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Doug Williams (Georgia)
Doug Williams ran for election to the Atlanta City Council to represent District 5 in Georgia. He lost in the general election on November 2, 2021.
Williams completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2021. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Doug Williams was born in Indianapolis. He graduated from the University of Indianapolis in 1996. Williams' professional experience includes working as a broker and business consultant in the natural products industry and as a general manager for a 12 store chain of health food stores. He has been associated with the following organizations:
- Park Pride
- The Sierra Club
- The Faith Alliance of Metro Atlanta
- The East Lake Farmers Market
- The East Lake Neighbors Community Association
- The Advisory Board for DeKalb County Animal Services[1]
Elections
2021
See also: City elections in Atlanta, Georgia (2021)
General runoff election
General runoff election for Atlanta City Council District 5
Liliana Bakhtiari defeated Mandy Mahoney in the general runoff election for Atlanta City Council District 5 on November 30, 2021.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Liliana Bakhtiari (Nonpartisan) | 68.4 | 5,963 |
 | Mandy Mahoney (Nonpartisan)  | 31.6 | 2,758 | |
| Total votes: 8,721 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
General election
General election for Atlanta City Council District 5
Liliana Bakhtiari and Mandy Mahoney advanced to a runoff. They defeated Samuel Bacote, Katrina Kissel, and Doug Williams in the general election for Atlanta City Council District 5 on November 2, 2021.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Liliana Bakhtiari (Nonpartisan) | 49.5 | 5,170 |
| ✔ | | Mandy Mahoney (Nonpartisan) | 18.2 | 1,903 |
| Samuel Bacote (Nonpartisan) | 17.9 | 1,868 | ||
| Katrina Kissel (Nonpartisan) | 8.2 | 855 | ||
 | Doug Williams (Nonpartisan) | 6.2 | 646 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.0 | 5 | ||
| Total votes: 10,447 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2021
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Doug Williams completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2021. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Williams' responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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I've been a usual suspect in good trouble in Atlanta in DeKalb for most of the past 20 years. I'm running for city council because I want to make sure that Atlanta works for everyone and currently it does not. A city council representative has the best opportunity to do the most good for the most people by acting as advocate, representative, and facilitator to bring public and private groups and resources together to effect positive change.
I put in over 10,000 hours of my life to my community as a neighborhood president, NPU officer, renovating our city parks, improving infrastructure, founding and running a farmer's market & urban farm, and reducing crime while building community. I've partnered with city, county, state, federal, and private partners to bring my community over 1 million dollars in measurable results. My work is built on bringing people together to bring about positive change .
I'm not new to this, I've been doing this. I know talk is easy but action gets things done. I will work for an Atlanta that works for EVERYONE but especially the people of Atlanta in district 5.
- We need to create an Atlanta that works for everyone, and I have the experience to make it work better for us.
- My key issues are Safety, Shelter, and Services for our community. I will work to repair the relationship between our community, police, and city hall, make sure Atlanta has affordable housing for everyone, regardless of income, and see that we care for those who have been left behind by careless development.
- I will partner with our neighborhoods and create new ways of increasing civic engagement and responsiveness to improve city services and community building.
One area in which I will create immediate improvement is facilitating community concerns, ratings, and opinions about city services and community needs. I will implement an annual community performance review for citizens to rate the performance of city services, with quarterly town halls at the neighborhood level. The survey will be available online but also through community centers, libraries, schools, and senior centers. This tool will provide metrics of performance of city services to identify citizen priorities for public safety, parks, water, sewer & infrastructure such as walkways, bikeways, road improvements, Etc. The survey will measure city responsiveness to service issues and help in setting community goals for development. We must improve communication between the community and the City and this program would provide an essential form of citizen feedback. I can't force the entire city to implement such a program, but as a city councilperson I can start work on this immediately.
We can increase accountability and professional standards while reducing crime if we increase community partnership and support to create a better relationship with law enforcement so that our officers are appreciated members of the community, not just respected authority. We need sufficient numbers for community policing and need them focused on local communities. We need to provide assistance for officers to live in all our communities so they are viewed as human beings and community partners, rather than an occupying force of people from outside the community. Most of our crime is done by very few people, and by knowing the community, they will know who is a problem and who is not. We also need to increase funding for Police Alternative Diversion and wrap-around mental health and addiction support. Recent increases in murder have been largely centered around club districts and gang activity related to selling drugs to the only nightclub scene open on the East Coast during the pandemic. The state is not doing Atlanta any favors by insisting that these businesses stay open, but we have to figure out how to manage difficult situations. Domestic violence has increased during the pandemic, revealing our shortage of support for survivors of abuse. We need to allocate additional resources for gang violence and domestic violence to get crime back down.
The cost to society of having a black market that feeds organized crime can be seen by the number People in our prison system due to marijuana and the amount of criminal activity this popular drug creates. It would be cheaper and more effective to regulate marijuana as we would have a lot less people in prison and jail and could use the revenue to pay for other improvements for the city.
We need to establish a punch list of priority roadway projects for each street sidewalk and project in each neighborhood, district and NPU with a scoring system for necessity that is easily viewable by city residents, with monthly reports at NPU and neighborhood meetings. We cannot fix all sidewalks at once, but we can start a network of walk ways to begin an interconnected grid of walkability in and among our neighborhoods, with additional identification on sidewalks that impede access for disabled citizens. We can start a community conservation corps of High school and college kids to do sidewalk repairs under guidance of skilled journeymen to ensure the least of us have safe sidewalks. We will not get it all done at once, but we can set priorities for a plan and execute that plan. We should pay for this with a 1 cent per gallon gas tax to be devoted to sidewalks, bike lanes, road repairs and upgrades.
I love Atlanta. For me, love is an action, how we put the golden rule into practice by creating systems that ensure we treat our people the way we would want to be treated. Frankly, that has not been the Atlanta way. The city too busy to hate has been too busy to care as it has left a lot of people behind in the pursuit of wealth. We have a long history of city government that is not very responsive to the people, and frankly, a lot of the council person's job should go into making sure the city works for all of us.
Lincoln recognized that our freedoms are only as secure as the laws that protect them, and that it is the working class and middle class who build our country.
T.R. saw that a system that failed to ensure fair systems for the working class could not stand, and that our natural resources must be protected for the people.
FDR saw that our systems must protect the least among us, and ensure that we care for the least among us.
Dr. King held us to account live up to our ideals and ensure that all people were equal before the law, especially minorities and the poor.
Hosea L. Williams understood that we have to organize and work for the poor and underrepresented and be willing to serve them to have their loyalty, and when choosing between money and the people, choose the people.
Richard Lugar understood that government should work effectively for the people, and the best way to do that is to set up ongoing systems for continuous improvement based on civic engagement and feedback.
I ask that citizens don't just listen to what candidates say, look at what we've done and what we have to show for our work. If you look at my record you will see I don't just talk about change, I bring people together, and I get things done to the benefit of the community. I'm not just making promissory notes about what I'll do, I've got the results and the receipts to show for my work in our community. I'm not new to this, I've been doing this.
Working with and listening to the various neighborhood organizations public and private entities, to deal with their concerns, and come up with solutions to problems. On paper this role is a legislative job in a strong executive government. When this job is done well in practice it is all about constituent services and making sure the various aspects of city government serve the people of the district.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Note: Community Questions were submitted by the public and chosen for inclusion by a volunteer advisory board. The chosen questions were modified by staff to adhere to Ballotpedia’s neutrality standards. To learn more about Ballotpedia’s Candidate Connection Expansion Project, click here.
See also
2021 Elections
External links
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Candidate Atlanta City Council District 5 |
Personal |
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on October 04, 2021
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