Copyright syracuse.com
Syracuse, N.Y. — Syracuse’s four mayoral candidates engaged in a wide-ranging — and at times emotional — debate that featured questions from residents who came to Syracuse University’s National Veterans Resource Center for a town hall-style forum. The 90-minute debate, held by SU’s CitrusTV student television studio, drew a crowd of about 150 people, with another 300 watching online. All four candidates — Democrat Sharon Owens, Republican Thomas Babilon and independents Alfonso Davis and Tim Rudd — earned applause from the audience, with some occasional jeers as well. They answered audience and online viewer questions on topics that included getting college students involved in city life, food insecurity, the school superintendent search, police handling of mental health-related calls, dealing with slumlords and working with the Trump administration. For many of the questions, the candidates aligned in one of two ways. The more liberal Owens, Davis and Rudd had some sharp disagreements with Babilon. At other times, Babilon, Davis and Rudd chastised Owens, the city’s deputy mayor since 2018, for what they described as failings of incumbent Mayor Ben Walsh’s two terms in office. Among the most spirited exchanges among all four candidates was a discussion about how the city can reach high-risk youth to curb gun violence. Babilon said he would work to recruit mentors but noted that an existing program championed by Owens is misguided because it has employed people with criminal records to serve in those roles. He cited a recent case in which two people serving as “credible messengers” for a local nonprofit were charged with selling drugs. “I don’t think those mentors should be ex-cons that came back into the community,” he said. “I think perhaps those mentors should be someone who came out of the community and were successful and that they didn’t go to prison.” Both Davis and Owens pushed back. “Who better to tell a young person who is going the wrong way, which way not to go?” Davis said. “And if you got young people or people who have been incarcerated who want to pour into our young people, I don’t have a problem in having them participate and creating financial opportunities for them to do that.” Owens added: “They lived the life. They’ve come back. Not all of them, but some of them have decided they want to restore the community they tore apart by their activity. And so I’m absolutely there to welcome them, to train them, to get them engaged to be a part of that.” Rudd pointed to the city’s Safer Streets program, which aimed to get 50 high-risk youth into mental health counseling, life skills programs and job training with paid internships, but ended up enrolling fewer than 20 in the counseling services. “I’m a numbers person,” Rudd said. “90% of the kids in city schools can’t count. 98% of the people in city government can’t count. Sharon asked for money. She asked for a program. The Walsh administration does this all the time. They said, we’re going to have a program, we’re going to serve 50 people. We need the money for 50 people. They don’t get 50 people. They get 18 people.” Differences also emerged with a question about addressing the proliferation of homeless people in the downtown area. Rudd, Davis and Owens all talked about the need to treat people in these situations with compassion, and said there needs to be more decentralized support services throughout Onondaga County so all people in crisis don’t end up in the same places. Babilon chastised them for not offering a true solution. Noting personal encounters with homeless people defecating, overdosing and sleeping on sidewalks outside his office, Babilon said police need to be able to intervene. “We gotta unhandcuff our police officers and let them handle that, OK?” he said. “If we’re gonna have a vibrant downtown where people want to live, where people want to go and do entertainment, we cannot have that. I’m gonna clean up downtown on day one.” Davis said that’s not the answer: “You have to have compassion,” he said. “And at the end of the day, under my administration, we will have compassion because everything cannot be criminalized.” Among the most tense moments was an exchange between Owens and Rudd, a former budget director for Walsh who was fired after making public comments that compared the mayor and Owens to a slave master who uses the slave mother to break the children. Rudd told Roth he would use a “dog whistle” to get Black men to see that dynamic and vote for him. Rudd, who has said the firing was really because he was speaking out about a failing city technology project and whistleblower accusations related to it, was asked if he regretted those remarks about slaves, which he made in a conversation he recorded and shared with Norm Roth, a large residential landlord. “I’m straight telling what I see, OK?” Rudd said. “If you don’t like it, don’t vote for me. But we got real problems in this community and we got to acknowledge them thoughtfully and seriously and read more. I don’t know. It’s a complicated issue. Race exists in this country.” Owens, the target of numerous Rudd direct attacks throughout the debate, got an opportunity to respond: “Mr. Rudd was clearly upset when he went on a rant for two and a half hours with, by the way, a landlord who sued the city because we wanted to inspect his properties,“ Owens said. ”I’m a servant of the city. I’ve been a servant of this city since I stepped foot off of this campus (after graduating from SU). And I will not stand for my integrity and my character to be attacked.” One of the debate’s oddest moments happened when Luke Radel, one of the CitrusTV student journalists who moderated, asked Davis about a social media comment he made months ago that said the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania was staged. “Anything I say, I stand on,” Davis said. “I own firearms. A high power rifle with a bullet this long and shooting 200 to 300 feet from that direction is, if it nicked your ear, your ear would be off.” Babilon later addressed Davis’ remark when answering a question about how he would work with the Trump administration. “How am I going to work with the Trump administration?” he said. “Well, first, I’m not going to call him a fascist. I’m not going to call him a Nazi. I’m not going to say his assassination attempt where someone was murdered was fake.” Monday’s debate was the second in the past seven days, following one held by WCNY and Syracuse.com last week. Two more are happening this week: WSYR-Channel 9’s studio debate on Wednesday, Oct. 22, and Central Current’s forum at Everson Museum on Thursday, Oct. 23. The general election takes place Tuesday, Nov. 4, with early voting from Oct. 25 through Nov. 2.
