El Paso Mayor: A Voters Guide

There are 8 candidates for mayor of El Paso this year but I will narrow that to a more manageable number.

There are only 2 candidates with a chance of winning this election. There’s the current mayor, Oscar Leeser’s, hand-picked successor, former City Council Rep. Brian Kennedy.

Renard Johnson, a newcomer to elections, is the other candidate with an actual chance.

I had the opportunity to interview both men this election season. I’m NOT going to tell you who to vote for in this local election. But I will give you my take, based on my interviews, of both candidates.

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Brian Kennedy is a larger-than-life and very well-known El Pasoan. The army brought him to El Paso in 1975. For the last 21 years, Kennedy was the Director, then CEO, of the El Paso County Coliseum and the El Paso Sports Commission. My read is that Kennedy is positioning himself as “the candidate who will stand up to moneyed interests”; the “moneyed interests” in El Paso are the four or five families whose pockets are so deep, they get to, in part, call the tune for the future of El Paso. Kennedy, like Leeser, scoffs at the idea of the Downtown Multi-Purpose Arena ever having been a feasible plan. He has said the voters should get a do-over, a straight up or down vote on the DMPA. Brian is also one of the few politicians in this current climate that would put a picture of himself in a dress on his own campaign literature (it was for charity.)

Renard Johnson is a homegrown success story. Following Andress and UTEP, Johnson founded METI, Inc., which is a successful and growing El Paso business. When I interviewed Renard, I asked, “If Kennedy is the anti-moneyed interest candidate, where does that leave you?” I didn’t mean this as a GOTCHA question and Johnson declared, to my understanding, that he was indeed aligned with those wealthy El Paso families. I asked him which of him many endorsements was the most meaningful to him. He responded that it was the Hunt family for their generous contributions to his campaign. Again, I was in no way setting traps, but it seemed like Mr. Johnson fell into them anyway. On the issue of the Downtown MPA, Johnson seemed gung-ho to get this project back on track. In his words, “We have to give citizens what they voted for.”