City Council member Bill Bishop said Thursday night he will run for mayor in the 2015 elections.
Bishop, a Republican, is a two-term council member who served as president during the 2012-13 council year and has served as chair of the Rules and Transportation, Energy and Utilities committees.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Bishop said Thursday. “I would say that it has gelled together the past couple of weeks.”
Bishop, an architect by trade, said his experience in the profession along with his 30 years of being a resident would help bring “dedicated leadership” to the office, he said.
“I have an understanding of how cities are supposed to run. Jacksonville, for a while now, has had this collective feeling for hoping something happens. We have been stuck in a rut, asking how to get out of that,” Bishop said. “We can’t get it moving.”
But with his background, Bishop said he can bring that movement forward and create “liveliness” that’s been lacking or bogged down in ineffective government.
He uses the situation at Hemming Plaza as an example and questions why it’s taken the time it has to become programmed and activated.
“We’ve gone through two RFPs (request for proposals) and the second one seems to be stalled somewhere,” he said. “It’s a bureaucratic morass … it shouldn’t have been that hard.”
For years, improving the public’s experience in the one-square-block park in front
of City Hall has been discussed.
Another smaller scale,
inexpensive problem that easily could be fixed would be turning Downtown’s one-way streets into two-way.
“It’s little things like that to tell the world we care about our city,” he said. “We need to simply tell the world by our actions.”
Bishop said he has been urged to run for some time by others, but that he finalized his decision run in the past two weeks.
He said he anticipates formally filing the second week of April, a week after he returns from a Jacksonville Sister Cities trip next week to Changwon City, South Korea.
He said the trip also mimics his ideals of “thinking outside our borders” and is something the city should do more.
Back to the city itself, he said it must shine on its own, too.
“I’ve seen how difficult it is,” he said. “Council can’t do most of it. The chief executive can be that person … and I want to be that guy.”
His wife, Melody, is an inaugural member of the nine-person Downtown Investment Authority board.
He would join Mayor Alvin Brown, a Democrat, as the only other high-profile candidate who has
filed.
Earlier this month Property Appraiser Jim Overton announced his intention to file, but has yet to do so.
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