Renard Johnson will be sworn in as mayor of El Paso on Jan. 6, almost a year after the political neophyte announced his candidacy.
A graduate of Andress High School and the University of Texas at El Paso who built an engineering business in his hometown, Johnson campaigned on shaking up the status quo that he said had left El Paso adrift.
He emerged atop an eight-candidate mayoral field in the Nov. 5 general election, then handily defeated city Rep. Brian Kennedy in a low-turnout runoff election Saturday, Dec. 14.
Johnson talked about the meaning of his election and his priorities as mayor in a conversation with El Paso Matters on Tuesday, his first in-depth interview since his election.
Here is a transcript of the interview, which has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
El Paso Matters: What messages did voters send in electing you as mayor?
Johnson: The amount of doors that we did knock on, we knew that there was a clear message that the voters wanted change, and they wanted something different than the status quo. And I think the voters came out and said exactly that. They want El Paso to have more opportunities. They want El Paso to have more economic development. They want El Paso to stop the brain drain, keep their kids here within our community. They want better jobs. They want more quality of life. And I think they want the basic needs taken care of — your roads, your potholes, your parks. That’s what they said. And I think they voted for the candidate that most connected with them on those issues.
El Paso Matters: What are your top two or three priorities for your first year as mayor?
Johnson: My priorities are, number one, to bring council together. That is going to be a top priority, to make sure that we set and have alignment with the vision. And once we have our vision in alignment, we’ll be able to come together as a council to move the city forward.
I want to be hyper focused on economic development. I want to make sure that we’re out connecting with industry that wants to either expand here in El Paso, whether that’s a small business within El Paso, that we can grow and expand our small businesses here and become bigger businesses. But, I also want to work with our business community and build on relationships that I have within Texas and throughout the U.S. I want to bring companies to El Paso to showcase what we have to offer so that ultimately, over time, we can start lowering our taxes. But I want to start growing the commercial base so the residential taxpayers can feel some relief over time.
El Paso Mayor-elect Renard Johnson has an ambitious agenda for his first year in office. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
El Paso Matters: How would you describe your leadership style, and what can the city staff expect from you as mayor?
Johnson: My leadership style is one of empowerment. I like to empower people to make decisions. I like to, in addition, bring people together. Once we develop trust, they’ll know that they have a lot of autonomy to run their areas. I don’t have time to micromanage.
And I think in order to build the high-performing customer service organization that I would like for our city to be, these are professionals, and they should be empowered to make decisions because they’ve been doing it for a long period of time. So I want to empower them, and I want to let them go and really do what they do best.
El Paso Matters: Have you identified a chief of staff or other top aid for when you take office?
Johnson: You know, I thought running the campaign was hard, but finding a chief of staff and getting the folks that I need to work with me in City Hall has proved to be difficult. The truth of it is that I’m going to get orientation (Wednesday), and then I’ll know more on how many positions that I do have. I don’t know if I have two or I have three, but I want to quickly, by Friday of this week, identify a chief of staff.
El Paso Matters: For the past two years, the city has adopted a no-new-revenue tax rate. And this year, the City Council decided not to sell any voter-approved debt, pushing it back to next year. Do you think this makes it likely that you’ll have to consider a tax increase as you build the fiscal year 2026 budget?
Johnson: That’s going to be tough because what I call the neutral tax rate that they adopted for the last few years, what that ends up ultimately doing is it takes a lot of your basic services, whether it’s roads, whether it’s parks, and keeps them in a budget that is flat. In order to maintain and expand services, you need to find the revenue to do that. By keeping a no-new-revenue tax rate, and inflation is coming at a rate, and you’re not expanding services, at some point, the services start suffering.
We’re going to have to really scrub the budget, look for areas of improvement. The last thing that I want to do is go out to the taxpayers and say, we have to increase your taxes. But when I go back to the high-performing organization that we can be here in El Paso, it’s going to take money to get us there. We may have to make a small investment to get our city services performing at the levels that they should.
But it’s not sustainable to continue to have a no-new-revenue tax rate and inflation is rising at a rate. The two don’t work together.
Within weeks of Renard Johnson taking office as El Paso’s new mayor on Jan. 6, Donald Trump will be sworn in as president and the Texas Legislature will begin its biennial sessio.(Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
El Paso Matters: A couple of weeks after you take office, Donald Trump is going to be inaugurated. How will you approach relationships with this new administration?
Johnson: It’s not a secret what the Trump administration may or may not do. President Trump has been in office before, and we kind of know what he’s going to do, and we need to be prepared, especially when it comes to immigration. He’s already indicated what he wants to do in that area.
I need to make sure that I work with the county, the city officials, state and federal to make sure that we have a plan in place when the administration addresses immigration within our region. Because if we sit back and wait, guessing on what he’s going to do, that could be harmful to El Paso. He’s been in office before, so why don’t we start coming up with a plan now to address immigration issues.
I’ve already spoken to the mayor of Juárez. He will be here in January to see me. I’ve gone to see him twice in Juárez, and I will work with him on immigration plans as well. But I think it’s very important to know that we’ve got to work together collectively, your county, your city, your state and your federal officials, to come up with a plan.
El Paso Matters: As a follow-up to that, how will you work with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state government leaders on border-related issues?
Johnson: I will be in the state Capitol at the end of January. I’m part of a group called the Texas Lyceum, where I’ll be swearing in the new president of that group, but we’ll be doing that in the Capitol. I’ve got relationships already in the Capitol, and as the governor lays out his plan for immigration, I think it’s important that El Paso is projected in the light of no falsehoods.
I need to make sure that we talk about how great our city is, dispel any myths that anyone may have about our region and tell the governor, ‘Hey, look, a certain rhetoric hurts El Paso.’ We need to make sure that we’re telling the truth. There’s no tanks coming up and down the street. There’s no missiles coming across the border. That it’s a loving, warm community, and that we portray that not only on a local level, the state, but a national level.
State Rep. César Blanco greets Nevaeh Johnson, left, and Aviva Johnson, children of El Paso mayoral candidate Renard Johnson at Johnson’s Nov. 5 election night party at Hush Hush, 533 W. Franklin. (Rudy Gutierrez/El Paso Matters)
El Paso Matters: The week after you take office, the Texas Legislature will convene for its session. Do you have any city-related priorities you’d like to see the Legislature address next year?
Johnson: We have to work with our state delegation. One of the things that I know we can work on together that’s very important to me is aerospace. We need to make sure that we can get aerospace dollars from the state level, which the governor has already pledged $300 million for aerospace. He established a space commission. I’ve already met with two of the space commissioners to make sure that they don’t forget about El Paso, because those dollars are going to be spread throughout the state of Texas. The governor wants Texas to be number one in aerospace. We’ve got to work with our state delegation to make sure those dollars can come to El Paso.
In addition, we need to make sure that the state dollars we can get for our bridges are coming to El Paso so we can continue to have cross-border commerce. We’ve got to make sure that the state dollars are coming to El Paso for projects like the Tramway. A lot of the funding is coming from the state.
We need to continue to work with our state delegation also when it comes to medical. As you know, they were very instrumental in funding the cancer treatment center and some of the burn centers and things that are going to be in health care. The mayor and the city government and the county need to continue work with the state to make sure we get those dollars allocated to El Paso.
Mayoral candidate Renard Johnson answers questions at a candidate forum on Nov. 21, 2024. Johnson faces Brian Kennedy in the Dec. 14 runoff. (Corrie Boudreaux/El Paso Matters)
El Paso Matters: How will you foster collaborations with the county government to move the region forward?
Johnson: I’ve already reached out to the county judge, and I told him I’m looking forward to working with him and looking at any duplication of services that we can consolidate and work together on. I think the judge is excited to work with the city more, and we just have to get together and it’s going to be more collaborative. But I’ve got to spend the time in the county, and the county is going to spend more time with the city, figuring out what we can do together. And we’ve got to get our staffs working together.
El Paso Matters: You’ve talked a lot about the kind of industry you’d like to attract to El Paso to boost economic development and increase wages — health, aerospace, technology. What are some of the challenges in attracting those areas and how do you plan to overcome them?
Johnson: I think one challenge is going to be labor. I think we need to make sure that we can show industry that we have a labor force that is ready to go to work.
I think another challenge is going to be our limitations with our flights in and out of El Paso. For example, you have one of the world’s largest military installations right here in El Paso at Fort Bliss, but we have no direct flight from El Paso to Washington, D.C. I think those are going to be significant challenges that we have to overcome.
But nevertheless, I think because of where we’re geographically located, our weather, the way people work here in El Paso, the way our school systems are nimble and can adapt to the industry, I think those are all positives that we can use. And I think we have a number of companies here that can show these companies coming to town how good it is to do business in El Paso.
El Paso Matters: To follow up on aerospace, which obviously is a key part of what you’d like to focus on, the plan for the community had been built largely around the National Science Foundation grant to UTEP. That grant has been suspended. That suspension also soured relationships between some of the elected leadership in the community and the university. What’s your relationship with UTEP and President Heather Wilson, and how can you work to push this initiative forward?
Johnson: I have complete confidence in our president of the University of Texas at El Paso, that she will work diligently to make sure that she gets the NSF grant back on track. Dr. Wilson is a champion of the region and wants to do everything she can in the area of aerospace. She has pledged a lot of money with the Advanced Manufacturing and Aerospace Center that’s currently under construction at UTEP.
I’m a graduate of the university. I’m a distinguished alumnus of the university. I was part of the search committee that selected our current president at the university. I’ve got a really good relationship with UTEP, and I think that’s going to be one of the key components in building on the aerospace initiatives that I want to build on.
Renard Johnson, right, celebrates being elected El Paso’s next mayor at the Hotel Paso Del Norte’s El Mirador, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024. (Corrie Boudreaux / El Paso Matters)
El Paso Matters: What are your plans for revitalizing areas of the city that have been economically stagnant?
Johnson: We’ve got to do public-private partnerships. We have an area, specifically in Downtown El Paso, the Duranguito area. I think we need to go out and find a user for that who can do some preservation, but at the same time, some modernization and expansion. I think it’s important to keep historical landmarks, but I also think it’s important to expand and not leave them vacant or dormant for the amount of years that we have.
It’s going to be important that we look at all areas of El Paso, and we work with stakeholders that want to develop it. There’s a number of businesses here that want to do more. I’ve already been contacted by a group that wants to look at doing a hotel near Downtown. Those are the opportunities that are already coming to me as I start to head into the mayor’s role.
El Paso Matters: The El Paso Independent School District plans to close several elementary schools in the next couple of years, which could possibly leave behind abandoned buildings. What role should the city play in preventing neighborhood blight that often comes with abandoned schools?Johnson: We need to look at repurposing those areas, whether it turns into multi-use, whether it turns into apartments, whether it turns into more police headquarters. Those are the things that we can work with the private industry on coming in and redeveloping and ultimately paying into the tax base and sales tax revenue that, over time, will lower our taxes. We’ll look at incentives if we need to, but we will make sure that they don’t stay stagnant and stay like that for long. We’ll improve it.
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