Change was inevitable in Tucker this election cycle, given a contentious mayor’s race, a vacant council seat due to a death and three other incumbent councilmembers leaving office due to term limits.
While plenty of new faces will soon be in City Hall, DeKalb County Democrats had hoped liberal candidates would sweep their races due to changing demographics and a voter base that typically votes blue in high-profile elections.
That didn’t happen, with incumbent Mayor Frank Auman winning his reelection bid and most of the more liberal candidates losing their races. The results and high voter turnout throughout Tucker have left-leaning activists rethinking how they should approach elections in metro Atlanta’s suburbs.
“To be honest with you, I think it was what the people wanted even though I lost,” said Shawn Woods, a left-leaning candidate who unsuccessfully ran for the city’s District 1, Post 2 seat. “The city spoke and you have to listen to that.”
One council race is proceeding to a runoff, which will take place Nov. 30, but the candidates who already secured their seats are thinking about how to reunite a city following a contentious and heated campaign season. Roger Orlando, one of the newly elected councilmembers, said he’s glad Auman won his bid to lead Tucker through this changing of the guard.
“If we had five new people on the council, I think it would have been at a standstill for the next two years or more,” he said. “With Frank remaining in office, I don’t think it’s going to be a bad transition.”
Was partisanship the issue?
Founded in 2015, Tucker has yet to face this kind of turnover in political leadership. Democrats at the county level saw it as an opportunity to displace conservatives, such as Auman given his prior stint as the DeKalb GOP chairman.
John Jackson, chairman of DeKalb Dems, said they underestimated Auman’s popularity. He recruited Robin Biro, a businessman who says he was the first openly gay U.S. Army Ranger, to run for mayor, but the incumbent secured 56% of the vote.
“Frank Auman is obviously more popular than we thought he was,” Jackson said. “... He founded the city of Tucker, and he’s popular with Democratic voters who don’t really see him as a Republican. They see him as the mayor.”
Orlando, who said he ran a nonpartisan campaign for the District 1, Post 1 council seat, sees the mayoral race as an example in misjudging what voters care about in local elections. He said the focus on partisanship did not sit well with many residents.
“People who recognize that this is a nonpartisan race were turned off by the fact that they (DeKalb Dems) tried to use that to their advantage and tried to cause harm within the unity of our city,” he said.
While Woods said he recognizes that voters spoke at the ballot box Tuesday, he said the focus on candidates’ partisan affiliation was about truth in advertising and keeping voters informed. Woods, whose 34% of the vote was bested by Virginia Rece’s 55%, said left-leaning candidates face a challenge in Tucker given who typically votes.
“I don’t think we can continue to look for the (current) voting population of Tucker to actually vote for change,” Woods said. “We’re going to have to get more people involved in bringing in new voters and to get new voters to participate in the elections.”
One more seat to fill
While Democrats lost the most prominent race in Tucker, they did have at least one victory down-ballot. Alexis Weaver, a senior manager at Atlanta Community Food Bank, was elected to serve in Tucker’s District 3, Post 1 seat with 54% of the vote. She also touts that her district had the highest voter turnout of any area in the city.
Weaver said the issue of poverty motivated her to run, especially after the City Council adopted an “urban camping” ordinance in February that intended to curb public homelessness in the city. She said dozens of residents, including herself, felt like their concerns were ignored.
“I think at minimum when citizens attend a meeting and reach out to their representatives... they deserve to be heard and taken seriously,” Weaver said.
Campaign season also isn’t over in Tucker this year. Cara Schroeder and Imani Barnes are participating in a runoff for the District 2, Post 1 seat.
Schroeder, who said she’s the nonpartisan candidate in the race, has been involved in Tucker since its cityhood movement and has worked as an activist in DeKalb for the past two decades. She’s running off her prior experience in government, which includes roles on Tucker’s planning commission and community council.
“We need to just think about the realistic role of City Council,” she said of Tucker’s primary three city services: code enforcement, parks and recreation, and planning and zoning. “... I have every single department checked off with experience in advocacy and public service.”
Her opponent, backed by DeKalb Dems, decided to run in the wake of 2020′s widespread protests against police brutality and racism. Barnes said the Tucker City Council needs representation that she can bring as a Black, LGBTQ+, single mom who is about to complete her PhD in public health at Emory University.
“When I went online to see the council, I noticed that every single one of them were white,” she said. “So then I went and looked up the demographics of Tucker and I was surprised to see that there were 37% Black people with no representation.”
‘Learn to work together’
Tucker is the only DeKalb city to have term limits for its councilmembers, restricting them to only two, four-year terms. An effort to remove that provision from the city charter fizzled out during the last legislative session.
With term limits still in place, three councilmembers were unable to run for a third time and a fourth council seat was vacated by the death of Bill Rosenfeld earlier this year. Rece, who was Rosenfeld’s campaign manager and friend, defeated Woods to fill Rosenfeld’s seat for the rest of his term.
She said she knew the importance of keeping a unified vision for the city given the unavoidable change in leadership.
“The next City Council will get to make a lot of decisions that really chart the path for Tucker for the next 50 to 60 years,” Rece said. She will be sworn in at Monday’s council meeting, while the other new councilmembers will have to wait until January.
Rece, Orlando and Weaver all cited the importance of uniting the city after months of campaigning and divisive rhetoric. Auman said he’ll have to keep the council focused on accomplishing the city’s various master plans, providing essential city services and working together as a team. He said he’s prepared for the job, since he had to lead the city’s first council through a similar transition period.
“Just like we did before, we’re going to build a team out of everybody, let everybody have their vote and learn to work together,” he said. “The hard part is staying in our lane by doing the things we are there to do and not getting distracted by a lot of peripheral stuff.”
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