Marikay Abuzuaiter Announces Run for Greensboro Mayor

Greensboro Mayor Pro Tempore Marikay Abuzuaiter officially announced her run for mayor Wednesday, confirming an ambition many across the city have suspected for years.

Abuzuaiter, 70, has been a constant on the council since her first election in 2011—but getting there in the first place wasn’t easy.

“If you don’t remember, I lost twice!” she told The Assembly this week. “It’s okay if you don’t, really.”

Abuzuaiter always had an interest in local politics. When she and her husband, Isa, owned the seafood restaurant Mahi’s on Lawndale Drive, some city council members were customers. Her conversations with them inspired her, as did the political energy around opposition to a new phase of the White Street Landfill in East Greensboro and conversations with a local women’s group of which she was a part.

She decided to run for an at-large seat, a city-wide contest for three seats on the council. She lost narrowly in her first two attempts.

“That third time people were like, ‘You’ve got it! You won!’” Abuzuaiter recalled. “I said, ‘Don’t say that…don’t say that until every last vote is counted!”

Though council races in Greensboro are technically non-partisan, the 2000s were a politically divided and combative time in local government. Fights over how the city dealt with the Greensboro Massacre and an ongoing controversy over alleged racial targeting within the Greensboro Police force divided the council and energized conservatives.

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, a national conservative backlash and proliferation of “Tea Party”-inspired local conservative groups led to a rare conservative majority on both the city council and Guilford County Board of Commissioners. But dysfunction on council and a politically unpopular plan to re-open the White Street landfill led to a big shift in 2011.

Abuzuaiter, a Democrat, was elected alongside fellow at-large council members Yvonne Johnson and Nancy Vaughan, two women Abuzuaiter considers mentors.

“I learned a lot from both of them and they were very supportive of me,” Abuzuaiter said. “I was very lucky to have those two women, who had much more experience, to talk to and to get advice from and to serve on council with and really to build those relationships.”

Abuzuaiter would weather some tough times on the public stage in her first few years in office.

In 2013, Yes Weekly reported on a series of emails and messages in which Greensboro Police described Abuzuaiter as a confidential informant. The messages suggested she fed the department information about protest movements to which she had been close both before and after her election. Abuzuaiter denied that.

And in 2014, her family’s restaurant, Mahi’s, closed after the IRS put a lien on it over nearly $35,000 in unpaid employment and payroll taxes. The IRS miscoded her payments, Abuzuaiter said, and she ended up paying about $6,000 to resolve the issue. The restaurant closed primarily due to the North Carolina Department of Transportation purchasing its parking lot.

That same year, a district court judge ordered her family to pay $97,000 on a personal loan on which they had defaulted.

That followed a series of other financial problems for her family, which became public when she took office. In 2010, the Abuzuaiters lost two apartment complexes to foreclosure. The next year, Abuzuaiter was taken to court over more than $10,000 in unpaid credit card debt. Her husband, Isa, was also arrested in 2014 after he was pulled over for speeding with two guns in the car—one of them stolen. He was charged with possession of a stolen firearm and two counts of possession of a concealed gun, though the charges were later dropped.

“Like a lot of people, we had some hard times in a tough economy and we got through it,” Abuzuaiter said. “I was always upfront about that and always talked about it. I think most people can relate to something like that. When people talk to me as a city council member about tough times they are going through or their family are going through, I can say I have been there.”

This year, as a number of long-time council members step down and long-serving members face strong challenges, a historic shift could be coming to the council.

The Thread talked to Abuzuaiter about why she believes now is the time for her to make her bid for mayor.

The following exchange has been edited for clarity and length.

Why is this the year to make a run for mayor?

It is something I’ve thought about and considered for a long time. if you asked me 20 years ago, never in a million years would I have thought I’d be doing this. But getting into city government, learning how everything works, I think it makes sense now. We are pretty much going to have a new city council, an almost totally new council. I truly believe that we need someone who has been on the ground in the last several years, more than a decade, in order to have the institutional knowledge.

Mayor Nancy Vaughan is retiring. Yvonne Johnson planned to retire before her death last year. Goldie Wells and Nancy Hoffmann are also retiring. If you win, you’ll be the longest continually serving city council member. Is that a position you could have imagined being in when you were first elected in 2011?

Oh, no way! I lost twice before I was first elected! But I think when you’re elected and you see what it really is you get into all of these neighborhoods, when you talk to all these neighborhood associations, when you work with the staff and the chamber and all the other council members as a team on some of the big economic development victories we’ve had, you just want to keep doing this work. That doesn’t mean that it’s always easy. But I just love having boots on the ground and having been part of so many different commissions and so many parts of the city, going way back.

The at-large seat can be a strong place from which to run for mayor—you’ve already got a taste of what running city-wide is like. Do you think it prepares you for being mayor?

I do think that being an at-large representative on the council you are thinking about the entire city. And you have to be able to go into any neighborhood, any part of the city and hear from people. They bring you their problems. And you don’t always have a solution, but you work to try to help them, to try to find solutions.

Former Mayor Robbie Perkins is, for now, the only other person who has announced a run for mayor. Did you expect him to make a bid this year?

You know, I don’t know if I thought Robbie would run again or not. He does have a lot of support. But Nancy [Vaughan] isn’t running again this time. I always said I would never run against her. When you have two people who are on council running against each other, it can just be a bad dynamic.

Well, sure. We saw that dynamic when Vaughan successfully ran against Perkins and defeated him. And of course last time out, when Justin Outling — who may get into the current race but so far says he’s undecided — ran against Vaughan. I think most people felt some tension on the dais there.

And I was up there right between them!

A match-up between you and Perkins is interesting on a number of levels. The council is technically non-partisan, but I think most people realize this is a race between a moderate Republican in Perkins and you, a moderate Democrat. To what extent do you think that’s going to impact the election?

I really think political affiliation should not make any difference. I know it does, anyway. But that’s really how I feel.

Most everyone knows I’m moderate. I get support from both Republicans and Democrats. And some of them will tell you that on both sides, I also do not get some support from some Democrats and some Republicans, let’s be honest. But you know, if any of us are on there for a party affiliation, then that’s the wrong reason to be on there. It shouldn’t be about a party platform. You know, we are here to pick up your garbage, make sure your water is clean, make sure we have public safety–which thank goodness we have and are getting back to with our police department now.

That’s what enticed me to run for council in the first place, that local government really touches everyone’s life every day. So I believe in the basics, in keeping what we do local and [addressing] the concerns of our 302,000 residents. That’s really my philosophy.

Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.

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