Former U.S. Senate candidate Amanda Edwards announces run for Houston mayor

by Patrick Svitek, Texas Tribune+


Amanda Edwards, the 2020 Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate and former member of the Houston City Council, is running for mayor of the city, a contest that is already garnering statewide attention despite being over a year away.

The field already includes two names well-known in Texas politics: veteran state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, and Chris Hollins, the former Harris County clerk who oversaw election changes in 2020 that became a lightning rod for Republicans. They are competing to replace term-limited Mayor Sylvester Turner in the November 2023 election, which is nonpartisan.

“As a native Houstonian and as someone who has a very deep passion and high level of experience in the city, my reason for running for mayor is to make sure that we are tackling some of the city’s challenges but also seizing some of the opportunities,” Edwards said in an interview. She added that Houston, the largest city in Texas and the fourth-biggest in the country, is “at a crossroads.”

Edwards said her top issues will be preventing flooding, increasing economic opportunity and combating crime. Like other major cities, she said, Houston has seen a rise in crime, “and we need to make sure that we have enough law-enforcement officers in the communities, not just to improve response times but also create” better relations with those communities.

Read more: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/23/amanda-edwards-houston-mayor/