Tishaura O. Jones is the Democratic candidate for St. Louis Mayor. As an outsider (a Chicagoan) St. Louis seems like it is overdue for a new mayor. With little knowledge about the city or Jones, I am ready to vote for her after reading the letter she sent to the Post-Dispatch, Editorial Page editor after she declined an interview with one of their reporters. She eloquently let him know why he was not privy to an interview with her and her goals for the city.

Tishaura Jones’ letter:

Two weeks ago, you used some of your ink to outline what questions you would be asking of mayoral candidates. You complained that “decades of sustained, abject neglect by city leaders have allowed a bombed-out graffiti-covered, war-zone image to prevail.” You said you were afraid to walk your dog at night and you called for a plan to “address blight and abate the graffiti that’s killing our city.”

You just moved here. It isn’t your city, yet. And graffiti is not what’s killing it.

What is killing our city is poverty. Since you’re new and you live in a great neighborhood, you probably don’t know that the poverty rate doubled during Mayor Francis G. Slay’s 16-year tenure.

What is killing our region is a systemic racism that pervades almost every public and private institution, including your newspaper, and makes it nearly impossible for either North St. Louis or the parts of South St. Louis where African Americans live to get better or safer or healthier or better-educated.

St. Louis needs to change. I am not afraid to say that. And I don’t mean the polite incremental kind that Alderwoman Lyda Krewson promises. I mean change.

I will look at every issue through a racial equity lens. I will ask if every decision we make helps those who have been disenfranchised, red-lined and flat-out ignored for way too long.

I will look through each and every program in city government and make the changes necessary to ensure that government is working for those people.

From participatory budgeting to the modernizing of services, I will take steps to make city government easier to navigate, easier to participate in and easier to understand. I’ll ask police officers and firefighters what would make their jobs easier. I’ll put social workers into the police department so that trained practitioners will be doing the jobs police officers aren’t trained to do.

We do not need to invent new programs for much of what I plan to change. There are programs all over the country we can learn from and that we can adopt. I know this because I’ve traveled to see them. I know that galls your writer who wrote that I am “high-flying” and should be grounded. I suspect she meant that I was “uppity” or had a “bad attitude,” but didn’t have the honesty (or courage) to be that overt.

I plan to work hard as your mayor, but I do not plan to waste time ignoring things that are working well elsewhere. We have too much at stake in this community to do any differently, and we have too much to do.

It’s the same way I have run the Treasurer’s Office. When I was elected, I found an office that did a lot of things inefficiently, and I looked for ideas for how to improve. Over the past four years, I modernized parking and launched a major effort to change lives practically with the Office of Financial Empowerment. You described that as “just doing my job” and wrote that the white guy you endorsed would have done the same thing. At least two of you have lived in Texas, so you will understand what I mean when I call that bullsh*t.

As mayor, I’ll take the same approach.

I’m not against using tax incentives for development. But, I want to make sure that we are using those incentives for blighted areas as intended and those we are coupling those tax incentives with community benefit agreements. Community benefit agreements can make sure there is a priority for those who are living in the area to get the jobs created by the development, that these jobs are living-wage jobs, and that they lead to real investment in the community. For decades, St. Louis has jumped around, investing here, giving tax breaks there, without any real reason for why or where. As a result, subsidy has often gone to the parts of the city that need it least. That practice needs to stop. We need a comprehensive plan for the entire city – one that recognizes that more needs to be outside the central corridor.

I will work to close down that rat hole of a Workhouse. Taxpayers spend millions of dollars a year to keep that place open to accommodate many people who do not need to be there, or be there so often. I’ll put the same resources into mental-health services, substance-abuse centers, re-entry programs, and job training. We also need to work with the rest of the region to ensure that they are doing their fair share around homelessness, not just dropping people off downtown or incarcerating them.

Too many people who live in North St. Louis have a hard time getting to centers of employment and recreation because we do not have transportation options that work for them. I’ll make that a priority, headlined with planning and development of a North-Side light rail system.

We need to protect our most vulnerable citizens by expanding access to responsible banking and credit, by insisting on a minimum wage that is a livable wage, by instituting paid family leave policies. We need to create a Tenant’s Bill of Rights so that renters across our city have the tools they need to ensure their housing is livable and safe. We need to do what we can as a City to make sure we are laying a foundation that allows all citizens to be successful and to thrive.

I think you were in Texas during Ferguson. If so, you may have missed what happened here: We woke up. Black people woke up. Allies stood up. Young people spoke up. Our best minds listened and produced a pair of remarkable documents, the Forward Through Ferguson report and the For the Sake of All report, that are blueprints for the next four years of a mayor.

I understand that the Post-Dispatch is hurting right now. I hear that soon you will have to lay off more employees. With readership down to below 100,000, it makes sense why you would resort to a more inflammatory news reporting style to boost readership.

There are some talented reporters at the Post who are very good at their jobs. I’ve had the privilege of talking with many of them. They have written about me fairly, objectively, and positively. I appreciate criticism when it’s due.

But what the editorial board and certain other reporters have done is nothing short of thinly veiled racism and preference for the status quo past. Something this city has had enough of.

I think there might be enough city voters who are with me and are ready to vote for that change in March and April. After we do that, you and your dog will be safer. And maybe you will consider hiring an African-American editorial writer.