“Give me more”: One voter seeks more than ideas from mayoral candidates

Bianca Jones is fired up about voting.

She attended a mayoral candidate forum hosted by League of Women Voters at Millsaps College Tuesday night. As a senior at the college, she organized a week-long voter drive coordinated by One Vote and Mississippi Votes. 

“Voting is extremely, extremely important because it represents our voice and our autonomy as people and as citizens,” Jones said. “?We need to make use of our voice and we need to make use of the rights that we’re given before anyone tries to infringe upon them or take them away.”

Jones took a seat near the front of the nearly half-full auditorium. It was a formal event, with each candidate’s speech punctuated by the ring of a bell. The crowd itself seemed mostly attentive, though a couple of heads had started to nod off by the halfway point. 

The candidates had good ideas, Jones said, but she was left with more questions. 

“What I really look for in a candidate is concrete and focused plans, not like the generalized, ‘Oh, well, we’ll do this.’ Well, yeah, but give me more. I don’t want to settle for anything,” she said.

Thirteen of the 19 mayoral candidates participated in the event Tuesday night, laying out their platform and fielding questions on the Jackson Zoo and affordable early-childhood programs. 

Most laid out crime as one of the first items they would tackle in their first 100 days if elected as mayor. Others pinpointed the need for accountability within the local government. 

But a big campaign issue for Jones is accessibility of Jackson’s streets. She walks everywhere, she said, and crumbling streets and a lack of dedicated walking paths don’t make her journey easy. None of the candidates spoke about walkable streets.

“?I think about everyone who doesn’t have a car, who doesn’t have certain privileges in Jackson, and they’re not even being considered,” she said. “I came here, tried to use the public transportation system. It wasn’t nothing. I had to walk at least an hour to get to where I was going from the bus.”

Jones said she’s looking for a risk taker, a candidate running to get things done for the people with a touch of empathy, not to line their own pockets.

“I think I respect politicians more if they go out and do right and earn nothing from it,” she said. “What does Jackson look like in comparison to your paycheck?” 

While Jones pondered about sidewalks, candidates tallied off ideas for how to fix Jackson’s Zoo. 

“Zoo’s gone. We’re not going to be wasting money on that,” said Kim Wade, a local radio host running as an independent. “No matter how emotionally you’re attached to it. If we wanted to have the zoo, we would have taken better care of it.”

Another independent candidate that stood out to Jones, child development director Lillie Stewart-Robinson, said that she would relocate the zoo northeast to Lefluer’s Bluff Complex, home to the Mississippi Children’s Museum and Museum of Natural Science. 

“?The land that the zoo is now occupying, I would set up a theme park,” she said. “This would create jobs for our youth, and it will bring the community together. 

Businessman and Democratic candidate Socrates Garrett said that he wants to create an entertainment district anchored at the zoo. He also points to establishing educational programs so that Jacksonians can care for the animals. 

“I want Jackson State University to have a veterinarian program where we’re training veterinarians, not only at Mississippi State University, but we have all of these animals there at the zoo,” said Garrett. 

Jones said she appreciated Stewart-Robinson’s idea about creating a children’s entertainment plaza, moving the zoo to a space where kids are already gathering.

“That’s really important to me, because my first time going to the Jackson zoo, I remember being kind of, for lack of a better term, underwhelmed,” said Jones. “It was in a bad state.” 

Because Jones walks to work at the Children’s Museum, the idea of having more attractions within a stone’s throw appeals to her. 

“I appreciate candidates who think that way, who think about what resources we don’t have in Jackson,” said Jones. “It’s easy to be like ‘Oh, you can drive there.’ But what if you can’t, or what if you don’t have transportation? How can we best support the people of Jackson within their accessibility to resources instead of having to go out to the city next to us?”