Tyson exits after 14 years on council
She becomes longest-serving woman in history
In 2006, at age 51, Priscilla Tyson had no plans to get into politics.
Tyson had worked her way through community college and university to receive a business degree, and had risen from a supervisor at the former Lazarus department store Downtown to a Columbus bank executive, a health care vice president, and the founding director of City Year Columbus, a nonprofit organization that puts volunteers into innercity public schools to support students.
She was also raising a son who required regular medical attention due to sickle cell
disease, a blood disorder that can cause serious complications.
“I had no idea about city government,” Tyson told The Dispatch. “I never thought about being an elected official. That was the furthest thing from my mind.
“I’d never run a race in my life, had no idea about it.”
Yet, this month Tyson, 66, retired from council as its longest-serving female member in history, having served 14 consecutive years, according to information provided by the city clerk’s office, which keeps the council’s records.
Tyson points to marks she leaves on the city, which are both numerous and nuanced, from funding for supporting the arts to expanding community gardens and neighborhood dog parks. She has been an advocate for the expansion of the Columbus Civil Rights Code, outlawing discrimination based on things such as age, gender identity or disability.
She helped pass a city code to outlaw racial discrimination based on hairstyle, including braids, locs, cornrows, bantu knots, afros and twists, “whether or not hair is adorned by hair ornaments, beads, or headwraps.” African American hair has been stigmatized and often results in being a source of discrimination, she said.
And she has worked to keep cigarettes from being sold in Columbus to anyone under the age of 21.
She convinced the City Council to create the city’s Commission on Black Girls, and then fund it as an ongoing concern, exploring policy to eliminate inequities that can present significant challenges in the lives of black girls.
She even pushed for and won a requirement that city restaurants provide alternatives to sugary drinks on kids menus.
Her political career began in 2006 when then-columbus City Council member Kevin Boyce, now a member of the Franklin County Board of Commissioners, phoned Tyson to encourage her to apply to fill a vacancy on the sevenmember city body. She prayed over the decision, she said, feeling that her greatest achievement in life was being a mother and stepmother to five children, including a son whose chronic blood cell disorder had kept him in a stream of late-night emergency room visits since early in childhood.
Tyson mulled the decision to go into politics so hard that she put in her application just a half-hour before the deadline, she said. She was appointed to her first city council post in January 2007, was subsequently elected to a two-year term, and then reelected to three, fouryear terms.
She stayed in office by crushing the opposition at the polls. In the city council “field races,” where up to six candidates ran for three open seats, with the top three vote-getters winning, Tyson always came in first.
“Folks know her,” said Council President Shannon Hardin, appointed in
2014.
Tyson spent her early childhood growing up on the Near East Side close to Downtown, on St. Claire Avenue, and attended the former Garfield Elementary School – now the King Arts Complex. Her father died of an illness before her first birthday.
But her mother wanted her to attend a racially integrated school – the Columbus City Schools would be eventually found guilty in federal court of running an intentional dual-race system and ordered to desegregate – and her family moved further east to the Shepard neighborhood. There, Tyson was assigned to the former Eastmoor Middle School, now Columbus City Preparatory School for Boys, at 3450 Medway Ave. east of Bexley. She later attended Eastmoor High School.
Today, she still lives in an area of Columbus east of Bexley, meaning she hasn’t strayed more than a few miles from where she was born.
“Priscilla was literally the original hometown kid,” Hardin said. “...I think that shows in her work,” and is “specific to who she was and who she is and how she grew up.”
Her mother, who had moved to Columbus from Georgia, and stepfather valued ethics, religion and education, she said. In an era when women’s roles and aspirations were limited, her mother used to tell her: “Don’t marry a doctor, be a doctor.”
Tyson worked for National City Bank from 1977 to 1993, overseeing community development and employee relations. She left to serve as vice president of community relations at Ohiohealth and stayed four years before starting Columbus’ local chapter of City Year, an organization that sends out young volunteers to work in schools. Eventually she oversaw an entire region of City Year operations in various cities.
Her first public-sector role was in 1994 whe, Democrat Tyson was asked to meet with then-mayor Greg Lashutka, a Republican who had taken office two years before. Lashutka asked Tyson to serve on the Columbus Civil Service
Commission, the three-member panel that oversees employment rules for public employees, including firings and disciplines.
Lashutka said he was seeking to diversify the commission, and wanted people with integrity and potential. “And she fit that to a T.”
“I think she was a little surprised when I asked her if she’d be inclined to join,” said Lashutka, who served as mayor from 1992 to 2000. “I think that kind of whet her appetite” for public service.”
“People knew me, and they thought I worked hard,” said Tyson, whose name in 1994 was Priscilla H. Butler, five years before she would marry attorney Renny Tyson. “I just did not think (elected office) was my path.”
She served 13 years on the city Civil Service Commission, resisting suggestions from various local leaders to get into politics.
“When you think about being a public figure, you really have to think about what does that mean for your life,” she said. “For me, it was, ‘Am I ready to take that type of a step?’”
In the early 1980s, Tyson’s son, John Butler, was diagnosed with sickle cell disease. Tyson said she learned of the news about her infant in a phone call.
“I’m being very honest, that’s one of the hardest things people can tell you,” Tyson said.
Her son, now in his late 30s, still requires regular treatments, but has kept the illness in check without hospitalization for the last four years, Tyson said. At one point, she said she thought about “dropping out” of her business career to be a full-time mom and caretaker, but decided God wanted her to carry on with her life while doing everything she could to care for John, who would go on to graduate from Howard University.
When the possibility of losing in her first election in 2007 surfaced, Tyson thought: “I had been through tougher situations,” she said.
“That’s why I’ve never been afraid to lose a race or stink up, because I have lived with some tough stuff,” she said. “You just have no idea all of the trials and tribulations that we have had to go through with him having this illness and still doing the work.“
On a seven-member council made up of liberal Democrats, Tyson has sometimes been a more-conservative vote – particularly when it comes to the movement to stop funding various city police operations and equipment.
Last February, she was one of two votes – along with the also-retiring Council member Mitchell Brown – to scuttle an attempt to delay seating a new police recruit class, saying “a large number of black and female candidates (in that class) would have to move on to other employment.”
Tyson said she believes racism is a public health crisis and that changes were “absolutely needed” in the Columbus Division of Police. “I’m not saying it’s perfect because it’s not,” but getting the right people to be police officers “isn’t as easy as it seems.”
She believes the newly seated Columbus Civilian Police Review Board, Police Chief Elaine Bryant, and new Public Safety Director Robert Clark will help usher in needed changes.
“There’s more to it than just the police department,” Tyson said, noting that the societal structures that lead to poverty, lack of mental health care, food insecurity, joblessness and other issues will also need to be addressed.
Tyson also ushered through, in her influential role as chair of council’s Zoning Committee, many controversial development projects that were strongly opposed by the neighborhoods in which they were located.
In July, over the strong objections of residents from Schumacher Place and nearby German Village and Merion Village, Tyson guided an 8,250-squarefoot retail complex and 262-unit apartment building sought by Pizzuti Companies for a former Giant Eagle grocery site through the approval process.
“Unfortunately, we live in a city where the developers run the city,” Brenda Gischel, president of the Schumacher Place Civic Association, said of the decision.
Tyson helped st launch a complete review of the Columbus zoning code that could drastically alter what developers can build, how they are reviewed, and what recourse residents would have to stop them. That new plan is set to be unveiled before council in early 2022.
“The code hasn’t been updated in 50 years,” Tyson said. “We definitely need to update the code and make it more relevant,” adding that details of what gets built shouldn’t be decided on the floor of the City Council. She believes the new system will lead to less council-approved “variances,” where developers are allowed exceptions to the code’s requirements, while still allowing the public to be heard.
But Tyson said she feels comfortable leaving future decisions to a new generation of leaders, knowing they will tackle different issues moving forward.
“In a community of 900,000 people, there’s always work to be done,” Tyson said. “There just always is.” wbush@gannett.com @Reporterbush