Endorsement Alert for Durham City Council 2025

The working class in Durham is at a crossroads. Corporate developers are throwing a record amount of money into the City Council and Mayoral elections. This election will determine whether Durham is a city that invests in its communities or is a city that continues the path of recklessness in over-developing, displacing, and gentrifying our communities. Currently, there is a 4-3 block of city council members that has voted against all our union’s proposals in the last two election cycles, resulting in city workers withholding their labor, due to continued unfair wages and skyrocketing cost of housing and living expenses. This same block supports faster development, with inadequate housing affordability and poor city infrastructure.

Mayor Williams himself has stated that, “I love gentrification.” Mayor Pro Tempore Middleton prefers to lecture city workers on their family budgets, rather than support their demands for higher minimum wage, yet their pens have never run out of ink when developers came knocking.

The City is currently working to rewrite its Universal Development Ordinance without acknowledging the lack of support for critical infrastructure and those who maintain it. Our union members are tasked to maintain and support these infrastructures, often put together by contractors who have long ago took the money and ran, leaving you, the citizens of Durham with the bill.

Willie Brown, President of UE150, and a stormwater maintenance worker in the City of Durham, stated that “Durham has a cancer, and we know cancer is often hard to detect in the beginning stages, yet often easier to cure,” referring to reckless development and displacement. “When it gets to the stage where it’s easier to detect, it is often fatal. You must treat cancer before it gets too late. I have never seen such a high level of underhanded skullduggery from developers in an election. We need candidates who will take the side of the citizens and not further displace, undermine, or destroy the communities that make Durham, who and what Durham is.”

“City workers are the ‘only responders’”, stated Brown. They are the only responders when the streets are flooded from inadequate stormwater infrastructure, when water main lines break, when trees fall into the roads in the aftermath of storms, and when snow and ice cover city streets creating dangerous conditions. “We’re there for the good and the bad times, we never leave you stranded.” Brown further stated, “We come from far and wide to serve this city, because many of us can’t afford to live here.”

Based on UE150’s main priorities, which include: 1) ensuring fair pay and up-to-date living wages adjustments for city workers, 2) creating more affordable housing, and 3) holding large corporations, including Duke University, accountable to pay their fair share of taxes to local governments, we are endorsing the following candidates:

Mayor – Anjanee Bell

Ward 1 – DeDreana Freeman

Ward 2 – Shanetta Burris

Ward 3 – Chelsea Cook

This article was first published by UE Local 150, the union that represents Durham city workers.