4 vie for 3 Columbus City Council seats
Last day to register to vote is Monday
It’s been a tumultuous year and a half in Columbus, with a pandemic, mask mandates, social-justice protesting that included rioting, several high-profile police shootings of Black people, a new citizen police review panel, and even the statue of Christopher Columbus in front of City Hall being removed and rushed into hiding.
But none of that apparently sparked enough interest among many residents to run for City Council in Ohio’s largest city, with a population of almost 906,000.
Only four candidates are on the Nov. 2 general election ballot for three open seats on the all-democrat council — meaning only one person will be disappointed after the votes are counted.
The last day to register to vote is Monday; early voting and absentee ballot voting begins Tuesday.
As it turns out, there are more council candidates on ballots this year in almost every other city and village in Franklin County than in Columbus. If Ohio’s largest city had as many candidates per capita as does Lithopolis, a village of about 2,000 located in Franklin and Fairfield counties where eight residents are seeking election, there would be more than 3,600 people competing for Columbus City Council.
With the widely anticipated departure announcements by Council members Priscilla Tyson and Mitchell Brown, two Democratic incumbents who were already on the ballot, only President Shannon Hardin will be seeking reelection to another four-year term. In a twist from previous elections, where council members resigned and the body appointed replacements who then ran as incumbents, Tyson and Brown will serve out their terms until the end of this year.
But because Hardin was officially running on a slate with Tyson and Brown, a five-member nominating committee for that slate chose the replacements for the departing candidates: Nick Bankston and Lourdes Barroso de Padilla. Both candidates are Democrats running as a team with Hardin.
Facing the Hardin slate is Tom Sussi, a former local television investigative reporter who said he is running as an independent, but is endorsed by the Franklin County Republican Party in the highly Democratic stronghold.
Here are brief profiles of the four candidates in alphabetical order:
Nick Bankston
Bankston, 32, has never run for political office. Since January, Bankston has been president & CEO at Gladden Community House, which provides social services to families in Franklinton. For five years before that, he worked for the Ginther administration as a project manager of Neighborhood Transformation Strategies, overseeing revitalization efforts in Linden and the Hilltop.
“I’m running for office because I’m a Columbus native, born and raised here,” Bankston said, adding that he is a graduate of Columbus City Schools. He resides in the King-lincoln Bronzeville neighborhood near Downtown.
The affordable housing crisis is an issue near to his heart, he said, because as a middle school student his family lost their home to a predatory mortgage.
“We ended up actually going to live with my grandmother for a little bit of time in Northland, so a family of four essentially living in her attic,” Bankston said. At Gladden Community House, he said, “I see every day how housing instability is a domino effect into people’s lives,” affecting education, jobs and families.
“This is not about politics for me,” Bankston said. “It’s personal because Columbus is my home.”
Other top issues for Bankston are improving public safety and transportation, he said. Bankston was initially removed from the ballot last winter for failing to gain enough valid signatures on his filing petition, but was reinstated in April as the replacement candidate for Brown.
Lourdes Barroso de Padilla
Barroso de Padilla, 45, is a vice president with City Year, a national organization that works extensively with Columbus City Schools students to stem systemic inequities that disproportionately affect students of color and students growing up in low-income households.
She is also the director of the Latina Mentoring Academy, a Columbus professional development organization.
Barroso de Padilla was born and raised in Columbus. She grew up on the East Side, where she still resides, and is a graduate of Columbus City Schools.
The daughter of political refugees from Cuba, her family came to the city with the assistance of a friend, which she said is often the case with immigrants.
“They knew somebody,” Barroso de Padilla said. “They had a good family friend who lived in Columbus.”
As an adult, she eventually became involved with Democratic politics, working on two presidential campaigns, for John Kerry and Barack Obama.
“The more that I got involved,” Barroso de Padilla said, “the more that I saw myself as a candidate and thought that I could bring a different perspective.” This is her first run for political office. “I’m not a politician,” she said. “I’ve spent my entire career working for community organizations ... so that young people have the tools to empower themselves.”
Much of Columbus’ future growth will be due to immigrants, Barroso de Padilla said, and they need representation on the City Council to help them succeed and make the city a welcoming place.
“You’re talking about people who need language attainment,” she said.
Shannon Hardin
Hardin, 34, is running in his third council election. He was initially appointed to the council in 2014 at age 27, chosen from among 12 finalists to fill a vacancy.
He rose to the top with the strong backing of his political mentor, former Mayor Michael B. Coleman, who had hired both Hardin and his mother to city
jobs in his office and is today an influential City Hall lobbyist.
Hardin became the council’s first openly gay member. His first election was for an unexpired two-year term.
“What I will represent is a young, diverse, new voice from the community to council,” he said after his appointment.
A little over three years later, he became council president, beating back a bid by Tyson, the body’s longest-sitting member. Tyson and Brown, the two departing members, voted against Hardin.
Hardin was pepper-sprayed in the face by Columbus police along with U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-columbus, and Franklin County Commissioner Kevin Boyce during a Downtown protest May 30, 2020.
That and other perceived police oversteps quickly led to Hardin rapidly advancing a public vote for the creation of a police civilian review board that had languished for decades.
At times, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther had seemed to be rushing to catch up with Hardin. Although an advisory panel Ginther created in 2017 voted in the fall of 2019 to recommend creation of a police review panel, the city had not taken up the issue until after protests erupted over the murder of George Floyd Jr., a Black man who was murdered May 25, 2020, by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin while in police custody.
Hardin later apologized for that delay.
For the next four years, Hardin, a resident of the Near East Side, lists improving public safety in the city as one of his main goals.
“We know that safety is the top priority of any leader,” he said, saying the city needs to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic with the “firm foundation” of safe neighborhoods. He wants to support police officers by not continuing to ask too much of them, expanding programs where social-service workers could respond to nonviolent calls.
Beyond that, Hardin said his focus is on managing the city’s strong population growth through things like transportation corridors served by high-capacity transit, job growth, housing affordability and workforce development to train people for available unfilled jobs.
Tom Sussi
Sussi, 63, is a former Columbus television reporter who made a career out of sting-style, gotcha, in-your-face confrontations at two local news stations.
While Columbus officials have sought to rein in the city’s police department from what many in the Black community and others perceived as abuses of force during protests and in some other situations, Sussi has positioned himself as the law-and-order candidate.
“I firmly believe that law and order is the foundation of any civilized society,” Sussi said. “...This administration has done everything in its power to undermine and castrate its own police department.
“To begin with,” Sussi said, “we have to allow police to do their jobs,” which he said officers are now fearful of doing proactively out of fear that if a confrontation leads to a shooting, they may go to prison.
“The criminals actually feel empowered,” Sussi said, which he contends has led to a rash of homicides and violence across the city, in particular around the Ohio State University campus. Sussi said current city leaders have “used a couple of bad cops” to divide the community along racial lines.
This is also the first foray into politics for Sussi, a resident of Italian Village.
Columbus City Hall has become a corrupt machine, Sussi alleged, with elected leaders “elevating their own sad political careers, keeping that (Democratic) party in control, and taking care of the fat cats and big businesses that bankroll their campaigns.”
“I’m a fighter,” he said. “I like to fight for what’s right. I believe this is a fight worth fighting. This little party has to be broken up.” wbush@gannett.com @Reporterbush