Assemblywoman Shondra Summers-Armstrong (D-Las Vegas) announced Tuesday that she plans to run for the Las Vegas City Council’s Ward 5 seat held by Councilman Cedric Crear, who is running for mayor.
The second-term assemblywoman said the decision not to seek re-election to the Legislature was difficult, but said the relationships she’s developed as a state lawmaker across state and local government make her uniquely qualified to serve her community at the local level.
“I’m choosing not to run for re-election and to move my work locally because this is where I believe I’m best suited,” Summers-Armstrong said in an interview with The Nevada Independent. “My strong suit has always been local government and local politics.”
The announcement makes Summers-Armstrong the 15th state lawmaker who will not return to the 63-member Legislature in 2025. That rate so far aligns with past turnover rates between legislative sessions.
Summers-Armstrong is the sixth legislator to announce a bid for a different public office this election cycle. She said residents have told her about struggles with housing, community safety, homelessness and jobs, issues that Summers-Armstrong said require collaboration that she can help facilitate and address.
“I think I would be able to really help move things forward,” she said. “I know where now to go if I believe that we have a situation that needs a legislative solution. I’ve built those relationships, I know the people to call and to ask for help with those things.”
Summers-Armstrong will likely square off against former Assemblyman C.H. Miller (D-Las Vegas) in the city’s nonpartisan primary. Miller resigned from his legislative seat in October to run for the Ward 5 seat. The official candidate filing period does not occur until March.
Ward 5 has a population of about 113,950 people and includes portions of the Historic Westside, downtown Las Vegas and neighborhoods in the northwestern part of the valley. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that the average median household income in the area is $25,000 a year, or half of the city’s overall average income.
In her first bid for office in 2020, Summers-Armstrong defeated Republican Katie Duncan in the general election by 60.8 percentage points. She won her re-election bid in 2022 by more than 62 percentage points.
During her time in the Legislature, Summers-Armstrong said she was most proud of a 2021 measure providing Medicaid coverage for doula services (AB256), which she helped expand in 2023 under AB283. She also highlighted a measure ensuring that businesses receiving tax benefits from the City of Las Vegas are hiring locally (AB335) and a bill (AB340) that attempted to change the state’s unique summary eviction process, which requires a tenant to make the first filing in an eviction case, not the landlord.
Though the bill passed along party-line votes with Democrats in favor, Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed it, along with a slew of other housing-related bills.
Summers-Armstrong grew up in the Bay Area of Northern California and moved to Las Vegas in 1990. She worked on the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority, served on the West Las Vegas Plan team and spent more than two decades working within the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada. The legislator, known for her signature red glasses, said she’s always centered her work around the community’s needs, and that won’t change anytime soon.
“There’s a lot of noise, I think, in politics,” she said. “If we just are clear who our constituents are and their needs, that’s the purpose why we run for Legislature. That’s the purpose why I’m running for Las Vegas City Council.”
