Former councilwoman Saunteel Jenkins announces Detroit mayoral bid

Former Detroit City Councilwoman Saunteel Jenkins is exploring a run for mayor of Detroit, creating a candidate committee that will commission polling, fund outreach to voters and solicit campaign contributions, she told the Free Press last week.

Detroit's next mayoral election is in 2025. Mayor Mike Duggan, a three-term incumbent, hasn't declared whether he'll seek a fourth term, but is rumored to be mulling a run for governor in 2026.

Jenkins, now CEO of The Heat and Warmth Fund, a nonprofit with a roughly $20 million annual operating budget that provides utility assistance to struggling families across Michigan, was elected to council in 2009. She was reelected in 2013, but stepped down less than a year later.

When she left council, Jenkins, 53, thought she was done with politics.

But in 2020, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I went through a little bit of hell and back," Jenkins said. "A lot of people who went through what I went through, and they didn't walk out of the cancer center ... I've been on this path of soul searching ... even though my whole life has been dedicated to service, what is my best and highest calling, what is the thing that I can do that can have the greatest impact?"

Jenkins said her first step will be a series of conversations to understand Detroiters' concerns, and to feel out residents' enthusiasm for her candidacy.

"At the end of this exploratory phase, if everything looks the way I expect it to, and everything goes well, then this exploratory committee will transition into a mayoral committee," Jenkins said.

Jenkins will become the second prospective candidate to form a committee in what is sure to be a vigorous campaign for Detroit's top job, which is a polite way of saying that a lot of people want to be mayor.

Council President Mary Sheffield filed candidate committee paperwork for a mayoral run last year. Businessman Joel Haashiim told the Free Press earlier this year that he plans to run. Haashiim hasn't created a candidate committee, according to Wayne County campaign finance records. Speculation about prospective candidates has ranged from state House Speaker Joe Tate to council members Coleman Young II and Fred Durhal III to actor Hill Harper, who ran unsuccessfully this year in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

Without Duggan in the race, the 2025 election would herald a new era in Detroit politics. Duggan, former CEO of the Detroit Medical Center, former Wayne County Prosecutor and a longtime lieutenant of late County Executive Ed McNamara, has held the office for three terms. Detroit's first white mayor since Roman Gribbs, Duggan moved to Detroit from Livonia to run in the 2013 election, and didn't make the primary ballot because he didn't relocate in time. He cleared the primary on a write-in campaign, won the general election by a decisive margin and has easily won reelection against all comers — even as voter turnout in the city has dwindled.

Duggan has won plaudits for his fiscal management and for encouraging new development that has transformed downtown, Midtown and some neighborhood commercial cores. But critics have objected to some of his administration's signature policies, like a large-scale demolition program and the operations of the Detroit Land Bank Authority, intended to drive reuse of blighted properties and now one of the city's largest land owners. Some longtime residents say they feel excluded from the city's progress, and that Duggan's vision for Detroit doesn't include Black residents.

All of this — the city's financial stability and the mandate for inclusive development — will land in the next mayor's lap.

An eventful council tenure

Jenkins is looking to lead a city that's very different from the Detroit of 2014, when she last held elected office.

A lifelong Detroiter, Jenkins was elected to Detroit City Council in 2009, a pivotal year that saw the election of former Mayor Dave Bing, dubbed an outsider by political foes, five new council members, the creation of a Charter Revision Commission and voter approval of a citizen-led referendum to reconfigure Detroit's council from an at-large body to two at-large and seven district seats.

Detroiters, in short, wanted change.

Jenkins, who has a master's degree in social work, was chief of staff to legendary Councilwoman Maryann Mahaffey from 1999 to 2004.

But when she ran for council, Jenkins was the relatively low-profile head of the nonprofit homeless shelter Mariners Inn. She was the third-highest vote-getter that year, finishing behind Charles Pugh, at the time a beloved Fox 2 Detroit personality, and former Detroit police official Gary Brown, who had become a household name after he was fired by former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Brown was leading an internal investigation into Kilpatrick's alleged misdeeds, and won an $8.4 million settlement in a whistleblower lawsuit that ultimately exposed a string of salacious text messages between Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty — a childhood friend of Jenkins — and led to Kilpatrick's ouster from office.

Jenkins served through a deteriorating relationship between Bing and the council, a consent agreement between Detroit and the state of Michigan that attempted to stave off municipal bankruptcy, the appointment of an emergency manager, the city's eventual bankruptcy filing and its emergence from Chapter 9.

She left council in October 2014, 10 months into her second term.

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The big questions

That may be the first and most important question Jenkins must answer — when voters choose a candidate, there's a general expectation that they'll finish the term. Given her resignation from council, why should Detroiters elect her mayor?

It's a legitimate question, Jenkins acknowledged.

"What I would say is, I never left Detroit. I never left Detroiters. I continue to do what I've done my entire adult life: I serve Detroiters. I did it in a different way," she said last week, of her departure from council to helm THAW. "I am not, and have never wanted to be, a lifelong politician. ... I ran for a specific purpose, to give what I could give, and to try to get the best outcomes. My last week at council was the week we announced when we were coming out of bankruptcy. ... I was really proud of the work we had done and the direction we were heading, and an opportunity came along for me to serve Detroiters in a different way that had a more direct impact on families like the one I grew up in."

Jenkins has also drawn fire for hiring longtime friend Christine Beatty, Kilpatrick's former chief of staff and affair partner, at THAW. Beatty, facing felony perjury charges, pleaded guilty in 2008 to two counts of obstruction of justice for her part in the firing of Brown and another police officer, and agreed to pay the city of Detroit $100,000 in restitution. Beatty stopped making payments in 2013, telling WDIV-TV that she believed she no longer owed restitution once her probation period was past, a statement that is incorrect; about $78,000 of that sum remained unpaid as of last winter.

At THAW, Jenkins said, Beatty doesn't report to her but to the nonprofit's COO, a structure that deliberately prevents Jenkins from supervising her longtime friend.

"Chris has a bachelor's and master's in social work, and years of experience serving families," she said. "She was hired for the skill set that she could bring, and she's brought it. She's doing a great job at THAW."

But if she were elected mayor, Jenkins said, she wouldn't hire Beatty to work for the city. Why? "It's a different organization. And frankly, I don't believe she'd want to work for the city."

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A reflection of Detroit

At THAW, Jenkins said she has expanded the nonprofit's offerings, moving from providing funds for emergency restoration of utilities to preventing shutoffs. She said she has been to Washington D.C. to lobby on the nonprofit's behalf, and believes she could bring those skills to bear as mayor. Jenkins said she'd like to improve Detroiters' civic engagement. She wants Detroiters to be comfortable with the quality of policing in the city.

And she said Detroit's next mayor must ramp up neighborhood development. She believes the city should incentivize development around analysis of what a neighborhood needs, based on citizens' input. Maybe that's a grocery store or a dry cleaners or a restaurant — the point, she said, is that city leaders must ask.

"It's got to be downtown and the neighborhoods. It's got to be new residents and the residents who've been here and stuck it out," she said.

A lifelong Detroiter, Jenkins attributes all of the good things in her life to the city. But she says she's also acquainted with the challenges residents of this still-struggling city too often face. She grew up in a working-class family on the west side. Her mother, who started work at Hudson's, retired from Macy's. Her father, a mailman, retired just this April.

"I grew up in a hardworking family, but we didn't have a lot of money. ... One of the reasons I'm so passionate about THAW is because we've had our lights and our gas shut off at our house before," she said. "I lost my 14-year-old brother to gun violence in 1991. So much of my life — the good and the bad — is a reflection of the things that people go through every day in the city."

Detroit has unquestionably changed for the better since her tenure on council, she said, but remains at a critical juncture.

"We've made a lot of progress, but it can still go either way," she said. "So from my perspective, this next race means progress will be on the ballot. We'll go forward, or we'll go backwards."

Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact: [email protected]. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it online and in print.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Saunteel Jenkins explores return to Detroit government, this time as mayor