Shelby Green, a data and software engineer turned neighborhood advocate, has filed to run for Tallahassee City Commission Seat 5.
Green, 25, is challenging City Commissioner Dianne Williams-Cox, who is seeking a second term. She said her decision to run was sparked by the commission’s record of “dismissing the public’s concerns” on a wide array of issues.
“My biggest message has been re-emphasizing the public in public funds, public services, public infrastructure and public programs because at the end of the day, a city commissioner’s job is to serve the interests of the public,” she said. “But they also have a job as regulators to align the interests of the public with the interests of the private. And right now, I believe the City Commission is not doing that.”
Williams-Cox declined to comment. A third candidate, Adner Marcelin, former president of the local NAACP, is also running for the commission seat.
Green said her main issues are traffic and pedestrian safety, gun violence, utility disconnections, poverty and sustainable development. She spoke out on a number of those issues during roughly a dozen appearances before the City Commission and the Blueprint board in 2021 alone.
“I feel really passionate about a lot of issues that keep getting ignored constantly,” Green said. “It’s time to move Tallahassee forward and think about how we can recover from the pandemic equitably and address these constantly ignored problems.”
Green has been involved in community advocacy and politics for a number of years. She graduated in 2020 from Florida State University, where she served as president of the College Progressives. She worked in the Providence neighborhood, studying food insecurity and civic engagement as part of a Knight Foundation grant.
Last year, she was appointed to the Leon County Soil and Water Conservation District, becoming the first Black woman to serve in the board’s history. She plans to step down from the seat in November under Florida’s resign-to-run law, though she said she would be leaving anyway because of statutory changes approved by lawmakers during their most recent session.
Green, who voted for Williams-Cox in 2018, said the commissioner has not lived up to her promises, including making neighborhoods more self-sufficient. She criticized her vote to end the city’s moratorium on utility cancellations — which passed last year with unanimous approval — and her more recent support to give $27 million in Blueprint funds to Doak Campbell Stadium.
“I think that she has for whatever reason lost sight of the people who put her in that seat,” Green said. “I think that she has not lived up to the vision that she had for Tallahassee and the vision that she sold to us when she was campaigning.”
More:Adner Marcelin, former Tallahassee NAACP president, running for City Commission seat
Green spent her early childhood in New Jersey and Brooklyn, New York, before her family relocated to Clermont when she was 8 years old. She moved to Tallahassee in 2014 to study chemical engineering at FSU.
She works as a research fellow with the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility and fossil-fuel industry watchdog group, and founded a software business called Together, Not For with her husband, Benji Charles.
Last year, she co-founded Open Tallahassee, a website still under construction designed to help the public access information and engage more easily in democracy. As part of the effort, which started over coffee with FSU history professor Will Hanley, she has collected data from traffic crashes to utility shut-offs.
“The main purpose is just to make local data more accessible,” Green said.
Her campaign said in a news release last week that she wants to improve services and infrastructure to help Tallahassee prepare for “an increasingly unpredictable world.” She also pledged not to take campaign contributions from corporations or trade associations.
“Shelby is running a people-focused, grassroots campaign,” the news release said.
Green, who is holding her campaign kick-off on Saturday, said she has not hired a campaign manager but will begin putting a team together soon.
She said her expertise in data would help her make informed decisions based on facts and encourage performance-based standards for the utilities and other city programs.
“What I’ll bring to the table is really being able to think about complex problems and using data to measure performance and increase our standard of performance,” she said. “Right now, we’re not doing any of that.”
Contact Jeff Burlew at jburlew@tallahassee.com or follow @JeffBurlew on Twitter.
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