On Thursday night about 60 residents gathered at Ray’s Temple Community Church of God in Christ to listen to seven candidates running for office in the city’s 2009 election. The evening’s discussion spanned a broad gamut of topics, from the future of Lancaster Square to the recent shootings in the city’s southeast. Though not formally billed as a debate, the candidates’ remarks—particularly those of mayoral candidate Charlie Smithgall and incumbent Rick Gray—often took a heated tone.
The candidates included:
- Mayor Rick Gray (D), Incumbent
- Charlie Smithgall (R), running for mayor, prior mayor
- Matt Holden (R), running for City Council
- Todd Smith (D), running for City Council
- Louise Williams (D), running for reelection to City Council
- José Urdaneta (D), running for reelection to City Council
- Tim Roschel (D), running for reelection to City Council
When asked about the future of Lancaster Square’s east side, which would fall out of commission if the Hotel Brunswick were to ultimately close down, both mayoral candidates weighed in on the topic.
Mayor Gray first addressed the now-shuttered hotel: “The Hotel Brunswick will reopen,” Gray said, “As soon as they make it safe for human occupancy. We have told them that any time they want the place inspected, we’ll be glad to have the place inspected.” Gray added that some prospects for developing Lancaster Square are currently in discussion, but cannot be publicly discussed for the time being.
In his response, Smithgall pressed the importance of a swift reopening for the hotel: “The Brunswick Hotel must open as soon as possible,” Smithgall said, “and the City should be cooperating in every way possible to get them open because it’s an important adjunct to the convention center and the Marriott Hotel.” Regarding the future of Lancaster Square, Smithgall raised his previous proposal of installing the Rocky Spring or Stoner Carousel within the space:
According to Smithgall, such an attraction would “bring at least 35-40,000 people downtown every year….It will drag people up from the convention center to see it and hopefully up past it to the other shops in the…300 block of North Queen Street.”
Pressed by Smithgall and Holden as a lead campaign issue, Crime control and prevention held a central role in the evening’s discussion. “Public safety, to me, is the number one goal of the mayor of any city government,” Smithgall said, “It’s a little bit lax right now, and it’s got to be brought up to speed.” Smithgall later added, “People are afraid to go out at night….a lady that was probably in her 70s walked up to me and said, ‘This is the first time I’ve been out of my house after 7 o’clock in two years.’”
Gray responded by asserting that the crime rate for Lancaster City has, for the past four years, “been pretty flat.” He further noted that the unflattering FBI crime statistics frequently referenced by Smithgall, in fact, deal an equally unflattering review for the last six years of Smithgall’s own administration.
“Quite frankly,” Gray opined, “I’m tired of hearing—from people running for office in this city—the same stereotypes that I hear when I go outside the city and speak to groups in the suburbs….Believe me folks, don’t let this kind of crap scare you….It’s scare tactics.”
Williams noted, at another point in the discussion, that, since the 1980s, Lancaster City has dealt with rising crime, largely due to an increasing transient population. According to Williams, things have not changed much in the past 10-15 years, “only [now] we have more guns around.”
The topic of crime naturally shifted into a discussion on how the City is reaching out to its youth population.
Smithgall recommended that the City crack down on illegal youth gun possession (“they’ve got to be afraid that they’re going to get caught”), while seeking to invest further in after school programs: “The schools have to be open at night so kids can go in and shoot basketball. If kids are involved, they don’t get in trouble.”
Gray said that, since he was elected, he has been in the habit of meeting with the school superintendent on a monthly basis, to “discuss how the City can help the schools and how the schools can help the City.” Gray said that he just recently arranged for funding to retain resource officers in city schools. Additionally, Gray said that the new school facilities being built in Lancaster City will allow for the gyms to remain open at night.
Throughout the forum, a common theme from many of the candidates was the importance of getting the local communities and neighborhoods more involved in cleaning up the city.
Holden said that a frequent complaint that he heard from residents while going to door-to-door was “my neighbor’s a real pain.” Holden frankly asserted that “one of the things that we can’t legislate into being is to make people respectful of each other.” Nevertheless, Holden maintained that an important role of the City Government is to encourage community partnerships and “foster those relationships.”
Smith spoke from his experience of visiting a number of neighborhood committee meetings: “I know first hand that any time you go to a neighborhood that has a meeting like that, and they have a group like that, that the quality of life is increased.” Smith noted that this kind of communication is crucial to public safety: “People are aware of what people are doing. They’re aware of their schedules. They’re aware of who should be in that neighborhood and who shouldn’t be.”
Roschel asserted that the City is already in the process of facilitating this kind of coordination: “We’re hoping to form a ‘Lancaster Neighborhoods, Inc.,’” Roschel said, “We already have the areas designated and named throughout the city. Now we have to get the residents to step forward and join the team.”
Looking at the lively audience of the Thursday night meeting, Urdaneta said that, in his second term, he would like to meet with the public more often in such a fashion: “I think that the most frusterating thing of being in Council is that we don’t have this level of input. The number of people that we have here today—I would love find a formula to make all of our Council Meetings…have this level of [attendance].”
