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Atlanta, Georgia – Atlanta City Council District 5 candidate Mandy Mahoney participated in a Decaturish Twitch forum on November 10.
Mahoney is running against Lilianna Bakhtiari to replace Natalyn Archibong on Atlanta City Council. The candidates are in a second round and polling day is November 30. District 5 includes East Atlanta, Edgewood, and Kirkwood.
In municipal elections, if a race for a seat does not allow a single candidate to receive at least 50% plus one vote, the election will run in the second round, according to the City of Atlanta website. The second round will be played between the two candidates who received the most votes between Fulton and DeKalb counties.
In the legislative elections, Bakhtiari won 49.5% of the vote and Mahoney 18.26%.
Bakhtiari was invited to join the Twitch forum, but she was unable to do so. According to a staff member, she intended to participate, but was called to a family emergency early Wednesday morning. The campaign explained his absence just before the start of the Twitch forum.
Mahoney shared his thoughts on voter turnout, tackling climate change, increasing affordable housing and improving the city’s infrastructure.
Here is the full forum video:
Here’s our full forum recap:
The second round will depend quite heavily on voter turnout, and Mahoney has a long way to go in the second round.
“I am fortunate to have an incredible army of dedicated volunteers,†said Mahoney. “We’re going back knocking on the doors of people who voted, people who maybe didn’t vote, because life is coming, but they said they were going to vote for me.”
Mahoney and Bakhtiari have come out against civic activist Sam Bacote, community organizer Doug Williams and civic activist Katie Kissel. In the run-off election, Mahoney relied on peer validation, among other strategies, from those who knew other candidates to gain the support of more voters.
“[I’m] work with [those] who came up to me and said, ‘I’m excited by you. What can I do to help? ‘ These are now my amplifiers, â€said Mahoney. “It’s another layer of that grassroots commitment. “
Mahoney identifies as a climate candidate. She hopes to integrate climate mitigation and adaptation into the functioning of the city.
“Best practices from other cities show that when we plan to build new infrastructure, whether it’s sewer infrastructure or roads, we need to use climate modeling in how we design that infrastructure.” , said Mahoney. “I think that puts us behind the ball of eight, and we must immediately demand that all infrastructure planning use climate modeling in this regard.”
Under the administration of Kasim Reed, the city completed a resilience plan for the city, which was not implemented under the administration of Keisha Lance Bottoms.
“I believe we need to take this plan off the shelves and breathe new life into it,†Mahoney said. “I don’t think we need to start over with climate planning for Atlanta. I think we need to use this planning that has already been done. This plan had so much strong stakeholder engagement in designing this plan. It has fairness as its first and foremost principle of it.
She added that homes should be upgraded to withstand climate change to allow residents, especially the elderly, to age in place.
“We need to lean in and provide more resources [toward] weathering the homes of these people, so that they can truly live in a safe and healthy home for them, â€said Mahoney.
When it comes to affordable housing, Mahoney would like the city to give credit to agencies that build affordable housing so they can fill the gap in the money they need to build affordable housing. She would also like to see more affordable rental housing in Atlanta.
“The real need in Atlanta is to house the workforce for people earning between $ 30,000 and $ 60,000 per year. In this context, we need more rental units. We need more healthy, high quality rental housing, â€said Mahoney. “I think we need to immediately use best practices like these to catalyze the private sector to come out and do what’s right and build more units.
In order to improve sidewalks and other pedestrian infrastructure, Mahoney wants to implement a participatory budget and use the funds dedicated to District 5 to address infrastructure issues.
“I think the first thing to do is to implement participatory budgeting so that we can have a transparent process,†Mahoney said.
During this process, she presented infrastructure projects to neighborhoods and asked residents to rank them in the order in which they would like to see the projects processed. After that, the projects would be priced and returned to the community for another round of ranking.
She also hopes to ensure that the planning and construction processes of infrastructure projects are transparent.
“Second is working with the Atlanta Department of Transportation as well as the Georgia Department of Transportation to be able to apply the dollars they have available to their priorities in order to do them in an efficient and transparent manner,†said Mahoney. “We also need to make the workings of these infrastructure projects more transparent and keep public works staff more on the go to do what they say they’re going to do.”
More information on the second round of the elections
Early voting will take place from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. from November 17 to 19, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on November 20, from noon to 5 p.m. on November 21 and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. from November 22 to 24. The second round of elections is on November 30.
The first polling stations are the Tucker-Reid H. Cofer Library, 5234 LaVista Road, Tucker 30034; Stonecrest Library, 3123 Klondike Road, Lithonia, 30038; Bessie Branham Recreation Center, 2051 Delano Drive, Atlanta 30317; and DeKalb County Voter Registration and Election Office, 4380 Memorial Drive, Decatur 30032.
Each early polling location will have a drop box for mail ballots until November 24. The voter must return a mail-in ballot on November 30 to the DeKalb Election Office on Memorial Drive.
To request a postal ballot, click here. Requests for postal votes must be requested by November 19, according to the new voting law SB202.
To check your polling station, click here.
All of our election coverage can be found at decaturishvotes.com.
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