For the next few weeks, Robert Gibbs’ job won’t be unlike that of a journalist.
As the chair of Mayor-elect John Horhn’s transition team, Gibbs, a downtown Jackson attorney and developer, will be seeking to learn as much as he can about how City Hall works. His goal is to help Horhn, who handily won Jackson’s general election last week, hit the ground running on July 1.
“We want to learn as much about the city and the city operations as possible,” Gibbs said. “We want the mayor-elect to go into the office fully aware of all of the administrative departments, of the budget, the personnel, and so we’re trying to gather as much information as we can so it will be a smooth transition.”
Gibbs, who had been working behind the scenes for years to secure a new mayor, will be joined on the transition team by fellow Horhn campaign supporters and staffers. Willie Bozeman, a lobbyist and former state representative who worked as Horhn’s campaign manager, will serve as Horhn’s interim chief of staff, according to a press release.
Kane Ditto, a former mayor of Jackson who leads a real estate development company and was recently involved in efforts to raise money to revitalize the city’s planetarium, will serve as a co-chair of the transition team, along with Bishop Ronnie Crudup Sr. of New Horizon Church International.
But like journalists, whether or not Gibbs and company will succeed depends largely on access — in this case, to outgoing Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s administration.
“We will be requesting information, but we realize we are not privy to that without the permission of the current administration,” he said. “We are hoping and expecting that they will cooperate but we realize they don’t have to, so we are gonna utilize our good will and our ability to communicate to try to get as much as we can.”
At a candidate forum earlier this year, Lumumba said that if he lost reelection, he would work with whoever went on to be mayor. He cited as an example the time he stood with former mayor Tony Yarber, who beat him in 2014, to defend the city’s ownership of its airport.
The transition team does not yet have specific tasks, Gibbs said, so he doesn’t know if they will be asked to help Horhn hire department heads or recommend members of his administrative team.
“We’re just getting started with our work, and I don’t know just how much the mayor is going to instruct us to do,” he said, “whether that’s going to be helping him put together his administrative team or will it be to just advise him on how you move into the mayor’s office with as much information as possible.”
“Maybe we’ll find out together,” he added.
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