With former Charlottesville Mayor David Brown announcing his withdrawal from the race for the Democratic nomination in the 54th District, four candidates now remain: former Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, Albemarle County School Board Chair Katrina Callsen, and former Police Civilian Oversight Board Chair Bellamy Brown. They each spoke with Charlottesville Right Now host Courteney Stuart to explain why they believe they’re the right person for the job. 

“I just jumped in this race because we need more young, younger candidates,” says Cooper, who at 29 is the youngest one vying for the Democratic nomination in the June 20 primary. Cooper says growing up in a low-income household in Charlottesville allows him to understand pressing issues from the need for affordable housing to gun violence in a way the other candidates cannot. In particular, he says, gun violence has hit close to home recently with the death of a cousin in a recent shooting.

“I definitely don’t want to tighten it up as to make it that nobody can purchase a gun,” says Cooper. “But we need to pass more commonsense laws so we can track if anybody has a mental illness and they have a gun or they need more training if they have a gun.”

Like Cooper, Brown is a Charlottesville native and is a product of city public schools. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran and graduate of James Madison University, he served as chair of the Police Civilian Review Board (now the Police Civilian Oversight Board) and ran for city council in 2019 as an independent, a decision he said was aimed at connecting people and creating a collaborative environment after the trauma of Aug. 12.

“At the local level, the party identifiers aren’t necessarily things that should be focused on,” he explains. “It should be focused on getting the work done for people locally at that level. And I’ve had people ask me this question repeatedly, so my goal in coming here was to really focus on getting things done. And it’s still the same thing. Doesn’t matter who you are in the district, I’m still going to work on your behalf…. So for this time, obviously, I mean if you go back and you look at a lot of my views and what have you, a lot of it will align with the Democratic party itself.”

Brown’s platform is service, governance and leadership. He says his family has a rich history of service in the city.

“In 2017 the City of Charlottesville did a proclamation to my great-uncle James Taylor. And he had fought in the Civil War, on the union side,” Brown says. Taylor later served in the House of Delegates, a role his great-nephew now hopes to fill.

Brown says Taylor’s father, Fairfax Taylor, was a key figure arguing for the separation of the two First Street Baptist churches, one on Main Street and one on Park Street.

“They were both instrumental in advocating for black liberation, women’s suffrage, public schools, the whole nine,” says Brown.

For Callsen, a graduate of Yale University and UVA Law, education is a top issue. Her parents, an interracial couple who dropped out of high school and joined the military before returning to school later in life, taught her the importance of education.

“I came here to go to law school. I was a teacher before that and I actually did Teach for America. I realized that many of my students had issues that pretty much extended outside the classroom door,” she says. “I taught in a school that was primarily an immigrant population. They had a lot of legal issues they were struggling with. I came to law school with the idea that I’d focus on child advocacy, and I was also happy to return to Virginia.”

In addition to serving as Albemarle School Board chair, Callsen is a deputy city attorney in Charlottesville. Those two roles, she says, have given her a deep sense of how state laws impact localities.

“I represent the Department of Social Services, represent the airport, and I believe in local government. And I believe, actually, that’s where a lot of power rests that affects our everyday life. But there are some times when bigger issues are being debated at a state level. That’s what pushed me to say, I want to join in this race because these educational issues are increasingly coming before legislators in Richmond,” she says.

Former Mayor Dave Norris currently serves as manager of the Financial Opportunity Center and Housing Hub at Piedmont Housing Alliance. He previously was founding director of PACEM.

“I’ve been involved in a lot of these issues on the local level in terms of housing, in terms of economic opportunity, in terms of youth opportunities, education, employment, and down-the-line environmental issues,” he says. “Consistently I’ve seen there are a lot of ways that we can get more support, and we should be getting more support from the state in helping localities like Charlottesville and Albemarle to address these challenges.” 

Norris says one of his priorities is increasing mental health resources. He has proposed the creation of a Virginia Community Mental Health Corps to “essentially flood our communities, our neighborhoods, our schools, our shelters, et cetera, with trained mental health workers, including peer support specialists to help do that early intervention,” he explains. “We need to be investing in programs like that, getting trained mental health workers out into the neighborhoods into our schools.”

You can hear all the interviews with 54th District candidates here.