Kevin Bott

Kevin Bott (born February 13, 1973) is an American theater artist and scholar. Bott was a candidate for mayor of Syracuse, New York in 2013. Since 2010 he has been the associate director of the national higher education consortium, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, located in Syracuse. He is married to Aimeé Brill, a childbirth activist and doula, and has two sons.
Background and education
Kevin Bott was born in Camden, New Jersey, to Roger Bott, a union boilermaker, and Gail Bott, a staff member in the Stafford Township Department of Parks and Recreation. His family moved to Manahawkin, New Jersey, when Bott was one year old. Bott began training in American musical theater from the age of 10, performing with Our Gang Players, a community theater company. At age 13 he apprenticed at the summer stock company, Surflight Theater, on Long Beach Island.
Bott received his B.A. in Italian from Rutgers University, and both his Master's and Ph.D. at New York University in Educational Theater, a field of study connecting social justice and theater. Through the prison-arts non-profit, Rehabilitation Through the Arts, where he became Director of Education, Bott volunteered at several medium and maximum-security prisons. This work led to his interest in prisoner re-entry, the focus of his doctoral research. His dissertation, "A Ritual for Return: Investigating the Process of Creating Original Theatre with Formerly Incarcerated Men," was the study of work he created with five formerly incarcerated men transitioning out of prison.
In addition to his work in U.S. prisons, Bott used applied theater initiatives in public schools, drug rehabilitation clinics, and at a minimum-security prison in northern Uganda.
In September 2004, Bott married Aimeé Brill at the Queens County Farm Museum in New York City.
In 2006, while living in Ithaca, New York, and completing his dissertation, Bott was recruited for a graduate fellowship position at Syracuse University as the Director of Events and Publications for Imagining America, a consortium of 90 colleges and universities dedicated to the role of higher education in a democracy. In 2008 he became the director of the Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) program within Imagining America. Bott and his family moved to Syracuse in 2010.
In 2011, Bott founded the D.R.E.A.M. Freedom Revival (DFR), a grassroots theater project combining theater and participatory democracy, and emerging from his work as a political theater scholar. Bott describes the DFR as:
. . . a political performance project that began in Syracuse, NY, during the long, cold winter of 2011 — a response to the general despair I had been feeling for some time about the state of the democratic experiment and what seemed (and seems) to be a powerful and intentional effort by the powerful to keep average citizens from thinking or acting within the political arena.
Imagining America became a financial sponsor of the program, and the first performance was held at Syracuse University's La Casita Cultural Center, on October 9, 2011. The D.R.E.A.M. Freedom Revival has also been funded by the New York Council for the Humanities since late 2012.
Bott has traveled extensively around the country and the world, living for extended lengths of time in Florence, Italy; San Francisco; El Salvador; India; New York City; and Uganda.
2013 mayoral campaign
In July 2013, the Green Party of Syracuse approached Bott about considering a run for mayor. Howie Hawkins, former Green Party of New York gubernatorial candidate, submitted petitions to the Onondaga County Board of Elections with his own name as a mayoral candidate placeholder, hoping Bott would agree to be a candidate. On July 14, 2013, Kevin Bott announced his candidacy for mayor of Syracuse in the 2013 election, and on September 11, 2013, he formally kicked off his campaign on the steps of the Syracuse City Hall, just after the Democratic primary. Bott used the opportunity to point out that primary election results indicated that the incumbent mayor had already lost 46% of the Democratic vote.
Some of Bott's solutions to the problems faced by the City of Syracuse include: returning jobs to Syracuse through locally-owned and operated manufacturing, creating a network of employee-owned enterprises modeled after successful efforts in Spain, creating a Municipal Hiring Hall to replace the for-profit temporary agencies, creating a rent-to-own home-ownership program that gives housing preference to city employees, abolishing the Gap Elimination Adjustment used to balance the state budget by reducing state school aid each year, raising the age at which people can be tried for crimes in courts as adults to eighteen, and creating a special mental health court to expand the range of sentencing options available to judges.
Bott compares the relationship of campaign issues to an ecosystem. He states:
I am certain that we must think about these issues in terms of an ecosystem -- a complex set of living relationships in a particular environment. I am equally certain that to begin to understand our ecosystem, we need to be brought together as a community. We need to begin hearing each others' stories, building relationships across difference, and listening for the deep ways our fates and our futures are joined. Only then can we begin to trust one another, to see that we are all in this together, and to start working together toward the just and prosperous future that we all seek.
Of Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner, seeking a second term, Bott stated, "I think that Mayor Miner, relative to her peers and relative to the situation that we find ourselves in this particular rust belt city, has probably done a good, competent job." Bott also said, "I think we're at a historical moment, where competent is not enough." On September 13 Bott challenged Miner to debate.
On September 16, 2013, Onondaga County's Republican Party officially announced that they would not run a Republican candidate in the race for Syracuse mayor, although Republican Ian Hunter would run with the Conservative Party's endorsement. This election is the first time in 100 years that no candidate will appear on the Republican Party line for a Syracuse mayor's race.
On October 16, 2013, Bott published a fiscal position paper with Common Council candidate Howie Hawkins focused on a new scaled local income tax, and the role of the state in the fiscal crisis in Syracuse. Bott and Hawkins point out that New York revenue sharing with its biggest cities has decreased from the teens to just about one percent since the 1970's. The position paper states:
Syracuse faces a Detroit-style takeover of the city and a Philly-style takeover of the school district in the next two or three years. What's at stake is whether we will still have the democratic right to address our problems together in a city government that we elect. Or whether the state will appoint agents of big business and Wall Street to rule over us through a Financial Control Board and an Education Oversight Board. The once and future solution to the fiscal crisis is to restore the kind of revenue sharing funded by progressive taxation that was adopted by the state in 1970.
On November 5, 2013, Bott was defeated in the Syracuse mayoral election by the incumbent Miner, who received 68% of the vote. Bott finished with about 15% of the vote.

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