Newburgh Heights Mayor Gigi Traore Will Run for Re-Election, Challenging Ousted Ex-Mayor Trevor Elkins

Gigi Traore, the current mayor of Newburgh Heights, is running against ex-mayor Trevor Elkins. Credit: Friends of Gigi Traore

Gigi Traore, who as city council’s president pro tempore took over as mayor of Newburgh Heights when Trevor Elkins resigned last year following his conviction on campaign finance violations, announced this week she’ll be running for re-election against Elkins, who recently announced his candidacy to return to his post.

In April of 2022, Elkins was sentenced to a month in jail for using his campaign account 651 times for some $134,000 of personal transactions. He also was sentenced to community service and probation.

In tandem with boosting Newburgh’s greenspace, via a parks master plan, and forming a Local Business & Economic Commerce Committee, Traore told Scene that it’s still her duty, in campaigning for re-election, to continue to foster trust in Elkins’ wake.

“It really started with having open conversations with residents,” Traore said in a phone call. “And sharing the impact that [Elkins’] personal decisions had on the village.”

Although Traore has just entered the race, it seems she’s been at loggerheads with Elkins’ political legacy since an investigation was begun into his misdeeds in 2021. As was reported last spring, Traore has claimed that council meetings had been inconspicuously scheduled while she was out of town, a way, she believed, to try and remove her from office. (Council denied this.)

Moreover, she said a group of villagers once showed up to her doorstep to ensure that she actually resided in Newburgh Heights. (Traore is the daughter of a Nigerian immigrant of the Ibo tribe.)

“Do you know what that does? To have a group of white man show up to an African Black woman’s house?” Traore said. She took a breath. “Thankfully, I was not home at the time.”

Traore echoed this incident in her campaign press release, lumping ex-mayor Elkins in the pot of the accused.

“Despite the intentional discriminatory targeting of the former mayor and members of council,” the press release reads, “[I] am committed to continuing the work started 5 years ago, and to village residents who deserve to have a trusting and accessible local government.”

In a statement to Scene, Elkins, who just announced his own re-election in May, said he was flabbergasted that Traore would begin a campaign attempting to paint him as a “racist,” Elkins wrote.

“Unfortunately, accusations of discrimination have become the go-to position for Ms. Traore,” he said. “When someone does not agree with her, this is her position. Every. Single. Time.”

Elkins, who noted he’s married to a Puerto Rican woman, further denied there was any intentional tribalism to begin with.

“A blanket allegation does not afford anyone the opportunity to learn from or correct the offense,” he said, “if it was in fact discriminatory.”

In Traore’s brief mayorship thus far, progressive successes have been countered with occasional negative headlines.

Since her appointment in April 2022, Traore has helped struggling tenants with Pay-to-Stay legislation, passed the Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for National Hair (CROWN) Act. (Newburgh Heights is 18 percent Black, 73 percent white.) And she helped replace the term “alien” with “immigrant” in all village code.

“I wear my culture and faith proud and loud,” Traore told The Black Professional in May.

Earlier in May, Traore was accused of “illegally” dealing with traffic camera enforcement tickets. As per a Fox I-Team investigation, Traore, according to Garfield Heights Judge Deborah Nicastro, was allegedly not filing said tickets in court to evade the $9 filing fee.

A self-descibed “revolutionary, activist, organizer” in her political beginnings, Traore spent the first half of her 20-year-long political career steeped in policy. She hit the fellowship circuit at Young People For and Green For All before running, unsuccessfully, for State Representative of the 11th House District in 2009.