All That Noise Is Because People Care
Vivian Sanchez-Jones on Winning Again, Party Friction and the Year Ahead
Roanoke, VA
Author: Roanoke Rambler Staff, Hart Fowler Lead
Published: 10:00 PM EST November 10, 2026
Edited: 10:00 PM EST November 10, 2026
Listen Here: Roanokesradio.com
Vivian Sanchez-Jones will return to Roanoke City Council alongside two newcomers after Democrats swept all three available seats Nov. 3. The only incumbent on the ballot, she received 12,830 votes, finishing behind Raekwon Moore and Danny Clawson, according to unofficial results. Her victory secures a second full elected term on the council she first joined by appointment in 2020.
In August, Democratic primary voters unseated her running partner Councilman Peter Volosin, while Sanchez-Jones finished third in a five-way field. The general election that followed, she says, was more toxic than her first full campaign in 2022.
Sanchez-Jones is Roanoke’s first Latina council member, first appointed in October 2020 to fill the seat left by Djuna Osborne’s pandemic-era resignation. In 2022 she was elected with 11,716 votes, fewer than 1,000 behind frontrunner Joe Cobb.
She was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States at 14, later attending college in New York City before moving to Roanoke in 2002. She identifies as Afro Latina and works as a student support specialist for Roanoke City Public Schools.
I spoke with her by phone Tuesday about the campaign, the Volosin fallout, local immigrants, the tone on council and her priorities for the year ahead.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been through two campaigns now. How did this one compare to 2022?
They were different. Totally different. The political climate was not as toxic as it is right now. Back then, there were no attacks against any of the Democratic candidates from the Republican Party. I don’t know if you saw all the nasty stuff they sent out.
Mailers paid for by the Republican Party of Virginia, and not authorized by any candidate, targeted Clawson, executive director of the Virginia Harm Reduction Coalition. One showed a needle in an arm alongside language about Clawson enabling drug addicts. Clawson called the mailers false, misleading and harmful and asked the party to retract them.
This nonsense about pushing drugs on the kids and giving them needles — that’s a bit of a stretch.
There are also different issues now: data centers, Flock, the casino. We didn’t have those kinds of issues four years ago.
Councilman Peter Volosin apologized to Councilman Phazhon Nash at a July 20 council meeting after Nash said a remark Volosin made to him after the July 6 meeting carried racial overtones. Volosin said he told Nash that Councilman Nick Hagen “owns” him, in reference to a zoning vote, and that his words landed differently than he intended. Volosin finished fourth in the August primary.
Volosin, the other incumbent, lost after that episode. What did you make of the fallout?
We lost a great candidate in Peter. He’s a very smart man, and he had the pulse of the city. But that was another issue that affected the election.
People ask me, “You should step down. You should put distance between you and Peter.” I’m the kind of person who doesn’t brush somebody off because of gossip or nonsense. Peter is not a racist. Me being Afro Latina, I would not be running with a racist next to me. No, sir. He calls things the way he sees them.
How well did you know Moore and Clawson before the campaign?
I knew Raekwon from different things in the community. I see him out and about. I’d only seen Danny at council during the zoning debate. I didn’t have a relationship with Danny.
How will their arrival change the dynamic on council?
When I started on council, I had never done it before, so I was going to sit back and watch and learn. I have a lot of ideas, but maybe my ideas are not practical.
First of all, we need to improve our communication on council: how we talk to each other in public. Behind closed doors, you can argue all you want. But when we come out in public, we need to look and act like we’re of one accord.
In the past, with other council members, we had our disagreements behind closed doors, and when we came out, whoever voted no, that was okay. We didn’t have that animosity. What’s hurtful right now is that we’re all from the same party. We’re supposed to be on the same page. And we have too many challenges to address come January 1.
As Roanoke’s first Latina council member, what are you hearing from immigrant residents about the challenges they face in the city?
When the political climate started changing, with ICE arriving in different cities, I organized a meeting with the consuls from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, and the superintendent of schools. Someone from the county came over, and the heads of the police, sheriff’s office and fire departments, and community leaders. We had a very quiet meeting, because I didn’t want to put it out there. We wanted to see what our responsibilities were going to be and how we could reach out to each consulate to see what they could do for the community. For example, resources for families that were separated, or if somebody needed to go back home and didn’t have a passport, whether passports could be expedited and fees waived.
We were also against ICE holds at the jail, and that was tough, because we couldn’t say a whole lot. We were threatened with losing funding, but when Spanberger came in, that went away. We were not required to keep ICE holds anymore. Before, if ICE picked up 10 people and took them to the jail, the jail had to hold on to them.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger rescinded predecessor Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 47 in January. That order had directed state law enforcement and corrections agencies to cooperate with ICE and encouraged local departments to do the same.
What’s on your wish list for 2027?
My number one thing is we need to find different revenue sources. If we don’t have revenue coming in, there’s not a whole lot we can do except cut back services or raise taxes, and that’s something I don’t want to do. We can find them together. Something comes up before us, and we could all vote for it and be in accord.
For example, I’m not a soccer fan, but I know most people in the community, whether they’re refugees, immigrants or not, love soccer. For the school kids and for adults, the more time they spend on the soccer fields, the fewer chances they have to get in trouble. I’d like us to expand our soccer fields so we could be ready for tournaments. There’s a lot of money in travel soccer and adult tournaments. We have beautiful hotels. We have the capacity to attract that revenue.
A casino at the Berglund Center would need General Assembly approval and a local referendum, and the region’s legislators have spoken only against it.
Is the casino idea off the table?
Whether it was a majority or a minority against it, we will still have to go to the citizens. They have to approve it. But people thought, just like I did, that it would be another source of revenue. They were going to invest $300 million in that place. To get that civic center halfway working, we’ll have to spend probably about $40 million. The casino was, I think, 15 percent of the project, and we were going to get the conference space we need. We don’t have enough conference space in Roanoke. Things are booked two years in advance. People said, “Well, just fix it.” We don’t have $40 million to do it halfway.
What are the biggest budget challenges ahead?
We do need to raise our employee salaries, and the other issue is collective bargaining. If we do it for the firefighters, we have to do it for all employees, and the cost is high. I’ve always been in favor of unions. But as an elected leader, I also have to be responsible: find out where the money is coming from, how we’re going to pay for it. I am in total support of collective bargaining.
What are you most thankful for in Roanoke this year?
We’re a very generous city. I’m grateful to everyone who voted for me, who decided to still believe in me. That means a lot. We live in a very caring city, in spite of all the noise out there. And I believe all that noise is because people care.
Sanchez-Jones’s new term begins Jan. 1.