Michelle Davis-Younger spent her last night as mayor listening to other people tell her who she had been.
They called her Mayor Parks. She called herself Mrs. Parks. The city website still says Davis-Younger. The letter on file says she is done Wednesday, Sept. 30 — three months earlier than the December exit she announced in February, and two years short of the term she won in 2024.
Delbert Parks, whom she reportedly married earlier this month, sat in the chamber and waited his turn.
He told the room he grew up poor in Texas, that he never thought he would run a billion-dollar company, and that meeting her was “one of the glories of my life.” Her father called him MB and told him to move in. He said no. Her mother, a couple of days before she died, took his hand and told him to take care of her daughter.
People say Micron gives to Manassas because of her, he said. He works there. He does not buy that story.
“We live. We grow here. We work here.”
Then he looked at her.
“I love you very much, and you know that. I always will. And unlike all y’all in the room, I’m so glad she’s not there anymore. Trust me.”
That was the joke. The rest of the night was the ledger — the one she wanted read, and the one that was already on potomaclocal.com.
The girl on the gravel road
She had notes because, she said, she would go on forever without them.
She thanked people who texted and those who couldn’t come. She described a child on gravel and dirt roads with no shoes, drinking from a hose, picking blackberries for her grandmother’s mush. Daughter of a janitor and a maid. A single mother who could barely put food on the table. Then the mayor of the place she called home.
“I never knew how strong I was until I became a mayor,” she said. “It’ll teach you real quick.”
Voters elected her to the council in 2018, making her the first Black woman elected to that body. In 2020 she beat Theresa Coates Ellis — now a colleague on the same dais — and became the first woman, first Black mayor and first Democrat to hold the office. She beat Xiao-Yin “Tang” Byrom in 2024 for a term that runs through 2028. She will not finish it.
In February she called that an eight-year cap she had set for herself, split between two chairs. “Leadership is not about holding power,” she said then. “It is about building something durable enough to hand over.” The August letter just moved the handoff up.
Monday she did the math out loud. Two years on council, six as mayor. “Just ninety days shy of a complete eight years, which would have been in December. Now I know that’s the new math, but six plus two still equals eight.”
She said she was beginning a chapter as Mrs. Parks, “completely wrapped in” by Delbert, and that the two of them had taken “the high road when folks tried their best to break us down.”
James Younger, her first husband, died in March 2023. Deaconess Thelma Davis, her mother, died Nov. 21, 2024, days after the reelection. She has said her father died in 2025. A woman who first met her in a firehouse, later a liaison at East End Mobile Home Park, told council she had watched her bury a sister, a mother and a father “and you never missed a day.”
The city proclamation Vice Mayor Mark D. Wolfe read Monday made the same claim in civic language: she never missed a regular meeting as mayor.
The picture on the wall
Diana Brown, who sits on the School Board and chairs the Northern Virginia Community College board, said her four-year-old, Nevea, looks at the mayor’s photograph and asks if that is the city’s president.
“I say yes,” Brown said.
Lynn Forkell Greene — a former council member running as an independent this November to reclaim a seat — said her granddaughter Alyssa is one of the girls who now thinks a mayor can look like that. Greene then asked council not to rush the Center Street rezoning. That fight is a different story. Monday she still stood in the sendoff line.
Brea Stokes, who does not speak “city jargon,” called her “mayor bestie” and said Parks answered texts when nobody came to the small events. Ashley Hutson said she ran because she could bump into the mayor on the street and end up at lunch.
Veterans walked a proclamation down the aisle. The American Legion, the Disabled American Veterans, women veterans, the VFW. They said the Mayor’s Veteran Advisory Board had not existed here for a hundred years. “This is not goodbye,” the presenter said. Godspeed. Fair winds.
Ellis, who froze with her through 45 days of early voting in 2018 and later lost the mayor’s race to her, wished her well “no matter what you do.” Ralph J. Smith told her and Delbert to live “an intentional life.” Tom Osina said whoever comes next will be measured against her. Sonia Vásquez Luna left her with Numbers 6:24-26 and thanked her for showing up on days she had a right to stay home.
Tim Demeria, the commissioner of the revenue, speaking from Burlington Court as a neighbor, did not recite the project list.
“I wanna thank you for loving my city.”
What the list was
The projects followed her anyway. They always do.
The city bought the Olde Towne Inn — about $5.75 million in later tallies — and tore the motel down. It bought the Manassas Shopping Center. It opened a community center in the school building she had walked as a child. Dean Park. A fire station. Jennie Dean Elementary. City Hall. The John D. Conner III public safety building. A Wawa she reminded them she had tie-broken, the one that sold a million-dollar ticket.
Monday’s agenda still included the MIFCO and City Hall-lot rezoning: 162 apartments and a garage. Hearing only. The vote was pushed to Oct. 26. An airport-terminal bid was opened and sent back to staff.
She told InsideNoVA she had “raised the visibility of this city to levels that it had never seen.” Wolfe said she had changed what the office felt like from the sidewalk.
The fights that traveled with her
The same years left a second record. It is not on the proclamation.
Potomac Local asked her to sit for interviews after she announced for mayor in 2019. For years the answer was no. Candidate surveys in 2024 — budget and taxes, data centers — came back “NO RESPONSE” under her name while every other candidate on the page answered. In September 2024, she gave this newsroom a campaign interview, the first since she won the office.
At a Prince William Chamber forum on Oct. 1, 2024, she looked at the press table and said organizers had “invited a journalist that has never said anything nice about me.” Potomac Local had written the walks, the lunches and the firsts. It had also asked questions she did not want asked. An October 2024 opinion page in this local news source said she made politics personal and kept a short fuse with the people who cover City Hall.
Two weeks later came text-gate.
On the podcast “Until They Kick Us Out,” hosts read aloud messages they said were between Davis-Younger, Ross Snare — then chairman of the Manassas Regional Airport Commission — and a city employee. The texts, as read on the show, disparaged a sitting council member. Potomac Local did not independently verify the messages. Snare resigned as chair effective Oct. 21, 2024. His letter cited personal matters and other commitments. The election was two weeks away.
Then the Micron letter.
On Feb. 10, 2025, the same day council extended Micron’s semiconductor equipment tax break through 2035, Davis-Younger and City Manager Steve Burke signed a city letter laying out the deal. Micron pays a special rate of $0.756 per $100 of assessed value. Other manufacturers pay $2.10. In tax year 2024 that difference was about $9.7 million: Micron paid $5.46 million instead of $15.18 million. The extension locks a 4 percent annual increase and runs five years past the 2030 end date the city had already granted.
Delbert Parks, vice president and site director at Micron’s Manassas plant, now her husband, is named in that letter. He had given $2,000 to her 2024 campaign. She recused herself from the vote.
Ellis voted no and called the extra five years “$50 million.” Wolfe dismissed talk of a conflict as “BS” and said the city was keeping a $2 billion investment and about 1,500 jobs. Davis-Younger and Micron did not answer this newsroom’s questions then about how the relationship sat next to the incentive.
Monday night, Parks told council Micron’s gifts to the city were not about her. The letter on file still has her name at the bottom.
She missed Sept. 21. Wolfe ran the town hall on First Friday after the Sept. 4 shooting that killed 16-year-old Ashley Intihar. Davis-Younger was out of town on a honeymoon. She said she watched it when she got home and thanked the people who came. The morning after the shooting, she had already spoken for the city. “Our community is grieving. Let me be clear: violence has no place in Manassas.”
At the close of Monday, she named the other half of the ledger herself. COVID. Gossip. Plots, she said, to embarrass her or remove her. Pictures taken in secret. A house watched. “Most hurtful were the racist comments that I often heard.”
“But I showed up. I kept showing up.”
The empty chair
Wednesday, the seat is empty, and no one arrives with a mandate to fill it. Virginia law gives the six remaining members a window — Oct. 1 to Nov. 14, in Osina’s telling — to appoint an interim mayor. If they cannot agree, circuit court judges can do it for them. Separately, council still has to ask the court for a special election so voters can finish the term through 2028.
The mayor’s office is not on the Nov. 3 ballot. Three council seats are. Those seats now belong to Ellis, who is running to keep hers; Vásquez Luna, who left the council race to run for the House District 20 vacancy; and Smith, who is not seeking another term.
The city’s sample ballot lists seven candidates for the three seats. Ellis is the only Republican serving in the city. The Democratic nominees are Dianne Lane, School Board Chair Jill M. Spall and Helen Anne Zurita. Running as independents are Eugene E. “Doc” Brown, Lynn Forkell Greene and Colin J. Turner. Greene is the former council member who stood in the sendoff line Monday and asked voters to send her back.
Wolfe has said he wants the mayor’s job. So has Osina. Both are Democrats.
