Mayor Slay finally has competition in the Democratic primary (aka the only vote that matters for St. Louis City) for next years mayoral race: Lewis Reed, the president of the city’s Board of Aldermen.
Reed announced his candidacy today at Sqwires restaurant in Lafayette Square.
Reed termed Slay’s 12 years in office “divisive” and said he would embark on a “mission of change.”
Reed said his first priority would be public safety — specifically mentioning decreasing crime rates and increasing after school programs for kids.
Here’s more of the same from his campaign page:
Today, St. Louis suffers from serious problems. Many parents have concluded that our public school system cannot meet their children’s needs; crime and safety are an increasing concern in our neighborhoods; the problems of unemployment and lack of viable jobs for our local economy is now more than ever at a critical level.
He’s no dummy. Those are clearly the two big issues the people of St. Louis are concerned about and the same two the same people think Mayor Slay has failed on. Attacking those two issues are a good start, but he’s fighting an up hill battle against the money collecting machine known as Francis Slay. For some reason people just love giving Mayor Slay money. Seriously, the guy has millions in his war chest while Reed is just getting started. It’s not insurmountable though, mainly because the city still really sucks in some key areas and Reed has a better following that the former Slay foe Irene Smith.
Oh and Lewis dropped on hell of a election announcement video!
Get it? He’s running, and running for Mayor! It’s like a Batman movie, but with a black guy that isn’t Morgan Feeman and no one shot at him…well maybe, he was running in downtown for a while, so someone must have tried to rob him.
Despite all of our Mayor Slay posts over the years, we don’t know who we’re rooting for just yet, but we do know we’d miss Photoshoping Slay’s head on to stuff. As with previous mayoral races, we’ll extend our offer for interviews to both candidates…and then make fun of each of them when we’re denied. It’s the circle of life.
For some reason though we’re super excited about this particular mayoral race so we’re going to be all up in this bitch! We’ll probably even endorse someone this year…wait a minute! Maybe we should run! Should we run? What’s the free food situation for mayors? Is that a thing? Can we just tell people to give us sandwiches if we’re mayor? If so, then it’s our duty to run for the city we love, if not, screw you guys.
via STLToday and LewisReed.com