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Article courtesy of The Sacramento Observer.
For more stories, visit The Sacramento Observer online.
Observer Staff Report --
When Kevin Johnson was elected mayor of Sacramento last year, the hopes and aspirations of local Black citizens reached a near peak level. He was the first African American ever to be elected this city's mayor. The joy and celebration among many of these residents were as high as they were for Barack Obama, also elected the nation’s first African American U.S. President during the November 2008 election.
It’s now a year later. Johnson, like Obama, has been in office for 12 months. The question now being asked locally is How has the first year been for Johnson? Has he lived up to the expectations of the Black community, and others, who supported him?
To get current feeling of the Black community, The OBSERVER launched its own poll among a random sample of OBSERVER readers, asking their reaction to Johnson’s first year as mayor.
The poll asked OBSERVER readers to rate the Mayor on a scale from the low “bad,” to the top “excellent,” with “poor,” “average” and “good” being the other rating poles.
The poll also asked Sacramento’s African American residents to relate what they felt were the areas of strengths and weaknesses of Mayor Johnson. It is interesting that many local African Americans felt a sense of “kinship” to Mayor Johnson — who was born and raised in Sacramento’s Oak Park area before having a successful career in the NBA.
“He is the first African American Mayor, and we want him to represent us well,” was the feeling of a lot of the Black respondents.
In The OBSERVER study, 70 percent of the respondents felt that Mayor Johnson has done an “above average” to “excellent” job during his first year. Nine percent, or almost one in every 10, rated Mayor Johnson as doing a “poor” to “bad” job.
Actually, 56 percent, more than half of all those who responded to the survey, rated Johnson as doing “good” to “excellent.”
The areas of leadership where most OBSERVER respondents rated Mayor Johnson high were his accessibility, homelessness, the arena initiative, racial profiling and his efforts to improve the city’s image.
The respondents rated Johnson “poor” on building relationships, on his support and development of minority business, on his selling of the strong mayor issue and on his leadership in generating jobs.
On his own Web site, www.kevinjohnsonformayor.com, Johnson said he and his staff have made a concerted effort to improve the city’s image on several issues.
The mayor, in his blog titled “One Year and a Look Back: Mayor Johnson’s First 12 Months,” addresses effective government, education, volunteerism and homelessness.
Most respondents of The OBSERVER survey indicate that if Mayor Johnson is to truly have an impact on the city and its citizens during his tenure, then he has to continue his accessibility with the public, listen and learn from his citizens, and work harder on building relationships with them. With three-quarters of his first term still available to him, there is yet time to develop meaningful and productive administration.
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