Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves wants city voters to judge him on the work he’s accomplished in his first term, four years in which he believes the city entered a “golden age,” but the five challengers argue Reeves’ management of the city has valued growth over everyday residents.
All 37,575 registered Pensacola voters will have a chance to give their verdict on Reeves during the Aug. 18 election.
Reeves is being challenged by Jasmine Brown, Ann Hill, Alicia Trawick, Eric Shorter and Jermaine Williams. All of Reeves’ challengers except for Shorter were involved in local political advocacy in some way before the race, and all but Hill are running for office for the first time.
Reeves: ‘Promise Kept’
Reeves, who in 2022 said his administration would be based on data, marks his performance on how the majority of the residents of the city view his administration and how city employees feel about working for the city.
Reeves noted all surveys the city has done of both residents and city employees show increasingly positive views of the city.
“I think the promises that we made about public safety, about housing, about job opportunity, are promises kept,” Reeves told the News Journal. “And I want to continue this golden age of our city, where two-thirds of our citizens feel like we’re going in the right direction. There’s lots of mayors that would love that. Where about two-thirds of our employees at the city feel engaged, which is the highest that it’s ever been.”
Five of the six candidates sat down for extended interviews with the News Journal over the last few weeks of July and are available to view in their entirety at PNJ.com. Hill declined to do an interview.
Reeves said when he ran the first time, he would give everything he had to the job. He said the projects that are moving forward, like the new Pensacola Airport terminal, Hollice T. Williams Park, Fricker Community Center, the American Magic Headquarters, Sun Trail along Bayfront Parkway, Direction 25, Bay Bluffs Park, Baptist Hospital demolition, and record levels of stormwater improvement projects which include the Palafox Street rebuild, are evidence that he has fulfilled that promise.
Many of those projects have been funded with grants the city sought out from state and federal sources, with a grants office and city economic development office that Reeves created in his first month in office. The city is in the final stages of securing a $76 million grant from Triumph Gulf Coast to bring military contractor Birdon and 2,000 jobs to the city. That grant will push Reeves’ total over $200 million in grant funding since he took office.
“Any administration would hang their hat on one or two of those things getting done in three years,” Reeves said. “We have eight, nine, 10 of these transformational projects happening in our city. And that’s because I’m fulfilling a promise that I’m going to give you everything I’ve got. So that won’t change in the next four years.”
Opponents: Long-time residents ignored
His opponents don’t see it that way.
Trawick, who works as a disaster recovery consultant for local governments and has also been involved in political organizing and was one of the organizers of the local No Kings Day protests, is running to take what she has learned working directly with local governments across the country back to her hometown.
Trawick told the News Journal that she views Reeves’ administration of the city as “reactive leadership” and wants to shift more city resources away from downtown to neighborhoods and parks.
“The city is really important to me, and I don’t want to see the city continue down this path of, in my opinion, its destruction,” Trawick said. “I feel like we’re destroying our historic homes, destroying our history, our trees, our vulnerable populations.”
Shorter is a soon-to-be retired U.S. Army Colonel in the National Guard who opted to jump into the mayor’s race at the last minute. Shorter said he would bring in fellow retiring military colleagues to run the city and believes there needs to be better integration between the city and county governments.
While Shorter says the city is on the right track with Birdon, he says it’s not enough. He wants to push the Port of Pensacola to bring in even more companies that work in the defense and national security industry to boost the local economy.
“The city (limits are) artificially small, and it’s been artificially small for years,” Shorter said. “The truth is that the city should have grown by now. And then we were talking about the Hard Rock Hotel coming in here, which is great. But you know what those are? Those are service industry jobs, and I can tell you something: you cannot raise a family on a service industry job.”
Williams said he was driven to run after seeing how the city handled the Baptist Hospital redevelopment process, the opposition he helped organize, along with Brown, that led to the City Council rejecting the contract in December of last year.
In his day job, Williams is a behavioral health peer recovery advocate helping people recover from addiction, informed by his own recovery from addiction. Williams was one of only two people named by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing as Peer Specialist of the Year in 2026.
“The condition when you don’t fix the bottom half of the city, you see certain things take root, and I was a product of it,” Williams said. “I’ve seen the best of the city, and I’ve seen the worst, and that’s (why) I don’t hide the fact that I’m in recovery.”
While Reeve’s city has sought grants largely focused on economic development and infrastructure, Williams said he is proposing a six-pillar platform for the city to seek more grants and federal funding aimed at increasing support for mental health and housing that he believes will boost the economy and save money in the long run.
“Government cannot take care of every single problem, but my goodness, we can help create the conditions to make sure our citizens flourish,” Williams said.
Brown, who got involved in city politics organizing over electric rate increases in 2022 and has been involved with many organized protests over city and county issues since, is running as an openly socialist candidate. While all the candidates are officially non-partisan, one of the organizations Brown is a member of is the local chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which the national organization has described itself as a revolutionary and Marxist-Leninist organization in its own publications.
Brown told the News Journal her socialist approach to the city of Pensacola would be to put power and decision-making away from what she said was a “small elite minority” and into the hands of ordinary workers by encouraging them to organize and form neighborhood associations and tenant unions.
“Right now, we’re just seeing like rampant development, rampant investment into areas that are not where the majority of Pensacolians are needing it,” Brown said.
Besides Reeves, Hill is the only candidate to previously hold city office as a former City Council member. She is also the only candidate not born and raised in Pensacola, though she has lived in the city for decades and raised her own children here. Hill declined to conduct an interview with the News Journal, but in a written candidate questionnaire, she said that she wants the city to work for everyday people and pointed out policy changes she’d make, like making parking free in city-controlled lots in downtown.
“Lately, I’ve heard from residents who feel that some of the biggest decisions affecting their neighborhoods have already been made before they’re even consulted,” Hill wrote. “I believe a good leader does not simply represent the people; she is their partner at City Hall.”
For his part, Reeves argues the policies he’s pursued will result in more affordable housing and more job opportunities for Pensacola residents.
“At the end of the day, between intentional investments and making sure that every corner of our community gets invested in — and projects like Birdon, where, at scale, we’re going to be able to create true quality of life improvement of having $60,000; 70,000; $80,000 a year jobs — I feel like that’s a great opportunity for every citizen of our city, and really our region, to be able to increase their income,” Reeves said. “There’s no mission accomplished here on any of these issues that we’re talking about, but I’m excited for our progress.”
Turnout on Aug. 18 will be crucial
Reeves burst onto the local political scene with his run for mayor in 2022, where he beat out three other candidates in an August election win that surprised some.
Reeves, the son of well-known Pensacola attorney and former state representative Jim Reeves and Connie Bookman, an advocate fighting homelessness and mental illness, started his professional career as a sports journalist. He pivoted to the business world, working for Quint Studer as his chief of staff, and co-founded Perfect Plain Brewing and The Well, which he sold for an undisclosed amount in 2022.
Reeves’ connections to the Pensacola business world gave him a fundraising advantage and made him a front-runner, but many observers expected the race to be decided in a November runoff.
If more than two candidates qualify to run for a city office, then the election is held the same day as the statewide primary in August, and if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two advance to the general election.
Turnout during the August election is typically smaller, as the statewide primary races are closed to non-party-affiliated voters, even though some local races are open to all voters.
In 2022, Reeves won the election with only 36.4% of city voters participating. In the general election that followed, citywide turnout went up by a 20.5 percentage point increase to 56.9%, but the mayor’s race had already been decided.
Turnout again will play a crucial role in deciding if Reeves will avoid a runoff or face one of his five challengers in November.
Reeves again has a clear advantage in fundraising, the latest campaign reports dated July 31 show. Reeves’ campaign has raised more than $121,000 largely from the Pensacola business community. A political committee set up in 2021 called Citizens for Pensacola to back Reeves’ candidacy has raised an additional $121,000 since Reeves was elected to his first term.
Trawick, who has previous organizing experience with political campaigns, has been the next-best fundraiser but still trails Reeves by a wide margin, with $28,619 in contributions.
Shorter had raised $21,495, largely self-financed as loans to his campaign.
Williams had raised $15,754, and Brown had raised $11,086.
Hill was at the lowest amount in cash raised at $7,784 but had the highest in-kind contributions amount of $12,901, a large portion of which were campaign expenses Hill has paid for directly.
Expect each candidate to be putting that money to work on a blitz of social media, billboards and mailers as early voting begins on Aug. 8 ahead of Election Day on Aug. 18.
The News Journal will have additional coverage of the mayor’s race in the coming days. Next story: Where do candidates stand on the property tax referendum?
Jim Little is the City Government Accountability Reporter for the Pensacola News Journal. If you have a news tip, please send it to jwlittle@pnj.com.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola mayor’s race is referendum on D.C. Reeves first term
Reporting by Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
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By Jim Little, Pensacola News Journal | USA TODAY Network
