On Monday, Mayor Barbara Buffaloe will preside over her first Columbia City Council meeting of her second term.

Buffaloe won April 8's municipal election with more than 14,000 votes in an expensive race for mayor over Blair Murphy and Tanya Heath. Buffaloe won handily, taking precincts around the city .

"I don't think I learned anything new, I would say, but I think some of the issues that we know are important to Columbia residents, it just helped emphasize," Buffaloe said. "So, the city needs to do better about communicating what's going on. How are we doing about staffing levels? Where does funding go? Just what's going on in the world, the importance of that."

Buffaloe said she thought City Manager De'Carlon Seewood was making strides in keeping the council and community informed. The city recently launched a program of "community connectors" to inform residents of different projects and meetings. She said in the coming term, she'd like to see Seewood talk more around town about the work the city is doing.

"One of the things that I'm always pushing him on is that he needs to talk more," Buffaloe said. "He needs to be out more in front. I think he can kind of rely on a lot of times, I'm always happy to talk, go and talk to a group as an extrovert. As an introvert, he's not as interested in doing it as much. So I'm trying to encourage, and he has been, stepping up and going out more, conversations in public and at council meetings, because he's very smart and he has the trust of his staff. So I think he needs to help show that more and show what progress has been done rather than waiting for other people to go up and make the conversation happen."

Seewood recently hired D'Markus Thomas-Brown to lead the new Office of Violence Prevention, a program Buffaloe proposed in 2023 following a homicide. With a leader and budget in place, Buffaloe said she's hopeful that Thomas-Brown will use his connections across the city and city staff to work on crime prevention.

"Some of the things that I hope he focuses on is working with our law enforcement on where do we see the trends and the data happening, building on those relationships that he has with the community and growing them to do more intervention opportunities within Columbia Public Schools and within the neighborhoods," Buffaloe said. "And just being that trusted voice so that when we do have rumors of something's that going to happen, he might be able to kind of connect with those involved, and let's have some preventative nature so that it won't actually happen and it will reduce our calls for service with our police department."