City of Gainesville voters will cast ballots for mayor on March 15, along with voting in the presidential primary.
Business in Greater Gainesville interviewed candidates Ed Braddy, the incumbent, and Lauren Poe, a former city commissioner, focusing on business topics.
Both candidates have previous experience serving the city. In addition to serving as mayor since 2013, Braddy was a city commissioner from 2002 to 2008. He is the former executive director of the American Dream Coalition, a nonprofit organization with the goal of “promoting freedom, mobility and affordable homeownership across the United States.”
Lauren Poe served on the city commission for two terms from 2008 to 2011 and from 2012 to 2015. He served on the Black on Black Crime Task Force, and he was co-chair of the 352ArtsRoadmap.
Braddy is the Assessment Center manager at Santa Fe College, and Poe is a professor in Santa Fe’s High School Dual Enrollment Program.
Mayor Ed Braddy’s Perspective
What makes you the best choice to lead the City of Gainesville?
I’ve demonstrated for almost three years a serious focus on economic growth opportunities, supporting small businesses and supporting the expansion of existing businesses as well as promoting Gainesville to the country and even the world as a place to look at to locate.
I’ve also demonstrated leadership in looking internally to our organization in spearheading change to make our city government more conducive to business growth.
City government has been working toward being more business friendly. What is your opinion of those efforts?
It began with the Small Business Task Force that I initiated and co-chaired with the chamber of commerce. It resulted in 27 recommendations, which we have implemented. It also helped change the attitude in city hall quite a bit.
We’ve gone from an attitude that had been prescriptive, sometimes even bossy — telling people what’s best for you — to one that is more facilitative, identifying the goals and the ambitions of folks wanting to come to Gainesville to do business and figuring out how we can help them get there.
We also looked at how we regulate businesses. A great example is how we made it possible for a company like Uber to operate legally in the city. All around the country, many cities are putting up regulatory barriers or they’re not doing anything.
We took a different approach. We brought the taxi companies to the table and listened to what their concerns were. Then, we created a regulatory apparatus that allowed Uber to operate consistent with its business model and taxi companies to operate consistent with theirs.
We removed a lot of the regulatory hurdles that were harming taxi companies and that were inhibiting companies like Uber. We made a better process. We have an ordinance that is much leaner but that provides the health, safety and welfare protections that we expect.
As mayor, it was my responsibility to identify the need for changes in leadership of GRU as well as the city manager.
Our utility is tied to our economic prosperity. Unfortunately, we have among the highest commercial rates in the state. The previous leadership at the utility as well as the commission, including the gentleman running against me, were relatively indifferent to the escalating utility costs.
I felt that was a primary responsibility to get that changed, and we’re doing that. We did announce that we’re finally lowering the fuel adjustment, which will be the first of what I hope will be a follow-up step to reduce rates overall.
With the city manager, we want to have a more facilitative mind-set in city hall in working with the business community. We have a lot of talent that works for us, and it’s just a matter of identifying and empowering them.
The Blue Ribbon Committee has concluded its plan for making Gainesville more competitive and more citizen centered. What are your hopes for this work?
I’m pleased that it was truly a broad cross-section of the community. It was very diverse, with many different backgrounds represented. Some of the members were selected by my colleagues on the city commission.
The group focused on the goal — to be bold, to be imaginative and to come back with recommendations to make this the most citizen-centered city in the country — and they did it. I think it goes to my leadership style, which is you empower people around you, and then you don’t micromanage them.
I didn’t want it to just be the Ed Braddy committee. I wanted to get buy-in from my colleagues on the commission. Instead of trying to control that, I had to put trust in others and show that I’m willing to work with others who don’t always agree with me.
Prior to me being mayor, there was a clear political tug-of-war. I set a tone for leadership to try and find solutions to our problems.
Does the city have the right balance between economic development and environmental protection?
One of the things I’m most proud of is that a strong business climate and a strong environmental climate are not incompatible. On my watch, we have exceeded the goals set by the Kyoto Protocol.
We’re performing in a much more environmentally conscious way than we were just three years ago, and we have the metrics to prove it, yet we’re also in a robust environment for business growth. We have the lowest unemployment in the state, and we have major job announcements.
Should the city take more responsibility for social services?
We have moved very aggressively in providing social services. We opened the Empowerment Center. We’ve added free Wi-Fi to the three East Gainesville locations to reduce the digital divide
We’re tackling equity issues head-on by working to make our utility rates more affordable. The gem of the Blue Ribbon Task Force is that it is focused on small businesses who don’t have the experience navigating the system. Historically, that has a disproportionate impact on minority-owned businesses and other minority opportunities.
We’re making great advancements in social services. My opponent was in office for six years, so if he thought there was something that wasn’t introduced, he needs to help us understand why he chose not to introduce it.
Lauren Poe’s Perspective
What makes you the best choice to lead the City of Gainesville?
I want to offer the citizens of Gainesville a clear choice between two candidates that are pretty different from each other.
I have learned a lot from Santa Fe College President Dr. Jackson Sasser.
I also have learned a lot in my six years as a city commissioner. It took a considerable amount of time for me to understand how to translate aspirations — my own and the community’s — into policy.
The creation of public policy is a difficult process because it means not only finding consensus with a majority of the commissioners, but it also means getting the staff that is responsible for the implementation of that policy to be enthusiastic about it. It’s also important to get the community partners excited about a new policy direction.
This is all yeoman’s work. It’s the grunt work that is behind the scenes that hopefully gets you to a point where you can have a warm, fuzzy announcement one day over a shared vision.
For the city right now — whether it’s the folks on the dais or city staff — it’s a very tense, very unsettling period. I get stopped by people all over town — at Publix, at the hardware store — wishing me luck because it has become such a difficult environment in which to do one’s job.
There’s a bit of a siege mentality. There’s a difference between holding staff accountable and making staff feel as if they can’t do their job for fear of public humiliation or even termination.
I have been told that in the last year or so, some staff is now doing projects at the direct request of individual commissioners. That’s unacceptable.
If you think we need a stop sign at an intersection, you can’t call up Public Works and say, “Can you put up a stop sign?” That is not how the council-manager system works.
Staff feels afraid to bring any new idea — anything other than the most neutral shade of gray possible — to the commission because they are going to get flogged for it if it doesn’t get implemented. The impact is that we’re going to start losing people — losing some very high-caliber folks in some middle-level positions, who are our next department managers.
City government has been working toward being more business friendly. What is your opinion of those efforts?
I’ve been supportive of this work. We have got to work on how we get to “yes” with our building, development and permitting process. It is very frustrating. I keep hearing about it.
To the credit of former City Manager Russ Blackburn, he started on some things, including his customer service rollout, with every member of city government learning about improving customer interaction.
What we need to rethink is how we do government. The first step was my Government 2.0 initiative. It was the commission’s No. 1 initiative in 2012. It’s evolved to what is called “Open Government” or “Open GNV.”
It uses the technology that is now available to our advantage and to our residents’ advantage. Whether you’re looking at Code Enforcement violations or whether you’re looking to see where your permit is in the process, all that information should be available on your computer or mobile device.
The Blue Ribbon Committee has concluded its plan for making Gainesville more competitive and more citizen centered. What are your hopes for this work?
I think there’s a lot of potential there. I have seen some things come out of it that are “sound good, feel good,” but I’m not convinced that they would have any significant amount of impact.
So much of good government is the person in the role and how effective they are. It’s not the role itself. I definitely believe that for the small business person who is starting a business, the process with the city is daunting.
Does the city have the right balance between economic development and environmental protection?
I don’t see them as contradictory or mutually exclusive. I firmly believe that we can have robust business growth while still protecting our environment. It’s a false dichotomy to say that it’s one or the other.
Transportation is something that we all depend on. It’s not just a mobility issue; we have a safety issue. Over 450 people have died on Gainesville roads since 2003. Those are preventable deaths. There are things that we can do that are not prohibitively expensive that can bring that number down.
I think that should be a community goal that we want to have zero deaths on our roads by 2020. I think that’s a realistic goal.
I see a need for consensus-building around additional funding for transportation. While I was a commissioner, we took the annual transportation budget for Gainesville roads from $300,000 to $2.1 million a year. We don’t have the same type deficit that the county has.
Should the city take more responsibility for social services?
I think we need to greatly expand our role. The greatest issue facing the city is equity. The city works very well for some folks and very poorly for others.
We can do something about that. We can build on our success through Parks and Recreation and the Police Department. The Summer Heatwave program has resulted in a dramatic drop in teenage crime rates while it was going on.
I’ve taught many students who have gone through Reichert House, and they said it was a life-changing experience for them. We know it works. We just need to do more of this type of thing.
The school district is doing several intervention programs. The city needs to be all-in.
We must talk seriously about how we’re going to pay for doing more. As mayor, I would be a strong public advocate for passing increased public funding for those types of services.