Mayor Corey Woods on The Black Future Under Kamala Harris (Part 1)

Published Oct 12, 2024, 2:01 PM

In part 1 of our show, the mayor of Tempe, AZ stopped by to discuss what a Harris-Walz presidency would look like, the impacts on life in Black America, and the importance of voting down-ballot!

Broadcasting from the Hip Hop Weekly Studios.

I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Civic Cipher, where our mission is to foster allyship empathy and understanding. I am your host, ramses Jah, and we are going to do something a little different today. We recently were able to have a conversation with a mayor of tim Pi, Arizona, who is a black man and who felt like it was important for us to have a conversation about the potential black future under a Kamala Harris administration. This was a particular interest to us because black men, if you follow the show, have been dealing with a lot of forces that we have not dealt with in the past, not the least of which is disinformation and misinformation, and at present, having an opportunity to elect the first black woman to the highest position in the world, you know, we felt like the challenges that black men are up against are they're they're significant, but the opportunity is also significant. And this gentleman, again he is an elected official, he was able to offer some insight that we thought would be very helpful. And so the format of today's show is going to sound a little different. We have recorded this conversation and we want to share it with you almost in its entirety, but of course, uh, you know, time constraints. So if you want the full version, of course, you're welcome to check out Civiccipher dot com. But we are going to forego a lot of the features that we normally hit you with this week because we felt that this conversation was just that important. And so, without further ado, this is myself, Ramsey's jaw to Ward and the mayor of Timpi, Arizona, Corey Woods, right here on Civic Cipher.

You know, one of the things things that Q and I brush up against being from Arizona is that we are on a national stage, but we're not in a city like New York. We're not in a city like Los Angeles, and that's good and that's bad. Obviously, there's a lot of things that are happening in places like Atlanta for the types of conversations that we have on this show, so we miss out on some of those things. But every so often we get the reality of our situation, which is that we live in a swing state. We live in a state that really matters in terms of shaping the political future. Of this country, and we live in a state where we do have our own fair share of black excellence, and today we are going to celebrate some of that black excellence by having a conversation with someone from our own backyard. He goes by the name of Corey Woods. Now I'm going to let him give himself a proper introduction, but I really want to set up the conversation that I think that we're about to have for those who are longtime listeners of the show. You know that Q and I have had to, along with you, our listener, navigate this. You know, the politics in this country, and certainly within the last six months, so much has changed. We went from being very concerned about our future to having some hope and becoming organized and galvanizing our support and leveraging our platforms to try to create the changes that we want to see in the world. And I'd say in the same last six months, we've received lots of support from obviously you are listeners, but folks that we had never really anticipated being connected with. And I think that today will ultimately be a testament to that. So back to today's guest, Corey Woods. Around here where we live, he's him. He's him, He's the man, and he's someone that makes us all very proud. He's the mayor of Timp, Arizona. And for those who are not familiar with Arizona, Timp is where Arizona State University is. Timp is just a magnificent city. And to know that the mayor of that city is a black man who is someone that we again we can all be proud of, is just a feather in our cat for those of us that live here today, we want to talk about obviously what it means to vote locally and to you know, stay engaged in your local politics. We also want to have a conversation about the goings on nationally because obviously, in the same last six months, we now have Kamala Harris, as you know, the person on top of the Democratic ticket, and that changes things and there are still some folks who are trying to find their place in this elect this election season. And my hope is that today's conversation will help us kind of sit through the rest of the weeds and understand.

What the wood is.

So welcome to the show.

So much for having me, really appreciate being.

Here, and and again I didn't give enough of your background.

I established who you are, but.

Talk to us a bit about kind of your journey to becoming the mayor of Tempe.

Sure, happy to So I moved to Arizona back in June of two thousand and three. So I've been here for a little over twenty one years, and originally came to be a graduate student at Arizota State University. And my thought initially was I was going to get a master's degree and spend a couple of years here in Tempe, and then go somewhere else and get a doctorate. Because my thought process was I was going to become a college professor. And after about a year and a half of being here, I really fell in love with temp and I fell in love with the state of Arizona in general, and so I made the decision that I wanted to stay. I ended up in two thousand and five, only two years after arriving, running for the city council in Tempe, and that was actually not a successful venture. That first time. I was a person who'd been in student government my entire life, probably from fifth grade all the way through my sophomore year of college, and thought to myself, Oh, this is probably very much of the same. I mean, I've run a lot of races, much smaller races for student government and been very successful, but that was the first time I really understood how politics worked at a much bigger level. At that point, it was a city about one hundred and seventy five thousand people, and they had a lot of very deep familial connections to people. They had a lot of those folks in Tempe had gone to school together, they had gone to church together, they babysat one another's kids.

And here I was.

I was a twenty six, twenty seven year old guy who didn't really have much history in the city other than being a grad student at what is the largest public university in the entire country, and so didn't win that race, but got more involved in the community. I had a lot of folks who reached out after I didn't win, who said, look, we don't want you to think that we didn't like you. We just didn't know you. The other people who were running were people who had They had been around for a long time, and so we just had much more familiarity with them. But we would encourage you, if you really want to stay here, to get involved. And next thing, you know, from being on I wasn't on any boards or commissions or anything of that nature. Within about two or three months, all of a sudden, I was on five people said, hey, I was impressed with what you did, and if you were interested in helping people out who were experiencing food insecurity, or who were struggling to pay their rent or or threatening to have their lights turned off because of insufficient payment. You know, there's a board called the Attempee Community Action Agency Board and they help people with all that, and you could be a really good young voice to be part of that group. I talked a lot about youth issues and how we can set up our young people to be successful moving forward into the future. And so people came and said, well, you know, the Boys and Girls Club board has a spot for someone like you and if you would like to join, you should join. And so that kept happening. So gradually I'm now involved in all of these things. And about a year later, there was a seat that was coming open on the City Council in two thousand and eight, and I had a number of people who reached out and said, would you consider running again? And you know, at that point, being a little bit more sophisticated at the ripe age of twenty eight, I said, well, look, are you gonna support me if I run? Are you just asking? Because you know, I mean, sometimes people see traffic accidents on the side of the road, and many times people slow down to see what's going on, but they don't stop to help. They just watch and then they drive away. But when enough people said no, I really I want to help, you know. I'll help you knock on some doors and make some phone calls. I'll write you a check myself. We'll open up our home and invite our neighbors and our friends and the folks that we go to church with. And I said, at that point, you know, then you got yourself a candidate. And so I was fortunate that at the age of twenty nine, I got elected to the city council. I was probably the second or third youngest council member to ever win. I was the first African American council member to ever win. And that surprises people a lot because Tempee's been around since eighteen seventy four, and so the notion that that was the first time a black person got on the city council in two thousand and eight to a lot of people was very shocking, but indeed that's what it was. And so it was fortunate to serve two terms on council. So I was there from twenty eight to twenty sixteen and spend a lot of time working on affordable housing and economic development and improving transportation infrastructure. And we're one of the few cities that doesn't have term limits, so I could have run for a third term, but I was thirty seven at that point and thought, you know, most of my life has been spent at this point doing public service work. You also in politics, especially in these jobs for the state legislature and city council, you don't make any real money. And because people see you walking around in a suit and they go, oh, you must be making a good living, I'm like, nope. And if I'm making a good living, it's because I'm working another job that really is my primary job, that allows me to keep a roof over my head and have a car payment every month. So I thought to myself at thirty seven, I'd like to kind of take on some new challenges, and to do that, I think it's time to probably step away from politics, at least for the time being, and that's what I did. In July twenty sixteen, I left. But about a year or so after I was out, I began to think that maybe I want to go back, but maybe I to go back in the role of mayor because I'll have a little bit more authority and a little bit more frankly influence to really drive the agenda for the city of ten be as opposed to just having the opportunity to vote on a Thursday night. Council members many times have the ability we all have one vote per person. I have one vote. Every one of my council members is one vote. But the mayor is the one who typically gets interviewed by the press. They're the ones who people tend to come to the most to say what's the direction on this project or what's the overall vision and the sort of narrative for the city. And I wanted the opportunity to present that. So it was fortunate enough to run in twenty twenty. I won in March of twenty twenty, assumed office in July of twenty twenty, and not a very quiet time and the history of this country during the middle of the COVID pandemic. Matter of fact, I won on March tenth of twenty twenty, and about two days later, on the twelfth, was when pretty much everything shut down due to the COVID nineteen pandemic. And I remember my consult at the time came to me, Eric Chalmers, and Eric said to me, you know, well, hey, I mean, you were the first black mayor of the city of temp We're going to get tons of run out of this. They're gonna be talking about this for weeks. And two days later, pretty much everyone told people, you know, take your laptop and your power cable and go home and don't come back until we tell you to come back. So I did about one full day of interviews and then it was over that I was home with everybody else.

But it's been it's been a wild ride.

I mean I was fortunate and I served that you know, first four years, and got reelected this past March. I was fortunate not to have an opponent in my reelection, so I got about ninety five percent of the vote and started my second term this past July second. So I'm very very new to this second term. But just like the first term, I have a very big agenda and a lot of things I'd like to accomplish. But you know that's a little bit about me. But I'm just excited to be here both of you today.

So TIMP is a really easy place to fall in love with. I came to Arizona February of two thousand and three. I was supposed to be here for three days one years ago, so you know, I had a very very similar experience to you. Came and never left. You have a very interesting role. You have your constituents here and timpe who are you responsible for? You answer to who you legislate on behalf of. But the stakes of the political process in this country right now are very high, and people like yourself and other leaders from around the country are doing their job for their city, for their state, for the area they represent, but also getting involved on a national level to shape these very very high stake outcomes that we have facing us.

Now.

What are some things that Vice President Harris has done or should do in your opinion, to engage with those who may have supported her in the past but are still trying to figure out how they're going to vote, or things that she can do to earn the votes, especially for those that look like us black men.

So one of the main reasons why I'm supporting her is the number one issue that I've worked on during my now thirteen years of being intellected office in TEMP is housing, and of the two candidates running, she is the only one, from my perspective, with a very proactive, forward thinking plan for how to address the housing crisis in this country. We have a real housing affordability crisis in this country. We also have a real housing supply shortage in this country, and the Vice president's plan is talking about finding a way to build three million new homes in our country, which are desperately needed. We need more affordable and attainable housing for people who truly need it. But part of the problem also is the lack of housing supply causes the cost or price of the existing homes to drive way up. Because if people know, like if you live in an apartment complex, which I do, we can talk about that a little bit later as well lived there for four and a half years, right in the heart of downtown TEMP. If there is not a lot of apartments or multi family units in your area, and your landlord at the company can charge you whatever they want to charge you, because their perspective is, well, where are.

You going to go?

You could threaten them and say I'm going to leave and go somewhere down the street, then well, good luck trying to go down the street. So the benefit of having more units and more competition in the marketplace is it has the ability to stabilize the rent someone and perhaps bring them down. Matter back to the city of Tempe. Over the last six months, we actually saw about a three percent decrease in apartment rates in our community, and that's largely because we're greenlighting so many more units in the affordable, workforce and market rate categories for people who need housing. And so when I see the Vice president's plan and talking about how do we build three million more homes across this country to give people opportunities whether they're home ownership or rental, that's really, from my perspective, the kind of forward thinking leadership I want out of a presidential candidate. When we're talking about a twenty five thousand dollars first time home buyers credit for people who are looking to purchase on because as we know, a lot of younger people have frank give it up on the whole dream of home ownership. That was something I mean, I'm almost forty six, where you know, that was something we still very much believed was within reach. And I have owned a home at one point in my adult life. But there are a lot of people I know in their twenties who've just said, I don't think I'll ever own a home when I look at the cost of housing, when I look at interest rates, when I look at how much I have to pay for rent just on a monthly basis, how am I ever supposed to save enough money to put aside a ten, fifteen or twenty percent down payment so I can actually achieve home ownership at some point in my life. So the housing issue for me is very critical, and for me, it's probably the most important issue that this country faces. And she's the only candidate I see who's actually having a real conversation with not just the black community but Americans in general about how do we not only accreate increase housing affordability, but how do we actually put more supply into the marketplace so people who want homes have the opportunity to do to obtain them.

You know, there's about you know, housing supply One of the things that I learned recently, and you can speak to this, perhaps more intelligently than I can, is that incentivizing builders to build housing that's affordable is it can be challenging because builders have a tendency to want to build luxury housing units. They can charge a premium their maintenance and whatever the operating costs are minimal or whatever their motivations are. I'm sure they're fiscal capitalism.

Of course, but.

You know, when it comes to which candidate can actually bring about some real change for real.

People, well, and a luxury housing developer who has a history of not renting to people who look like the three of us, you know, so that's obviously critically important to me. Not only was he many times building housing that wasn't attainable for a lot of people in our country because of income levels, but even if people like you and I or the three of us walked in with the cash or with the credit to actually rent, we would have likely been turned away for some kind of phony reason as to why they didn't want us in his apartment complex. So, you know, that kind of track record, to me, is very critically important when I'm thinking about the character of the person who should be sitting in the oval office of the first place. But when I look at zoning in general, and I understand why zoning exists, but it also has some very troubling roots in a lot of ways. I mean, it was created sort of back in the nineteen twenties as a way sometimes to do rentline, to keep certain people out of certain neighborhoods, people who folks thought were undesirable or objectionable people. And so, you know, I understand why it still exists, and I think the system has been set up in such a way that you're always going to have some form of zoning in local cities in towns, so the elected officials and residents have some ability to sort of dictate the course of where things will go. But I also don't think that zoning policies should be so onerous that it makes it hard to build anything other than single family detached houses. And sometimes that is still very much to the case. Zoning can be a real impediment to developers building anything, or it simply slows down the process so much that a lot of people simply just throw up their hands and walk away. And so I've been very very encouraged by what I've heard from Vice President Harris, but also you know, watching the Democratic National Convention and hearing former President Obama have that conversation and say, look, we have to do we have to talk have a real conversation in this country about zoning reform so we can try to find ways to remove some of the red tape and some of the barriers that either preventing additional homes from being built and of course therefore preventing people from actually obtaining quality housing that they need to survive and raise their kids and live a happy, comfortable life. So we have to have these conversations. And I only hear one political party really having that conversation at a national level, and I only hear one candidate, which is Vice Preident Harris, during this cycle actually really have a good conversation. And I say that because, look, I watch both conventions. I was at the Democratic National Convention this year in Chicago, so I spent four nights out in Chicago going to all the different events and listening to the speakers. But I also watched the Republican National Convention on TV because I do think it's critically important to understand what both sides are saying when we're having very important policy decisions that have the ability to determine the future of this country. And I didn't hear much conversation about this during the RNC. I heard the conversations from, as I said, Vice President Harris and former President Barack Obama. They were the ones talking about zoning reform. They were the ones talking about building more units. They were the ones talking about twenty five thousand dollars worth of down payment assistance to first time home buyers. And they were the only ones talking about giving middle class people a tax cut, not just simply the wealthy who don't need it anyway. So that's why I'm out here supporting Vice President Harris, and I'm going to do everything I can to help get her across the finish line on November fifth.

So there is a spooky term, and spooky is me being kind an agenda that is becoming obvious, an obvious point of intention between both parties, and that is our former president and Project twenty twenty five. I think a lot of our country wasn't really paying attention to that. And then Ramsen I remember Traji p Henson used her time Live on television in front of a camera to bring a lot of attention to this. The amount of times it was Google skyrocketed after that, and then our former president tried to distance himself from something that we all know he's very very much aligned with a lot of our listeners. However, a lot of our colleagues don't have time to go through a nine hundred page document, which I'm sure they counted on. Are there some things that it out in Project twenty twenty five to you that could have very obvious negative impacts on black people, people of color, and poor people in this country.

The first thing I can think about is Project twenty twenty five talks about the notion of a national abortion ban, which former President Trump and you know, Senator Advance keep trying to run away for, even though both of them, at various points during their political careers, and not frankly even that long ago, are both publicly on record as saying that they support national abortion bands. And so that is specifically spelled out in Project twenty twenty five as one of its main goals and objectives. And my perspective has always been you need to let women have the you know, they need to have control over their own bodies and have the right to make those decisions with their own health care provider. But they don't need me in the waiting room with them, and they assurely don't need the government, and they're making decisions for what's best for them and what's best for their families when it comes to their own health care and reproductive rights. And so that's one of the things in Project twenty twenty five. I think that concerns a lot of people. I think also when you think about too the notion of repealing the Affordable Care Act, or as many people will call it, Obamacare, that the Affordable Care Act has frankly saved lives. It has helped families by the notion of people being young people being able to stay on their parents' insurance until they're twenty six years old. The Affordable Care Act is also what allows a lot of people to actually take the chance to start small businesses, which a lot of people on the conservative side say is very critically important to them. But many times, if you have a pre existing condition, or if you have a family, or just even for yourself, say I need to have quality health care. So in case I happen to get sick for whatever reason, I have some means to go to the doctor or get a prescription for an antibiotic. But if I don't have access to that, I'm going to probably end up just working for a company and not being an entrepreneur, because I'll be concerned that if God forbid, I get sick, I don't have any means to take care of myself. And so the Affordable Care Act, I think has opened up an opportunity for a lot of small business people and entrepreneurs to really kind of release that power of innovation and to really follow their dreams and do the things that they are really called to do on this earth. But without the Affordable Care Act, you're going to have a lot of people that's going to be a real challenge. And I thought it was interesting the other night when I heard Senator Vance talking about how, you know, Donald Trump was trying very hard to save the Affordable Care Act and actually under him it got better. I don't know where that came from. That is one of the wildest things I've heard in quite some time. I Mean, he came into office back in early twenty seventeen on a pledge that I'm going to repeal the Affordable Care Act that he kept, you know, pushing the Republican Congress at the time to find ways to get rid of it.

And they never had a plan to actually take care of it.

And obviously at some point voters caught on and realize this was just simply political rhetoric to gin up your base. But you never really had any plans to do this. And and even now when he's asked about a plan for healthcare and public he says, I have the concepts of a plan.

Sir.

You've been in public life since the year twenty fifteen, when you first wrote down that escalator and spewed some of the most hateful, bigoted rhetoric that I've ever heard in politics. It seems like in nine years you and the people around you would have actually come up with some kind of a plan. But that goes back to the point. Project twenty twenty five is an over nine hundred page document that outlines exactly what his plan is if he happens to make it back into the White House. And I tell people all the time, don't be fooled about the notion. I wasn't aware of this. I never read it. He probably has never read it. But you know, I don't think anyone really mistakes him for being much of a policy person at times. But the fact of the matter is this was written by his friends and his close allies, which he will then utilize to rule over this country. I mean that would be like me having my brother and my father and all my closest friends write a nine hundred page document that they clearly didn't write overnight, and they did over a series of months, if not years, and for me not to know anything about what was actually going on. I think most people would find that very hard to believe. And that's why when he continuously tries to distance himself from Project twenty twenty five, I think a lot of people throw a flag on the play. I think they realize that does not add up. There is no way that all of these people and all of these minds got together to craft this very cohesive, comprehensive policy document, only for you to say I know nothing about it. So when you hear these things about repealing the Affordable Care Act, or implementing a national abortion ban, or trying to raise taxes on middle class people, this is absolutely what they intend to do, and absolutely what he intends to do should he make it back to the White House. And I think it's our job to ensure that we get the word out, talk to our family, talk to our friends, and talk to our neighbors to ensure that Donald Trump is not elected again and that Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the next president of the United States this coming January