Welcome to my blog!
Here, I write about my experiences as your Mayor and topics of interest to our community. My goal is to give you a sense of the job and how it affects us all.
This blog is also a place where I share ideas, such as for the future of our downtown, or give you information on how else you can participate in strengthening our community.
Artist's rendering of New Mount Olive Christian Academy
On Sunday, August 29, I attended the New Mount Olive Christian Academy Ribbon Cutting and Open House on Big Bethel Road. Other elected officials in attendance were Vice Mayor George Wallace and Delegate Jeion Ward. The school is directly behind the church and was designed to beautifully complement its architecture.
The New Mount Olive Christian Academy building is brand new, complete with such state of the art features as a computer classroom and a science lab. The school is for children in Kindergarten through 5th grade.
I was honored to be an invited guest for the grand opening and to help cut the ribbon to the school. I have been friends with the pastor of the church, Reverand W. Randolph Rylander and his wife, who is the principal for the academy for many years. They are both powerful forces full of warmth and determination.
In my job, there’s no better way to start the day than with a fun event like the one I was invited to participate in by the Peninsula Metropolitan YMCA. I arrived at the Hampton JC Penney store at 7:15 am on August 19 to greet the Y’s Bright Beginnings crew for a back to school shopping spree with deserving kids.
Together with Bruce Hoogstraten and Debra Flores from the YMCA Board, I was asked to help choose and buy clothes with a six year old named Daniel who is preparing to start first grade this year.
Daniel was adorable and hilarious and we all instantly fell in love with him. He had a serious shopping attitude and knew what he liked and what he didn’t like and was very, very efficient. (I wish my own boys were so focused in a store).
The job of being a member of city council involves a lot more than the four regularly scheduled meetings we have each month. There is an alphabet soup of regional and local organizations in which we participate. Naturally, every meeting involves staff and preparation time, travel and attendance at the meetings themselves.
For whoever sits in the mayor’s seat there are even more responsibilities. When I first took office, Joe Frank, who was then mayor of Newport News, made me a cheat sheet on a 3 by 5 index card listing the acronyms of the different organizations I would need to know, all in his very neat handwriting.
I’m not particularly sentimental about holding onto things, but I saved that index card. It represents to me the enormity of the task of trying to be everywhere and do everything, not only within the boundaries of your city (or county), but also across the region. It was a task that Joe was able to master.
Click to see a map of our destinations
I had the pleasure last month of traveling with a contingent of city ambassadors to visit and network with two of our four Sister City partners: Vendôme, France and Southampton, England.
Hampton’s other two sister cities are Anyang, South Korea, and Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.
The objective of this ambassadorial voyage, which was paid for entirely by the members of the delegation, was to renew and strengthen our relationships with these communities.
The group departed from Hampton on July 15th and consisted of three citizens: Geoffrey Tennille, President of Sister Cities of Hampton, Dr. Martha Tennille, Secretary of Sister Cities of Hampton and Brittany Foster, Member of Sister Cities of Hampton, plus Special Assistant to the City Manager Dianne Foster, and myself. The trip started one day late due to bad weather in Atlanta.
