Lone woman among mayoral race leaders offers change at City Hall
One-on-one with mayoral candidate Sue Lovell
FOX 26 reporter Greg Groogan sits down with former city councilmember Sue Lovell about the upcoming mayoral election.
HOUSTON - There can be no conversation about Sue Lovell's mayoral candidacy without first noting the integral role of her granddaughter, Callie.
"She went to school the next day and said, 'My mama and I are running for mayor and we are going to fix this city,'" said Lovell.
It is the future of the city her 5-year-old will inherit, which drew Lovell off the sideline and into the fight. As a business owner, neighborhood and LGBTQ activist, respected three-term city council member and founding board member of AIDS Foundation- Houston, Lovell spent the better part of five decades advocating progressive solutions.
"I am part of that leadership, that infrastructure that brought that diversity to our city and the people being more tolerant of people who are not like them. It really wasn't like that when I moved here and I've been part of those changes and making them happen," said Lovell.
And leadership at City Hall is what Lovell believes is sorely lacking, describing incumbent Sylvester Turner's governance as based far more on "fear" than collaboration.
She cites Turner's destructive, ongoing labor dispute with Houston firefighters as a prime example.
"He told them, I will give you the worst deal ever and he did and he came back and since then it's been a philosophy of you aren't going to get anything and that's just not how you lead the City," said Lovell, whose son is an EMT with the Pearland Fire Department.
Among Lovell's principal priorities is rethinking the proposed I-45 expansion, a decade long project she believes will needlessly devastate inner-city neighborhoods.
"We are going to widen the freeway so folks can move to the suburbs and we can make it easier and faster for them to come in. That's insane," said Lovell, who favors investment, which enhances urban mobility.
And when it comes to building a community less vulnerable to mother nature Lovell believes she's far better equipped than the incumbent.
"We have a huge problem with more intense storms dumping more water. We are still reacting like they are the old storms and our plans on the books to deal with that large amount of rain now are to deal with the smaller storms. Those need to be scrapped. We need to start now and start planning for these larger, more intense storms and I don't see us doing that," said Lovell, who sees the job of mayor as primarily an administrative position.
As the lone female among the leading mayoral contenders, Lovell harkens back to a time when women were a majority on city council. She says lots of good things were done then and can again with her at the helm.
"I want you to look hard at who this current administration is and decide whether that's what you really want and my bet is you'll decide different," said Lovell.