By Desiree Parker
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Five candidates are vying for two seats on Williamsburg’s city council. WYDaily will share an in-depth profile of each candidate this week, Monday through Friday. The election will take place Tuesday, May 4.
Bobby Braxton, who grew up in the city in the 1930s and 40s, is running for his second term on city council because he wants to finish what he started in his first term.
“Your first term is a learning term,” he says.
Well before he ran for council four years ago, Braxton, now 73, spent his childhood in a segregated Williamsburg. He went to Bruton Heights School, and graduated in 1956. He graduated from Hampton Institute with a degree in electronics, and served in the Air Force.
Other candidate profiles
Monday: Scott Foster, a College of William and Mary senior who wants to serve the city he now calls home. Read it here.
Braxton worked for Westinghouse Electric (now Northrop Grumman), and he also taught as an adjunct at Catonsville Community College in Baltimore.
He decided to run for council the first time after his involvement with the Braxton Court Neighborhood Revitalization Team, which used a $2 million grant to refurbish residences and infrastructure on Braxton Court, named for his family. Braxton currently lives in a house on Braxton Court built by his grandfather.
“I wanted to see if I could make an impact on the area,” Braxton says about why he got involved with the project. He worked with the city while spearheading the Braxton Court work, and that got him interested in running for council.
“People often complain after the fact, but the people have a voice,” Braxton says. “Often they don’t know that. I can fall right in and help, I thought.”
Some of his accomplishments during the first term, he says, are his work with the Peninsula Council for Workforce Development and the development of the Youth Career Café program in Newport News, which helps students in high school and afterward research and have tools to help them be more competitive in the working world. Braxton wants to see the program expand into the Triangle. “Now, we’ve got all the three jurisdictions talking about it,” he says. This is something he’d like to work on if he’s elected for another term.
He says he also worked to get Riverside to purchase land in the city (on Rt. 60 East). Riverside plans to build a hospital on the land. “It’s not about the capability of [other] hospitals,” Braxton says. “It’s a proximity issue. It will be close to the Grove community, Kingsmill, parts of York County, etcetera.”
He also supported the Quarterpath Crossing Shopping Center project, where Harris Teeter is located.
In the year ahead, Braxton says “the state budget cuts are the number one problem, but Williamsburg is very well-managed…and better situated than most in the region” to weather the budget problems. “The impact on schools will be rough, though, and I’m hoping the state cuts won’t be that bad.”
Health and human services are also a priority for Braxton. He has ridden along with the local police at night, he says, and has gotten a first-hand look at some challenges that face the homeless in the city. He says the city’s health and human services department, headed by Pete Walentisch, is working hard on the problem.
Offering affordable housing is also important to Braxton. “We need to figure out ways to make sure that the people we count on, like police and fire fighters, can afford to live here.”
As for town-gown relations, Braxton says he doesn’t get the sense that there’s a huge rift between students and the city. “Look at how many William and Mary alum live here,” he says. “And students are a part of things – they work in the city and volunteer.” Read more about his thoughts on campus issues in a previous story in the Flat Hat. Braxton voted against council’s decision to change the three-person rule after no one supported his request for deferral – read a WYDaily story here.
Braxton also has an interest in how high school students are doing. He attends high school local graduations because “I like to see what they’re doing, where they’re going. I’m proud of them.” This is the same reason he has attended some GED graduations at the local jail, he says.
Braxton invites people to come talk to him about issues in the mornings at Aroma’s, where you can find him nearly every day of the week.
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