Updated on March 4 at 10 a.m.

There’s another entrant in Boston’s packed mayoral contest. John Barros — who ran against then-state Rep. Marty Walsh during the 2013 election cycle and subsequently joined the Walsh administration — is announcing his candidacy today at Restaurante Cesaria, a Cape Verdean establishment that Barros’ family runs on Bowdoin Street in Dorchester.

No other candidate currently seeking the mayor’s job participated in the 2013 contest, which saw Walsh narrowly defeat then-Boston City Councilor John Connolly in the November final election. In the September preliminary, Barros finished sixth in a field of 12 candidates.

Barros went on to join the Walsh administration as Boston’s first-ever chief of economic development in Feb. 2014, a post he held until last week. Barros said his experience in that role sets him apart in the current mayoral field, which also includes city councilors Michelle Wu, Andrea Campbell, and Anissa Essaibi George, along with state Rep. Jon Santiago, D-Suffolk, who is also an ER doctor.

"When the mayor invited me to come into City Hall, he basically said … ‘I want to make sure that we’re addressing the inequities in our economy,'" Barros told GBH News. "And so together, we decided that we would build a new cabinet — an economic development cabinet — and really help to provide the kind of role that didn’t exist in city government."

In past mayoral administrations, Barros said, "all of the economic development agencies and departments … were really reactionary or regulatory: ‘You just file an application, we’ll have a conversation, we can think about zoning, we can think about height, we’ll engage community.’ But [Walsh] wanted to be more forward looking — and so together, we went in and we emphasized economic equity, economic inclusion and participation as we grow our economy.”

That conceptual shift, Barros said, led to the Imagine Boston 2030 master planning process, which he co-chaired, and neighborhood-specific planning efforts in areas like Nubian Square — as well as record levels of affordable housing production and a citywide unemployment rate of just 2.4% prior to the pandemic.

“We made sure that resident voice, and resident participation, was going to be central to how Boston was going to grow,” Barros said.

As Boston recovers from COVID-19, he added, “It’s going to take a leader to come in with some real decisive action, with some real understanding of our economy, to support the reopening of our economy.”

If voters give Barros credit for the Walsh administration’s economic achievements, they may also hold him partially responsible for its shortfalls — including the disproportionately low number of city contracts awarded to Black and Latino businesses between 2014 and 2019.

Asked about a recent study documenting those shortfalls, Barros said the findings were not unexpected — and that an aggressive effort is already underway to rectify the problem.

“We’ve been looking at the numbers of city contracting [sic] since we went in. And we’ve been making them transparent, we’ve been reporting on them,” Barros said. “And so, in fact, the study that looked at the spending … these numbers are old numbers.”

The study was conducted to “lay the legal foundation for change,” Barros said — and after its release, Walsh signed an executive order mandating that a quarter of discretionary city spending go to businesses owned by women and people of color.

“That is a historic goal, has never existed in Boston at that level, and it’s going to take a lot of effort to meet it,” he said, adding, we now need to go in and do specific things in our procurement process to make sure that we can hit those goals, such as take a look at some of the larger contracts of the city and be able to split them up to make them competitive for smaller businesses.”

Barros is also a past member of Boston’s school committee and the former executive director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, where he helped push for the construction of affordable housing and two new schools — the Dudley Street Neighborhood Charter School and Orchard Garden Pilot School — in a formerly depressed part of Boston.

“I bring a lifelong career in trying to help my community, trying to help improve my community,” Barros said.

Barros attended Boston College High School and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in African and African American Studies. He later earned a master’s in public policy from Tufts University.