I am running again, and I feel relieved that I’ve made a decision, Mayor Valerie Keehn told Spotlight Newspapers early Wednesday morning, April 25.
The first-term Democrat mayor said it took her a while to decide what the fall would bring for her.
`I did a lot of talking with my family, taking stock of my personal life, asking myself, ‘Can I do this again?’` she said.
Keehn, a 48-year-old special education teacher and mother of three, was part of a Democratic slate that won all seven elective offices in the city during the November2005 elections.
She said the lack of consistent leadership in the city is what led her to run again.
`The short two-year term`you can barely get done what you’ve started in your first term. I don’t think it’s fair to the voters to have a continuous turnover of leadership in the city,` she said.
Keehn said she wouldn’t describe her first term as `rocky,` but said she has stirred things up a bit while in office.
`I would say that I’ve shaken up the establishment,` she said. `When you have entrenched politicians in office, any attempt you make to change things is going to shake things up a little.`
Keehn certainly shook things up last fall by leading the charge to change the city’s form of government from the commission-style it’s been for decades to a stronger mayoral form of government.
Gordon Boyd, a 60-year-old Democrat whose wife chairs the city Democratic Committee, also plans to seek the committee endorsement. Boyd, who was in strong opposition to charter reform, announced his candidacy early in the year.
This marks the second time Keehn would faces a challenge for the Democratic Committee endorsement.
In 2005, former Deputy Mayor Hank Kuczynski won the party’s endorsement. Keehn, a relatively unknown candidate at the time, staged a successful primary in September 2005 and won the party’s endorsement by defeating Kuczynski at the polls.
Keehn will make a public announcement this afternoon, Wednesday, April 25, at 4:30 p.m. in Congress Park.
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