Reverend Margaret Fountain-Coleman stood before a crowd at Veterans Memorial on Sunday Jan 15th to kick off her campaign for Mayor of Yonkers. Democrat Fountain-Coleman is the first major candidate to contest incumbent Mayor Mike Spano in 2023.
Holding multiple master’s degrees, including in Elementary Education, Fountain-Coleman has been a special education teacher at Yonkers Public Schools for over eight years. She has also been an ordained Baptist minister for the past 25 years. She presently is a pastor at Messiah Baptist Church. Husband Frank Coleman Jr. is also a pastor at Messiah Baptist and the President of the Yonkers branch of the NAACP. Alongside 11 other Yonkers voters, he sued the Mayor and the City in December over the extension of term limits without a voter referendum.
On a cold January day at the foot of Yonkers City Hall, dozens of supporters and press huddled around potentially the next Mayor of Yonkers. Margaret Fountain-Coleman spent 10 minutes conducting a sermon to her audience. She spoke on the importance of this Dr. Martin Luther King Jr day – about equality, the need for good local government, and on making Yonkers “one community.” She criticized the current Spano administration without mentioning his name. Accusing the 12 year Spano-family reign of being mired in self enrichment and ignoring the real problems of regular Yonkers citizens. Fountain-Coleman has promised that one of the first issues she wishes to address is affordable housing. One issue that Mayor Mike Spano has been intractable on during his entire tenure.
Fountain-Coleman faces a steep climb to topple three-term incumbent Mike Spano. In the last 2019 primary, Spano bested his next closest challenger, Karen Beltran, by over four times as many votes. Spano also enters the race with hundreds of thousands of dollars already in his campaign fund. Despite the inherent advantages to incumbency, Fountain-Coleman is hopeful that Yonkersites will want “a new voice.”
The Democratic primary election is held in June.
