Soon, John Carney will be added to this short list. Term-limited as Delaware’s governor this year, Carney opted to run for mayor of Wilmington. He won the Democratic primary in September and faces no Republican opposition next month.
“I started off as a constituent response person for then-Sen. Biden,” Carney says. “In some ways, this brings me back full circle in terms of dealing with those kinds of issues.”
Carney, who is 68, previously served as lieutenant governor and in the U.S. House. He'll switch from running a state that's home to more than 1 million people to a city with just under 72,000 residents.
He did not take his move to local office lightly, knocking on roughly 11,000 doors during his campaign. He survived a close race in the primary against Velda Jones-Potter, a former state treasurer. “We weren't talking about some of these highfalutin issues that you hear about in the presidential campaign,” he says. “We were talking about potholes in the streets and these dead trees in the neighborhood.”
Governing spoke with Carney about his decision to cap his career as mayor. Here are edited excerpts from that interview:
Governing: This year, your old House seat was open and a Senate seat was open. What made you decide to run for mayor?
John Carney: I was looking for a challenge. I feel like I have a lot of energy and a lot of juice left. I've always been interested in the city of Wilmington, in particular, where I've lived for almost 40 years.
The current mayor [Mike Purzycki] is a good friend, he's done a great job. I wanted to see some of the things through that I worked on as governor, working with him to a certain extent. And when I started campaigning, it really confirmed for me that this was a good thing to do, because talking to people every day, you just learn about what their concerns are. It's very much more down in the weeds and at the street and ground level. And I like that. You know, going back to Washington, you're as far from the street level as you can get — particularly, I imagine, in the United States Senate.
Governing: This is a tough time for mayors, between empty downtowns and rising homelessness and federal pandemic aid starting to run out. Can you talk about the challenges you anticipate dealing with as mayor?
Carney: Well, I would say this: I know what I'm walking into, having been there through the pandemic, having experienced the uptick in gun violence and gang violence in our city.
In Wilmington, we have a huge legal community. Delaware's legal community, and its corporate area in particular, is world renowned. Well, the lawyers during the pandemic figured out they can, maybe better than most, work from home. If they work from home, and their home is outside of the boundaries of the city of Wilmington, they get credit against their wage tax for that time. And so that has really negatively affected our revenue, which affects our ability to provide public safety services and other services as well, and it has an impact, obviously, on the commercial real estate market, which is not just bad for the people in those buildings. So, yeah, it is a tough time.
But we just had one of the more positive things happening in Delaware's economy. A company called Incyte — which makes really innovative treatments, mostly for cancer, based on both immunotherapies and genetics — they're expanding, and they've decided to move 500 people from Pennsylvania into one of the former bank buildings, and then will grow into another one. That’s 1,000 employees over the next number of years, which will be a huge boost for the city.
Governing: Just after you became governor, you had to deal with a prison riot. Since then, there’s been COVID-19. Can you talk about what you’ve learned in terms of anticipating the unexpected?
Carney: Not long after the prison riot, with the murder of the correctional officer, I also had a state trooper who was murdered on the job at a convenience store, and that was difficult as well. And then a once-in-a-century pandemic.
At the Democratic convention, I met some of the people with the Democratic Mayors Association. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself — hadn’t had the election — but I spoke with their executive director who said, “You should talk to them about what you are going to say the first time somebody walks into your office and tells you that a 16-year-old boy has just shot and killed another 16-year-old boy in one of your neighborhoods."
I have to tell you, it hit me. I mean, I see these incidents happening here in our city, and they're tragic, but I never thought of it quite in those terms. Those are really important moments, and they're also where you separate the good mayors from the bad mayors, the good governors from the bad governors in terms of how you deal with that — whether or not you can communicate a sense of understanding and outreach at the same time. With the pandemic, it was communicating a sense of calm and reasonable control and that you're doing the right thing.
Governing: Whether you serve as mayor for four years or eight years, what do you think success on your watch would look like?
Carney: Even though this is not the official responsibility of the mayor, I would like to have at least half of my third graders read proficiently when they take that assessment test. Right now, in some of the elementary schools, it's less than 10 percent. That’s just immoral and it's a bad indication of the future for those children. I hope to be an advocate for the children. It's one of the motivations behind doing this. We are in the process of consolidating the schools, hopefully, into two districts right now, just to get a hyper focus on those children.
But we've got some great projects that are already underway, continuing to cultivate that downtown business district, because we need that to be an engine to support the rest of the city, and, frankly, the overall economy of the state.
