Akron voters in parts of the central and west sides of the city will decide on their council representative in the May 6 primary election.
Ward 1 Councilmember Samuel DeShazior was appointed to the seat after Nancy Holland unexpectedly left in January 2024. Community organizer Fran Wilson and attorney Emily Durway are running against DeShazior.
Ward 1 covers part of Downtown Akron and several northwest neighborhoods including West Hill, Highland Square and Merriman Hills.
Ward 1 candidates focused on housing
City of Akron
All three candidates for Ward 1 councilmember mentioned housing as a top priority.
DeShazior resides in the Cascade Valley neighborhood. He previously worked in economic development and urban planning in the city’s administration for two decades.
He touts his experience working with Alpha Phi Alpha Homes, which conducts housing projects in underserved neighborhoods. On council, he’d like to continue working on affordable housing, he said.
“Through some of the work that I've done over the last, since 2009, which is about 16 years, we developed more than 2,500 units of housing throughout the town and more than 1,500 units of housing right here in Akron itself,” DeShazior said.
Wilson, who uses they/them pronouns, lives in the West Hill neighborhood, where their family has resided for four generations, they said. They have not held elected office before. They ran for an at-large council seat in 2023 and have been actively involved in the community and attended city council meetings for the last five years, they said.
Wilson is focused on cracking down on out-of-town landlords, protecting renters’ rights and revising the housing code, they said.
“I see a desperate need for accountability in the housing space,” Wilson said. “We need renters’ protections and subsidies. We need to keep fighting out-of-state, negligent landlords, and we need to revamp our housing code desperately to make sure that there is teeth and that the places that we are renting and living are safe.”
Durway, who lives in Highland Square, is a criminal justice attorney and local community organizer. She also plans to focus on negligent landlords if elected, she said.
“Making an ordinance that would specifically make sure that if you do have property here in Ward 1, making sure it's being taken care of, increasing civil penalties when people don't,” Durway said. “Making sure they have somebody inside this area, inside the city who can actually respond when there's an emergency or there's an issue.”
Other top issues
DeShazior added that he wants to continue economic development initiatives and job training. He helped spearhead the development of Mustard Seed Market and other retail establishments in Highland Square, he said.
“I kind of feel like that's part of the work that I've done that will shine in Akron for a number of years, and I'd like to be able to continue that work,” DeShazior said. “We've identified communities where every time we've seen the least, the lost and the left behind; we've tried to empower those communities. We tried to make sure that people got the kind of job trainings that would not only support the work for people who are looking for employees today, but also people who were looking for employees that will go deep into the 21st century.”
Another priority for Wilson, they said, is increasing citizens’ input and transparency in government.
“We have seen the public's voice being cut back and neighbors being cut off during city council meetings, public comments being restricted and the latter,” Wilson said. “We need a city councilor who advocates for the public voice and expands public comment.”
In 2023, Akron City Council approved an ordinance restricting public comment to 10 speakers per meeting. Speakers must wait 30 days to participate in public comment again after speaking.
Durway would like to expand investment into arts and culture in the ward, she said. She’d like to see more spaces for people to engage with theater, plays and visual arts.
“These are all things that are important to engage in our community in order to prevent the young brain drain that also often happens, where people don't stay here or people don' return here after college,” Durway said. “I believe we have the resources and the creativity here in Akron to actually make sure that we're keeping a safe space and a support for those arts that actually keep people engaged in civic life and also create fellowship throughout the community.”
Ideastream Public Media also asked each of the council candidates for their thoughts on a review of the Akron Police Department’s use-of-force policy.
Council voted down a $640,000 proposal from Mayor Shammas Malik that would have hired a team led by former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch from law firm Paul Weiss. Council debated the proposal for several months.
DeShazior, who voted against the legislation, said a use-of-force review is needed, but at a price that most residents are comfortable with, he said. He believes the study should be conducted by a local organization, rather than an outside firm.
“People somewhere locally would have a better idea, a boots-on-the-ground, a bird's eye view of what was happening in our town, rather than always having to go and get somebody from outside,” DeShazior said. “I think we need to do something. I think it needs to be clear, and I think that everybody needs to sign on for that.”
Wilson would have supported the mayor’s proposal, they said. A use-of-force review is needed, regardless of the cost, they added.
“After four months of them negotiating it over public meetings, me sitting through a lot of those meetings, talking to a lot of community members and organizers and people who have lived experience with police trauma, I came to the realization that we need to do this use of force review, kind of no matter the cost,” Wilson said. “It should cost a lot of money because these are lives that are on the line.”
Durway believes the city should produce priorities for the use-of-force review and put out a request for proposals, she said.
“We come together with the city council and the mayor's office and people who represent different stakeholders in our community and come up with an RFP with specific pillars that we wanna see done for this use of force review,” Durway said. “It takes a little more time, but I think it'll be more thorough. Also, [we’ll] control how much money we can spend on it, because the RFP would have specific budget parameters of what we're actually doing and how much we're able to allocate to it.”
Also on the ballot
There's also a race in Akron's Ward 8 to fill the unexpired team of that seat.
All of the candidates in the Ward 1 and 8 races are Democrats. No Republican candidates filed for the primary. Independent candidates have until May 4, 2025 to file for the November general election.
Akron residents can check which ward they live in here.
