Dear Fellow Citizens of Charleston,

Mayor Joe Riley has ably led our hometown for nearly 40 years - a Mayor of great vision and accomplishment. I’m proud to have supported him and thankful for his service. His retirement will mean a new era for Charleston - one full of new opportunities.

It will be up to all of us, to create a new, shared vision going forward, involving all our citizens, pursuing excellence, and focused on improving our quality of life – for everyone. By defining a clear and collaborative vision, and then working together to make that vision happen, I believe Charleston’s best days are ahead of us!

With this and an even brighter future for Charleston as my goal, I humbly and respectfully offer myself as a candidate for Mayor. Working with you and all our citizens, neighborhood leaders, and our City Council, I would be honored to serve as your Mayor, to continue a renewed pursuit of excellence in the many dimensions of our community life.

I have lots of innovative ideas and a vision about how we can make Charleston work even better, but my leadership will value listening to you and your ideas, and putting the best together for our future.

I want to tell you about three things that will be my first priorities as Mayor:

First, I will launch Charleston 2020, a community dialogue to develop a clear and compelling common vision, a blueprint, for our city’s future. Together we’ll have a dialogue where I’ll invite everyone in Charleston to get involved, give us their ideas, tell us what worries them and what are their hopes and dreams for the future. We’ll have neighborhood forums and town hall meetings, create issues task forces, conduct online polls and digital discussion groups – whatever works and whatever it takes to get people engaged and working together to develop new ideas and a shared vision. We’ll need everyone’s ideas - and everyone’s involvement - to make our city’s future great.

Second, I will launch CitiStat. This will be a citizen driven, public process of reviewing how our government works – from top to bottom, to identify opportunities to make city government more responsive, more accountable and more cost effective. CitiStat is a proven effective management strategy which uses hard statistics and data combined with new ideas and new tools to measure results. It’s about how we make our city work better, smarter and provide better services-improving our quality of life - without having to raise taxes. Since it was first developed by the Mayor of Baltimore in 2000, CitiStat has proven successful in other cities, large and small, all over the country. It will work here.

Thirdly, I will focus on infrastructure, both physical and human. The physical component meaning our public realm; streets, sidewalks, drainage, parks, and public spaces that we utilize and enjoy. We must tend to repair and maintenance, and build anew according to our affirmed priorities. The human component, the most important, is to enhance opportunities for our people in education, jobs, recreation, housing, the arts and much more. I will serve as a catalyst to community efforts to lift our quality of life, making Charleston the best place to live, work, play, worship, and raise a family.

Other areas of focus that would flow from our community vision include:

• Grow our economy by creating new jobs, particularly knowledge based enterprises and supporting small business
• Empower our young people to build their own future by expanding youth and recreation programs and educational opportunities
• Encourage greater community engagement, by making sure all our citizens have the opportunity to be heard and included
• Support historic preservation to protect our heritage, both physical and human, that make Charleston unique and special
• Create more diverse housing options to promote affordability with strategic incentives and by keeping fees and taxes down
• Re-think our public transportation system to promote alternate modes and strategies to reduce traffic congestion and promote more biking and walking
• Foster more cultural and arts opportunities, furthering a renaissance of our creative and artistic community while at the same time providing new jobs and economic growth
• Promote volunteerism and new models of community service by assisting our many non-profit and faith-based efforts that build our community and help our citizens in need
• Ensure sustainability with best use planning to protect our natural resources and improve the quality of life that makes Charleston so unique and special
• Enable more transparency and tough new ethics reform to make sure the business of our city government is open, honest and conducted with the highest integrity.
• Make Charleston more sustainable-environmentally, culturally, and fiscally

This is not just some pie in the sky wish list; this is what we can achieve if through a shared vision we work together to make it happen. I truly believe this.

Since our earliest days as a Port city, Charleston has been a place of diverse people and diverse neighborhoods. That makes us strong. Downtown, James and John’s Island, West of the Ashley, Daniel Island and Cainhoy, each area has its own unique identity, just as we are unique as individuals. It’s so important for our City to be inclusive and respectful of all our citizens and all parts of our City.

Together - we strengthen Charleston.

Charleston is known as “The Holy City”, some say for the religious tolerance that was a hallmark of our City’s origin, others just for the myriad of steeples that grace our skyline. I believe we are all children of God and made in his likeness. I believe this “likeness” of God to be love and compassion. I believe, in order to be a truly Holy City, that we should do all we can to share and illuminate God’s love and compassion. If I am honored, with the support of the citizens of Charleston, to serve as your Mayor, my faith in our Creator would be my compass. Charleston is in fact a very caring City, as evidenced by many wonderful community efforts. As Mayor, I would propose that Charleston adopt the Charter of Compassion, a global campaign inspired by the Golden Rule to bring together efforts towards increasing compassion through initiatives, policy and projects.

My wife Sandy and I live in Windermere, West of the Ashley, and have raised five children in Charleston, and we share a deep concern for our collective quality of life – both physical and spiritual. This ideal of our quality of life is not only where basic needs are met, but a place of nurturing, a place where we, our families, and our neighbors have the opportunity to realize our potential. This collective experience is the “Spirit of Charleston”, it is what makes Charleston the special place we love.

I am a common-sense business person with a caring heart, inspired to community service by my faith and the example of my family, with a touch of artistic creativity. I’ve been blessed with the example of wonderful parents who were deeply involved in our community and I’ve tried to follow their example, leading numerous non-profit and civic organizations. I have an inner urge and believe it’s a fundamental part of the human spirit, to simply leave things better than we found them. I know that working together, we can fulfill the “Spirit of Charleston”, uplifting Charleston’s quality of life, and leaving things better than you and I found them. We owe this effort and commitment in respect of those who have come before us, and more importantly, to our children and generations to come.

This is why I am running for Mayor- and I look forward to working with you because with your help, the best days of Charleston are yet to come. Thanks and God bless!

Respectfully and sincerely,

John J Tecklenburg

9 Fenwick Dr, Charleston, SC