seem to be placing on it.
Will Newton
The union leader and retired firefighter is the youngest of eight siblings, one of them Wengay Newton. But he’s not running to replicate his brother. The two are very different in demeanor and point of view. While his brother was often the sole dissenting vote on many issues, the younger Newton said he prefers a different approach.
“I work through collaboration and trying to reach a deal because that’s what I do on a daily basis when I represent the men and women in uniform,” he said. “I get deals done.”
He likes the approach Chief Anthony Holloway is taking with police-community relations. He said the CRA is “perfect” but would ask the council look for creative ways to fund community projects in the district. Like the other candidates, he hopes investment in the south side will create jobs with livable wages and increase homeownership, which may already be happening.
“Here you have housing in Jordan Park, and you can go across the street and get a four-year degree. How great is that?”
Newton added he admires former mayor Rick Baker, especially his “seamless cities” concept, which he’d like the city to embody.
“We want to make sure that there’s no noticeable distinctions, glaring distinctions, as you travel throughout this 60-square mile place,” he said.
Sheila Scott-Griffin
“That is the neighborhood I grew up in,” she said. “So when they dumped that effluent, raw sewage… into Clam Bayou, that’s called environmental injustice.”
She’s not a critic of the mayor per se, but there were some things she would have liked to see done differently, like more public outreach ahead of the recycling rollout and the Pier decision.
As other media outlets have reported, Scott-Griffin’s record has a blemish, arising from decade-old problems with her now-closed law practice. The Florida Bar Association twice suspended her license and fined her for lack of competence and due diligence on her handling of several cases. She said she suspects the complaints stem from a vendetta, and that she shouldn’t be judged by those complaints alone.
“It was one of those things that nothing in my history could have diagnosed… if you call any job I worked, if you pull any record, it’s without blemish,” she said.
Aaron Sharpe
“I’d like to see us build community day/night care learning centers within walking distance of every house,” said Sharpe, who has served on the city’s code enforcement board for six years.
He said he wants to get rid of education “silos” and provide career-building opportunities like internships for the district’s youth.
He thinks eliminating desperation and poverty are key in reducing crime, and that the Pier process is working the way it’s supposed to work. He wants to look at city worker salaries, he said, to make sure longtime city employees are earning wages they deserve.
“All of those folks that have basically given their lives to the city, and they work hard and care deeply about what they do,” he said. “We need to make whole the people that were skipped and left behind in the past decade.”
Unlike the four other candidates in the race, Sharpe is white. But so far, he said, identity politics haven’t come up.
“I have probably walked 15, 20 miles, knocking on doors all over the district,” he said. “And not once has anybody said that. In my eyes, we all do look alike. It’s about being able to celebrate diversity.”
Elvert “Lewis” Stephens
At 26, Stephens is the youngest of the candidates, but he doesn’t want you to hold his age against him. After all, his career to date has largely been centered on youth development. He has worked in the Department of Juvenile Justice and currently works as a behavior specialist at Campbell Park Elementary.
He said he’s running because his generation is currently lacking a voice in city politics.
“I had just gotten back from college and I had seen what was taking place in the city and I’d seen how far the young people were falling back behind, and there were a lot of people who led this community in the right direction and one thing that was missing was.… no one was passing the baton down,” he said in a phone interview.
While he thinks the city is on the right track with the CRA, he says it can do more to help youth through apprenticeships at places like barber shops.
“One thing that I’ve been learning from running for City Council and just being here is, a lot of our young people say they can’t make it here,” he said. “I have a lot of colleagues that I even work with myself, and people I grew up with [who] feel like there’s not opportunity for young professionals here. And we have to change that model. We have to be able to give our young people something here to offer.”
Stephens also thinks the city ought to be better about educating the public on policy changes, such as recycling or bans on parking cars on grass.
Lisa Wheeler-Brown
It was unthinkable tragedy that got Wheeler-Brown, a medical billing specialist at a pain clinic, into politics: the shooting death of her son. She was unsatisfied with how slowly the investigation of his killing was going, so she decided to look into it on her own, sometimes going into some of the district’s most dangerous areas to find leads. What she saw compelled her to get involved.
“I’m running to make a difference in the community,” said Wheeler-Brown, a former head of the Council of Neighborhood Associations. “When my son was murdered and I was out doing my own investigation of the case I started seeing what the community was lacking, how blighted our areas were, how we needed things. And in doing that I just have started fighting for families.”
Like her opponents, Wheeler-Brown, a favorite of progressives and labor unions, sees job creation as key. The CRA will go a long way, she said, but she wants to see the city’s small, sometimes struggling businesses get help in the form of microloans.
“If we could do anything to help these small businesses and create jobs, it would be awesome,” she said. “We have to do something to keep not only our downtown thriving, which I love, but now we need to come west and make sure that this area, that all of Central is thriving as well.”
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2015.