Janet Cowell came into the mayor’s office with more government experience than most. She still wasn’t ready for everything it would throw at her — and she wouldn’t trade it for anything.
One Year In: What Being Mayor Really Feels Like
The Good Government Show checks back in with Raleigh Mayor Janet Cowell after her first year on the job.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Dave Martin
646-483-5898
dave.goodgovpodcast@gmail.com
Subhead
New York, NY — June 22, 2026
I had the chance to sit down again with Janet Cowell, the Mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina — this time to take stock of her first year in office. She came into this job with serious credentials: years as North Carolina’s State Treasurer, experience at multiple levels of government. And still, the job surprised her. That’s one of the things I love most about doing this show. No matter how prepared someone is, the work of governing up close — right there with the people — has a way of teaching you things you couldn’t have learned anywhere else.
What she described is something mayors across the country know but rarely get to say plainly: this job is unlike any other in government. As treasurer, she had more formal authority. As mayor, she has something harder to quantify — proximity. When something goes wrong in Raleigh, her phone lights up. When kids see her in the grocery store, they want a selfie, because a six-year-old knows what a mayor is. She called it a “physical, retail job” — and that’s exactly right. There’s no buffer of bureaucrats or lobbyists between her and the people she serves. That directness is both the hardest part of the job and, she told me, the best part.
The work itself has been both gritty and unexpected. She tackled a noise ordinance — not a headline-grabbing issue, but a real one — hiring an expert out of Austin, Texas, and getting new rules in place within nine months. She helped develop what may become one of the best parks in America, a public-private-philanthropic collaboration that now draws 45,000 people on a weekend — including Buddhist monks walking from Texas to D.C. on a 109-day, 2,300-mile walk for peace. She’s launching a poet laureate program for the city, building on a conviction that art, design, and public space aren’t luxuries — they’re infrastructure. She told me a great example: the same park where those trolls and that playground now draw tens of thousands of people used to house a large homeless encampment, because nobody went there. Public art activated the space. That’s the kind of creative, evidence-based thinking I find genuinely exciting.
What I appreciate most about Mayor Cowell’s approach is her honesty about what mayors can and can’t do. She operates in a state with a city-manager form of government, a Republican supermajority in the legislature, and a federal environment that hasn’t exactly been friendly to cities. Her answer isn’t to grandstand — it’s to be strategic, stay present, and protect the people who most depend on local government to function. She said she tends to “say less” — not because she doesn’t have views, but because she’s clear-eyed about when words help and when they hurt. That’s mature leadership, and it’s exactly the kind of leadership that makes this show worth doing every week.
PULL QUOTES
- “The mayor is a really special job. You’re so close to the community — you really feel like you’re in and of the people.”
- “It’s a physical, retail job. You’re not five layers behind bureaucrats and lobbyists. It’s you and the people.”
- “When people lose battles, they don’t say we’re on the losing end of this policy — they accuse you of nefarious intent and bad character.”
- “The best part of the job is getting to be in these special moments in your community that you would probably never be a part of if you weren’t mayor.”
- “Art and how you structure a city makes a tremendous difference on how people connect and relate to each other.”
BOILERPLATE
The Good Government Show is produced by the Good Government Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to civic engagement and civic education. Every episode — including this one — extends the Institute’s core mission: demonstrating that government works, that public servants are doing meaningful things, and that civic participation matters. All donations support that mission. You can donate at goodgovinstitute.org. Executive producers are Jim Ludlow, Dave Martin, and David Snyder. Jason Stershic is editor and producer.