A Conversation With Jersey City Mayoral Candidate Lewis Spears

JERSEY CITY, NJ — Lewis Spears is running for mayor of Jersey City and when he certified his campaign papers in August, he became the fourth, and the youngest, African American man in 200 years to do so.

Spears was born and raised in Jersey City, often pointing to his childhood growing up in the Booker T. Washington Projects as part of his incentive to go into public service. The mayoral campaign trail wasn't the start of Spears' commitment to public service — his resume includes teaching at Dickinson High School, founding the nonprofit Kismet of Kings, Inc. and his current position as the Hudson County Youth Services Commission Administrator.

Spears is running against incumbent Mayor Steven Fulop who is campaigning for a third term.

Patch sat down with Spears at Snapdragon Coffee & Social to discuss the election and some topics voters may have in mind while in the ballot box.

Here is our conversation with Lewis Spears:

Tell me your fondest memory of growing up in Jersey City.

"I talk about this often on the campaign trail. My fondest memory is going to the doctor's office. One reason is because my doctor, she was Asian, and she understood, like, Black culture. I remember her giving my brother a needle and, like, not being able to penetrate his skin. She's like, 'It's the type of skin that he has,' right. The trips, going from the projects to her doctor's office was always an adventure. We would get on a bus or drive, there was food connected to it. Then, when we got there, it was so multicultural, man. There were Spanish people. There were white people there. And my mother would buy a bag of potato chips, for example, and the whole office, all the kids were sharing. So that's a fond memory because that's a Jersey City that I remember and I that love and essentially going back to that place of taking care of one another."

Do you feel like that is the same Jersey City that you live in today, or are there still hints of it?

"No. There are hints. And of course, we operate in our own circles or parishes, but no. That's part of the reason why I'm running as well. Jersey City does a really good job of bringing people in, and there's no problem with that per se. But 1. We don't do well by the people once we get them here, meaning, the safety isn't all that great, education is suffering and affordability doesn't exist. But then 2. People are just distant. They are doing their own thing, or they're disconnected in many ways. I'm trying to bring that oneness. That one Jersey City back."

So let's say you become Mayor. What is the first priority, the number one thing on your agenda on day one?

"There are so many things that's so hard, right? Only because there are band-aids on bullet wounds right now. So infrastructure is going to have to be, my number one priority when it rains a little bit it floods, and folks are just not happy, and I'm unhappy that we're living in these conditions. So definitely an initiative around green infrastructure.

The other thing is safety. They're excited about crime going down, quote, unquote. But homicide has risen 31 percent, and then you give numbers of crime from 2019 to 2020 — it was a pandemic. So obviously crime would have gone down. But we're not talking about the homicides that just happened. So safety will be huge.

Fully funding our schools is very important, that needs to be at the top of the priority list because there are kids sitting in classrooms with mold in— it's just mind-boggling.

And then affordability — we have to pass an inclusionary zoning ordinance so that folks in Jersey City could be able to stay if they would like.

So you said one thing, I gave you four. Unfortunately, those are all competing priorities right now, and I don't know if I can put one in front of the other."

What would affordable housing look like under a Spears administration? And how much weight would that inclusionary zoning ordinance hold within that system?

"When I look at affordable housing, I don't just look at the inclusion zoning ordinance, but it's also under that umbrella. So when I look at affordable housing, we're talking about an IZO, inclusionary zoning ordinance, we're talking about rent to own, we're talking about workforce opportunities for our firefighters, OEM, folks, our police officers as well as teachers. So going back to the IZO, there needs to be, for every 100 units, we need to set aside 2o for low and moderate income families, because essentially, when we do that, we will be supporting the folks in the community, but also we will be eradicating this homeless issue that we have as well. Jersey City, we represent 53 percent of homelessness in Hudson County. It may not sound like a lot, but there are twelve cities in this particular county, and we represent the majority. That number is growing based on a lot of the policies, or non policies, at this point. It's very important that we pass an inclusionary zoning ordinance, but also, find opportunities in our ecosystem to allow folks to go from renting to owning.

There's a mandate for police officers and firefighters to stay here their first year. But their first year, they're making $40-50,000 a year. How do you afford to live here and work here? It doesn't make sense. So we need to really create the system that will support them."

It's just very important that we move towards community policing. And what does that look like? It means not top down, but bottom up. When we look at safety or public safety, we're like police officers go in and they have to do this, XYZ to the community. What I'm saying is, let's have quarterly meetings in each ward with stakeholders in the community, and it doesn't have to be the loudest ones. It's the ones who have a stake in the community who want to stay here and have something to say. So it's going to look different for each ward. We might have a clergy in Ward A, but no clergy is in Ward B. Essentially, every quarter, we will meet and talk about what the success look like, and then how do we obtain it for the particular wards? And so policing is going to be very preventative.

Oftentimes when you say CCRB, people are looking at it under this current regime. The naysayers are like, 'Well, we can't have people who hate police officers.' I'm with that, I don't want people hating police officers, but we want to make sure that we balance that team. We want to make sure that everyone who's on that team has a love for Jersey City, and it shouldn't be cherry-picked by the leader, the Mayor."

We talked about the homicide rate and gun violence and how community policing could play a part in [lowering] that — How do you think that education and the school system plays a part?

"Every part is supposed to supply and then when there's a break in the system, then things could essentially fall apart.

When we're talking about liberation, right, when we're talking about development of a particular group, typically, we use education. But what type of education? Knowledge of self through history? Or language arts, and we're reading, something by Ernest Hemingway. The reality here is how do we create systems within our education system to really support the young people with the social emotional learning. The traumatic experiences that they're encountering need to be dealt with before we're saying, 'Hey, here's this algebraic equation."

Last question: If you can give me one thing that you would like to do away with or see done with in Jersey City, and one thing that you would like to add.

"The most frustrating part about running is the lack of transparency in this administration. So I would want to incorporate transparency. I would like to take out frivolous spending. There are a bunch of lawsuits that are still sitting around where we're using taxpayers' money to fix that, to handle it. How can we really foster a community where we're not being sued at an alarming rate so that we're not taking away from the monies that could be allocated to things like education or things like recreation?"