Bellwater's mayor isn't ready to hand off the job. Renata Ibarra announced Wednesday she will run for a third term, betting that voters will credit her administration for steering the city through its biotech pivot rather than punish her for the disruption that recovery has caused in gentrifying neighborhoods.
Flanked by City Council President Walter Kowalczyk and a handful of Foundry Row business owners, Ibarra told several dozen supporters that her administration’s focus on biotechnology and green-energy manufacturing had put Bellwater on stronger footing than at any point since the factories closed two decades ago. “We were told this city’s best days were behind it,” Ibarra said. “I am not interested in managing decline. I am interested in finishing what we started.”
Ibarra, who took office when the city’s unemployment rate stood at 7.9 percent, pointed to a rate of 4.6 percent in the most recent county data as evidence her strategy is working. She also cited Kestrel Biologics’ recent $64 million funding round, which the Kincaid University spinout has said will nearly double its Bellwater workforce, as proof the biotech cluster she has championed since her first term is still gaining momentum.
A record she wants to run on
The mayor’s campaign is expected to lean heavily on last year’s council vote approving an $86 million bus rapid transit corridor linking West Bellwater to the Foundry Row biotech offices, a project Ibarra lobbied council members individually to support. She also pointed to preliminary budget office projections showing biotech-related property and payroll tax revenue climbing by roughly 22 percent this year, money she said has helped the city avoid deeper cuts during a tight budget season.
Eight years ago, people in this city were leaving for other places because there was nothing here for them. Now companies are fighting over lab space in Foundry Row. That didn’t happen by accident, and I don’t think the job is finished just because the headlines got better.
Renata Ibarra, Mayor of Bellwater
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said the mayor’s re-election bid would likely draw support from downtown business owners who credit her office with coordinating the transit corridor and the storefront-vacancy debate now before the council. “Whatever people think of individual votes, the mayor has kept economic development at the center of this administration for eight years,” Nakamura said. “That consistency matters to people trying to plan five years out, not five months.”
Not everyone is convinced
Not every council member greeted the announcement warmly. Council Member Terrence Boudreaux, who represents Lowertown and has clashed with the mayor’s office over the pace of neighborhood reinvestment, said Ibarra’s numbers tell only part of the story. “Unemployment is down citywide, but walk two blocks off Vale Avenue into Lowertown and tell me the recovery has arrived,” Boudreaux said. “I’m glad Foundry Row has biotech jobs. I’d like to see what this mayor plans to do for the neighborhoods that are still waiting.”
Kowalczyk, who has served alongside Ibarra through both of her terms and does not face voters again for two years, declined to formally endorse her but said he expected her record to be central to the race. “She’s going to have to answer for the transit corridor’s cost overruns and for how slowly some of this growth has reached Lowertown and Cedar Hollow,” Kowalczyk said. “But she’s also going to get to point at a skyline that looks a lot different than it did eight years ago, for better or worse.”
No formal challenger had entered the race as of Wednesday, though Ibarra’s team acknowledged they expect at least one serious opponent to emerge before the filing deadline. Council Member Luis Bettencourt, who represents the gentrifying Foundry Row district and is himself facing a competitive re-election fight this cycle, said he had no plans to run for mayor but declined to rule out a future bid. “Not this cycle,” Bettencourt said. “I’ve got my own race to worry about.”
Ibarra said her campaign would formally kick off with a series of neighborhood meetings in the coming weeks, starting in Lowertown and Cedar Hollow rather than Foundry Row, a scheduling choice her campaign manager described as deliberate. “The mayor knows where the skepticism is,” said campaign manager Felicia Grant. “She’d rather answer the hard questions in the room than avoid them.”
City Manager Marcus Whitfield, who works closely with the mayor’s office on budget matters, declined to comment on the political implications of the announcement but said his office would continue operating as usual regardless of the campaign calendar. “My job doesn’t change because there’s an election,” Whitfield said. “The budget still has to balance either way.”
The filing deadline for mayoral candidates falls several months from now, and Ibarra said she expects the race to sharpen once the council finishes its current budget season. For now, she said, she intends to keep governing as though the outcome were not assured. “I’ve never run a race like I already won it,” Ibarra said. “I don’t plan to start now.”