Remarks by Heath Mello — Mello for Mayor Kick-Off

Thank you each and every one of you for coming tonight to engage with us about the future.

The future of our neighborhoods…the future of our families…the future of our city.

I’m Heath Mello and I’m running for Mayor because I believe Omaha can become a more welcoming, more connected, and more innovative city.

Growing up the son of a factory worker and house cleaner, my parents instilled in me the values of hard work, opportunity, responsibility, and to live by the “golden rule.”

As the first in our family to be able to go to college after high school, they also taught me to dream big and never stop believing that tomorrow can be better than today.

It’s those values and idealism that I take with me every day, whether it was at the State Capitol or neighborhood meetings in South Omaha or Midtown, to try to make life just a little better for working families like the one I grew up in.

Thanks to many of you here tonight, we were able to give back through public service and work over the past 8 years to improve people’s lives by creating new opportunities for them to pursue their God-given potential.

And tonight we begin another journey.

A journey to build the right kind of change at the right time for Omaha.

When I announced my intention to be your next Mayor back in August, like tonight, I was motivated by two reasons:

The first reason was my belief that a city of our size needed a vision for the future — a vision that expands opportunity by making Omaha more welcoming, connected, and innovative.

The second reason being what kind of Omaha my 2 year old daughter Angelina and 1 year old son John — and your children — might inherit in twenty years.

Will they inherit an Omaha where they, and children like them, can find good jobs that they can build into careers — so they don’t have to go to Chicago, Denver, or Kansas City to live their dreams?

Will they inherit an Omaha that embraces technology enough to be a ‘smart city’ and prioritizes the talent of our entrepreneurs and innovators as much as our Fortune 500 corporations?

Will they inherit an Omaha that is inclusive and receptive to all, no matter the color we were born or who we love, but also no matter where we choose to worship or how we identify politically?

Will they inherit an Omaha that understands the impact of our changing climate and how our drinking water, food production, and air quality are connected to how we live?

Will they inherit an Omaha that has finally addressed the struggles in many of our North Omaha neighborhoods and made equity a fundamental value for City Hall?

These questions keep me up at night, not because we cannot answer them, but because we cannot wait any longer to answer them.

And I know from the conversations I’ve had with many of you in your living rooms, your union halls, and your offices, I’m not the only one kept awake worrying about our children and the kind of city they will inherit.

Because our city’s future is their future.

Their opportunities to receive high-quality early childhood education, attend high-expectation schools, and graduate high school ready for both college and a career is exactly what our connects our city’s future to an ever-changing global economy.

Without nurturing the talent of the future and ensuring we have an economy that works and creates more opportunities for all Omahans, we will continue to lose not just youth but our hope in the future.

Because no one leaves Omaha because they want to, they leave Omaha because they have to.

Unfortunately, this is something our current Mayor just simply doesn’t understand.

Whether it’s losing ConAgra to Chicago or losing an opportunity to bring HDR downtown, our Mayor has been uninspiring and has allowed Omaha to coast when it comes to leading our city in creating and supporting 21st century jobs needed to keep our youth in our community.

But we can change this and it all starts with a new vision and new energy for Omaha.

Now, as many of you may know, I can get a little wonky about budgets, strategic plans, benchmarks, and metrics.

So I won’t go on too long tonight, but in the coming weeks and months, we will be unveiling policy proposals on the major issues impacting Omaha from housing to clean energy to the workforce to reforming our city budget process.

Proposals that many of you in this room have helped us craft over the past four months through neighborhood meetings, house parties, town halls, and roundtable discussions.

But tonight I’m excited to share with you just a few of the big ideas that we believe will help make Omaha become the city of the future.

For too long, our city services have operated on a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.

This approach has given us worse city services that have cost more in property tax dollars over the past four years.

We not only have to embrace the “smart city” model of relying on data, transparency, and technology to reinvent City Hall, but also to move past the old bitter political squabbles that consistently get brought up every time someone brings a new idea to City Hall.

This spring, we all know what our streets will look like after the snow melts because the Mayor has no plan to address our crumbling infrastructure.

On top of that, today the Mayor came out in support of our vision and plan to expand transportation options like enhancing Bus Rapid Transit routes, ridesharing, adding bike lanes, and light rail.

That’s why we’ve proposed creating an Omaha Infrastructure Bank to help finance these investments in our city to not only grow our economy, but make Omaha more walkable and livable.

Making neighborhoods safer is something I hear about every day in every corner of the city.

But like with medicine, simply treating a symptom does not cure the disease.

And that’s why we not only need to strengthen our capacity within the Police and Fire Departments, but just as importantly address the root causes of crime: lack of living wage jobs, lack of access to healthcare, lack of access to reliable transportation and lack of affordable housing.

Omaha can be the economic spark that just needs to be ignited by a Mayor who sees the possibilities in being proactive, instead of simply reacting to the world around them.

Omaha can be a quality of place that primes our neighborhoods for reinvention to retain our talent and high-growth businesses.

Omaha can move past this Mayor’s complacency over the past four years and proactively tackle the problems that are holding us back from growing our startup companies, jobs and talent of tomorrow. We have to move this city away from the top-down, ‘my way or the highway,’ approach that has engulfed City Hall.

We know that in part because of our extremely polarized politics right now, many of us are talking past each other.

When people, especially a Mayor, refuse to work with each other or acknowledge a good idea simply because they don’t belong to the same political party, our city loses.

We have to change this type of mentality and civic engagement if we want to make Omaha the city of the future.

I know many of us are disheartened right now by the divisive rhetoric and derogatory language being thrown around by national officials.

But in Omaha, we can and must do things differently.

That’s why our campaign will stand up for a higher purpose of politics and take a different tack from what we’ve seen over the past four years.

This campaign will build consensus around who want to be as people and as a city.

All of this will take time and none of it comes easy.

But nothing in life worth anything ever really does.

So I ask you join us over the next five months in bringing this vision to reality.

Please consider the gifts you have — your talents, your time, your financial gifts — whether it’s $5 or $500 — your ideas — and how you might contribute to our effort to make Omaha the city of the future.

This is our city and, like my parents told me years ago, we can be better than we are today.

We can grow together, we can build together, we can prosper together, but more importantly we can dream together.

So join me, join Catherine, join our families, our supporters, in believing again that we can unite people from different backgrounds, families, neighborhoods, and businesses to build an Omaha that welcomes diversity, connects opportunity and responsibility, and embraces the future of our children and for generations to come.

Thank you and God bless our great city.