The five Democratic candidates for Harrisburg mayor squared off in their first debate Saturday night, and the battle for votes was charged and pointed.
Challengers Otto Banks and David Schankweiler spent the night on the attack against incumbent Mayor Eric Papenfuse, charging him with failing to fix the city’s most basic problems, and failing to serve all of the city’s residents equally.
Papenfuse, meanwhile, gave a ringing defense of his administration’s work, arguing city government is working better than it has in a generation under his leadership, and that his first eight years have left Harrisburg poised for a new era of growth that he is best-positioned to guide.
Sitting City Council President Wanda Williams touted her unique position in the race as the only candidate who is a lifelong resident of the city and a lifelong Democrat, and political newcomer Kevyn Knox tried to sell the voters that electing an outsider is the best way for voters to attack the city’s most intractable problems.
It made for a spirited give-and-take, as the five-way race enters a one-month sprint to election day.
Papenfuse, the incumbent first elected in 2013, is seeking a third term in City Hall and he has repeatedly said it would be his last.
He is being challenged for the Democratic Party’s nomination by Banks, a one-time city councilman who later served as an assistant secretary in President George W. Bush’s Department of Housing & Urban Development; Schankweiler, a retired media executive who was instrumental in starting Harrisburg University; Williams, the council president; and Knox, the general manager of the Harrisburg Midtown Arts Center.
One of the first sparring points in the debate sponsored by local ABC affiliate WHTM and the Harrisburg Regional Chamber of Commerce was crime.
Schankweiler said his first order of business if elected would be to convene a citywide summit on violence prevention that would generate sets of short- and long-term solutions to the violent crime. Banks, meanwhile, talked about putting an emphasis on building a police force that looks more likes the community it serves.
Papenfuse and Williams countered that they believe most of the right steps are being taken to create a safer city, even though Harrisburg’s violent crime rates are appreciably higher than most other areas of South Central Pennsylvania.
Papenfuse specifically argued that despite a spike in homicides last year, overall crime rates have gone down through most of his tenure in office. The department’s new community service officers, a revamped use of force policy and the deployment - with county help - of mental health co-responders will all help address the need to make the department work more fairly for all residents, he said.
Harrisburg’s response to the pandemic was another flashpoint.
Banks, Schankweiler and Knox, meanwhile, said the city failed to take the lead in setting up contact tracing, mass testing or vaccination sites.
“None of that was in place when the coronavirus hit the city of Harrisburg” Banks said. “This mayor, as well as this president of council, completely disappeared when the coronavirus had an impact on our community. When we needed them the most, they were not there.”
Schankweiler said residents tell him communication was lacking throughout the pandemic, saying: “We didn’t hear anything from anybody about what was going on and where.”
Papenfuse, meanwhile, said he believed city government had done better than most in the things it could control.
For example, he hailed his early decision to tap cash reserves to fund an early small business grant program that the mayor said helped some of the most vulnerable businesses in the city stay afloat before state and federal programs got started. His eviction moratoriums, he said, had kept people in their homes throughout the economic crisis.
Banks hit Papenfuse - and Williams, by extension - hard throughout the night for overseeing a city government that he said has not done enough to lift up Harrisburg’s Black and brown communities.
As an example, he argued that city leaders failed to push for the inclusion of local minority contractors on the construction of the new federal courthouse, and Banks said that his administration would set new goals for minority participation in contracting, more diversity in city hiring, and policies aimed at encouraging local banks that the city does business with to do a better job of providing credit to minority-owned businesses.
Banks also said he would propose marshaling the city’s federal Community Development Block Grant funds and work with city non-profits to use the schools as a base to provide case management services and educational programs for parents of school-age children during the day, and to reopen the schools as community centers in the evening with tutoring and recreational programs for all youth.
Schankweiler, meanwhile, talked consistently through the night about infusing the city government with a new sense of mission to attack the quality of life issues he says the residents he’s met on the campaign trail have turned into a chorus. There is a malaise that has settled over much of the city that he has vowed to scrub away.
“As Mayor, I will confront the bullets, the blight, the trash and the potholes. Change is possible,” he said.
Williams, as a 16-year member of City Council, often found herself taking collateral hits from the other challengers blows, too, which prompted her at one pojnt to draw some separation between herself and Papenfuse.
“We have a strong mayor form of government, and the mayor sets the policies and the legislation that comes to city council. And I am a part-time employee (as a council member),” Williams said. “So things may not have been done because I’m a part-time employee and he’s the full-time, and he has not been cooperative to do the things that we need to do.”
Papenfuse, meanwhile, presented point-by-point defenses of most of the attacks lodged against him.
On the need for more affordable housing, he pointed to the city’s recent passage - with Williams’ help - of a set of policies intended to incentivize developers to build new, high-quality units throughout the city with 10 years’ worth of property tax breaks.
On the criticism that he is “the mayor of Midtown,” where Papenfuse owns a bookstore with his wife, Papenfuse said he understands that perception. But, he added, a lot of the development in Midtown and downtown right now is private development.
“When the city spends its public dollars,” Papenfuse said, “we’re investing in the neighborhoods. We’re out there supporting affordable housing projects in Allison Hill or working with the Camp Curtin Y in Uptown. Those are the public dollars that are being spent.”
Papenfuse also went on the counter-attack against several of his opponents.
He called Schankweiler a lifelong Republican who’s campaign is being run by Republican strategists, which he argued should cause city voters to think hard about whether the values he would bring to City Hall would match up with theirs.
Schankweiler called that an attempt to distract from the issues at hand.
“I’m one of 635 former Republicans who switched to the Democratic Party. I switched because of the president that was in there, because of where the Republican Party is going and because... it is not paying attention to the issues that are important to us in the city,” Schankweiler said.
Papenfuse responded: “You’re not a former Republican when you’re paying tens of thousands of dollars to Republican political consultants and they’re the ones messaging your campaign, and presumably advising you to say things like you don’t support increasing the minimum wage. Your values are Republican values, and they aren’t in step with the values of Harrisburg.”
When Banks talked about reviving and redesigning a city-run revolving loan program to give small businesses in the city better access to capital and credit, meanwhile, Papenfuse warned that in the latter years of former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed’s administration, that loan fund was “a bastion of corruption.”
Knox was able to use his outsider status to avoid the political crossfire for most of the evening.
But he argued his fresh eyes would allow for a fresh, progressive approach to city problems. For example, he said, “the first thing I would do is get rid of the entire codes department, and replace them with people that actually will do the job. Right now, no one’s enforcing codes, which means landlords are just able to get away with anything. They become slumlords.
“I am one of you,” Knox said, “and I will do everything within my power - and will surround myself with people that will also have this passion - to help all forty-nine thousand residents of Harrisburg PA.”
The Democratic primary has often been decisive in Harrisburg in the current political era.
There is, however, also one Republican Party candidate on the primary ballot, Timothy Rowbottom, a city resident who’s blamed Papenfuse’s administration for quashing his plans to develop a parcel of land on South 18th Street in Allison Hill. As the only candidate on the Republican ballot, Rowbottom should be a lock for the November ballot.
The primary election is May 18. Any Harrisburg resident who wants their say in the mayoral primary has to register in the Democratic Party by May 3.
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April 18, 2021 at 10:00AM
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Five Democrats spar in lively Harrisburg mayoral debate - PennLive
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