Colorado Springs voters have elected Yemi Mobolade — a 44-year-old Nigerian immigrant who moved to the city in 2010 and emerged as a business and church leader — to serve as the city’s 42nd mayor in a runoff election by a double-digit margin.
Mobolade will be the city’s first elected Black mayor and the first non-Republican in that office in four decades. He’ll bring a former “outsider” immigrant’s “hard work, hustle and seeing nothing but opportunities” to the job, he said in an interview Wednesday morning.
His Republican opponent, political veteran Wayne Williams, has conceded. City clerk officials, wrapping up vote counting Wednesday, said the margin was about 57.5% to 42.5%. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis congratulated Mobolade, who is registered as unaffiliated and has cast himself as an entrepreneurial bridge-builder committed to prioritizing quality of life and “loving your neighbor” over political party interests. About 37% of the city’s registered voters cast ballots in the runoff.
“Colorado Springs is poised to become a world-class American city. We have the natural assets, the beauty of our landscape, and we are doing the work of making sure our urban scenery matches that of our landscape and that our quality of life matches our landscape,” Mobolade said. “Today is a new day in Colorado Springs. My vision for our city is to be an inclusive, culturally rich, economically prosperous, safe, and vibrant City on the Hill that shines brightly.”
Colorado Springs’ position at the base of Pikes Peak and relatively big space – 195 square miles compared with Denver’s 153 square miles – has made it a leader among U.S. cities deemed most liveable in recent years and the population has grown to more than 483,000. Traditionally conservative as a hub for the U.S. military and the U.S. Olympic Committee, the city over 152 years has relied on trans-mountain diversions of water to sustain settlement on semi-arid high plains. City leaders this year approved a controversial ordinance requiring guaranteed water supplies at 128% of demand before allowing any annexation of new land for development — a looming factor in the mayoral election.
Mobolade won with a message prioritizing public safety, infrastructure improvement, and overall economic vitality. He supported a Trails and Open Space initiative that 80% of voters in April approved – extending a tax that raises funds for ensuring greenspace, consistent with General William Palmer and other city founders’ emphasis on natural beauty. On Wednesday morning, Mobolade pledged to restore parks and recreation funding that was cut by predecessors following the 2008 economic recession.
“I think about General Palmer and his vision for this city. What he saw is what we all saw when we came to Colorado Springs: the beauty of the landscape, the mountain. That’s what brought most of us to the city and that is what kept us here,” he said. “We must continue to invest in it.”
Mobolade never has held elected office before.
He came to the United States in 1996 seeking educational opportunities as an immigrant born in the West African nation of Nigeria, where his mother was a teacher and his father an employee of the global oil giant ExxonMobil. He attended Bethel University in Indiana, graduating with degrees in business administration and computer systems, before earning a master’s degree in management and leadership at Indiana Wesleyan University and a seminary degree at the A.W. Tozer Theological Seminary in California. A married father of three, he helped establish, and co-owns, two cafe-style restaurants in Colorado Springs — the Good Neighbors Meeting House and the Wild Goose Meeting House. He founded a Christian and Missionary Alliance church and ran a ministry for the First Presbyterian Church of Colorado Springs. He became a U.S. citizen in 2017. He served as a small business development administrator for the city and as vice president of the Colorado Springs Chamber and Economic Development Corporation for business retention and expansion.
“When you are an immigrant coming in — that was 27 years ago for me — you start off as an outsider. Now, this outsider is playing fully in the great American experiment. I am an insider now. But I still have not forgotten how it is to be on the outside, and our government needs to represent all people,” Mobolade said. “I know things are not great for everyone. But, I tell you, life is still better in the United States than in most parts of the world. We are so lucky, so blessed. I see nothing but opportunities to make our city great. As mayor, I will use that drive, of seeing not just challenges but opportunities.”
Long a Republican stronghold, Colorado Springs over the past decade has been shifting — reflected in Mobolade’s victory. He received the most votes in Colorado Springs’ April 4 general election, propelling him into Tuesday’s runoff against Williams, a heavily favored city councilman who has served as Colorado’s Secretary of State and as an El Paso County commissioner. The city’s current Mayor John Suthers, a former state attorney general who has led the city since 2015 and was term-limited, endorsed Williams, as did a majority of Colorado Springs City Council members, El Paso County Sheriff Joe Roybal, the Colorado Springs Police Protective Association, Colorado Springs Professional Firefighters, and former mayor Lionel Rivera.
Williams had raised far more campaign money. Mobolade relied on a grassroots fundraising effort that drew 1,951 contributions from 1,265 donors, with an average amount of around $395 – compared with Williams’ average donation of $2,784 after receiving $1,066,203 in funds from 331 donors, including special interest groups representing the house-building and real estate industries. In a concession statement, Williams said “It is clear Colorado Springs is less conservative than it used to be.”
Mobolade said at a recent forum that he intended to be “an agent of good disruption.”
Polis issued a statement late Tuesday congratulating Mobolade. “I look forward to working with the mayor-elect.”
His victory marks the first time Colorado Springs has elected a Black mayor. Colorado Springs’ first Black mayor was Leon Young, who became interim mayor in 1997 following the resignation of Mayor Bob Isaac but was not elected.
Looking ahead toward an inauguration scheduled for June 6, Mobolade said his greatest fear in the United States has been a creeping “tribalism,” which he compared with conditions he and family members left in Nigeria. Tribal backgrounds — his family in Nigeria’s capital, Lagos, had roots in Yoruba tradition — carried into modern politics, and even a personal relationship across traditions could feel “like you were ex-communicated,” he said.
U.S. political factions “are looking more and more like tribes,” he said. “We are going that way.” And constraints on free thought, embodied in “the cancel culture,” threaten core freedoms that motivated him to come to the United States as a student, he said.
“That type of culture hinders progress, hinders democracy. I left that world to come to this world because I love democracy. I love the freedom that is embedded in our way of life. You remove the competition of ideas, you have nothing,” Mobolade said.
“I want us to be Americans because what we have got is good. And we can make it better.”
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