Vincent Brown is confident about his candidacy for mayor of Durham.
"I know I'm going to win the race," Brown said. "I know that the citizens of Durham need and desire a change."
Brown's background is unique among Durham's 2005 mayoral candidates. The owner of contracting firm Hairston Enterprises, Brown is currently unaffiliated with the city government.
In addition, his campaign is precipitated by professional conflicts with current Durham Mayor Bill Bell.
According to the Raleigh News & Observer, Brown declared his candidacy after the Durham City Council-acting on the advice of Bell-twice rejected his bid for a housing redevelopment project on Barnes Avenue. Brown has since filed a federal lawsuit against the city.
Brown said he hopes to reform and revitalize the city government and "break up cronyism," which he said is prevalent in the Bell administration.
Brown has accused Bell of funneling the Barnes Avenue project to Raleigh Durham Construction Inc., a company Brown said has ties to non-profit UDI Community Development Corp., which is headed by Bell.
But Brown noted that his campaign is ultimately about his leadership and management skills, which he said were the chief strengths he would bring to the table as mayor.
"Attacking Bill Bell is not what I'm about, because that would make me no better than Bill Bell," Brown said.
If elected, Brown said his first action would be to call the heads of all the city departments together to address internal problems. His second priority would be combating Durham's crime problem.
Brown said Durham's history of crime is caused by a lack of economic opportunity.
"Bill Bell has been here for 30 years, and we still have a city with high crime, we still have a city where people are afraid to go out at night," Brown said. "We should do more looking out for our local economy, our local businesses and our local taxpayers. We ought to utilize our tax dollars in a wise and proficient way, and the wisest way is to let those tax dollars circulate back to those who pay them."
Brown said the issue of gang violence also needs to be re-examined. "I don't think the gangs themselves are a problem," he said. "They're being labeled that they won't work and taught that their voices don't count. When you start labeling people, sometime people carry out those labels."
Brown noted the gang issue is largely one of perception.
"We've got to highlight the positive and not just focus on the negative," he said. "We need to highlight the efforts of those students who are doing well [and] playing by the rules. We give one gang so much publicity that other gangs see it in the news and say, 'I want a piece of that,' and come to Durham."
Brown said he also plans to tackle crime with aggressive police action."Everyone may not like the aggression, but as a military man, I know we have to attack first," he said, adding that he served five years in the Navy aboard the U.S.S. Arthur W. Radford and saw action in Lebanon and Grenada.
One of Brown's chief priorities is to apply his business experience to make city government financially accountable. He said he would work on decreasing taxes, in contrast to what he termed the current "spend-spend-spend" mentality of the Durham city government.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.