For anyone who follows Rochester politics, there was little doubt that City Council President Lovely Warren would run for mayor. The only question was when.
Last week we found out: it’s now.
And so we will have incumbent Tom Richards, a 69-year-old white male lawyer and former corporate executive, and Warren, a 35-year-old African-American woman lawyer, in a Democratic primary in September. The winner will likely face Green Party candidate Alex White and, possibly, a Republican candidate and others, in November.
It will be an important campaign. And if everybody resists the temptation to go negative, it could offer the city – and the metropolitan area – a chance to take stock of where we are, where we may be headed, and our options for the future.
Those options, frankly, are limited. And the challenges are enormous: persistent, concentrated poverty; an eroded manufacturing sector and tax base; an outdated structure that forces the city to rely heavily on property taxes to finance its services; and governmental barriers that keep poverty walled up inside the city.
Still, there are options. And it matters who leads the city.
Richards likely will campaign as a pragmatist, emphasizing the challenges we face; cautioning that there will be no grand projects, no magic solutions; and offering himself as an experienced manager who can keep the city stable in tough times.
And while in her kick-off press conference last week, Warren said that the city “needs a vision for the future,” I don’t expect her to promise miracles, either. She’s been on City Council for almost six years and has been president for the last three, so she should know the city’s challenges as well as Richards does.
One Warren theme will almost certainly be neighborhoods – particularly Rochester’s poor neighborhoods and their residents. On City Council, Warren has been a dogged representative of the northeast inner city. And she pushed successfully for affordable housing in College Town on Mt. Hope.
In her press conference last week, she challenged an approach that the Richards administration has followed for neighborhood development. Called “focused investment,” the policy directs financial resources to a few targeted neighborhoods rather than spreading them among all neighborhoods.
So this campaign could result in a serious discussion about a serious topic: how we invest the city’s limited resources in a way that benefits everybody. How we balance the need to attract development with the need to lift the poor.
But there are also risks in this particular campaign between these two particular people. Everything Richards and Warren say from now on, as mayor and City Council president, will be viewed through the lens of the September election. And the campaign could impact the actions of City Council, which at least publicly, has been a fairly cohesive group and has been supportive of the mayor. Now the Council president is running against the mayor, and Council members are beginning to take sides: Adam McFadden is supporting Warren, and Carolee Conklin, Elaine Spaull, and Matt Haag are supporting Richards.
There is also the danger that the campaign will take on racial or class overtones. Rochester’s recent political history includes the election of plenty of African Americans – a mayor among them – so Warren’s candidacy itself doesn’t inject race into the discussion. But the moment it looked likely that Warren would announce, I started hearing mutterings of concern that this would quickly become a race-based campaign, pitting the needs of black Rochesterians against those of whites.
Dissension is good. Primaries are healthy. An election campaign with racial or class overtones is an entirely different matter. I’m confident that neither Warren nor Richards wants that and that neither one will encourage or condone it. But some of their supporters might. That would cause serious damage to this community – to the city and its surrounding suburbs – that would last well beyond the tenure of either candidate as mayor.
This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 2, 2013.
The current leadership has been focused on slashing services to meet reduced revenues and not focusing nearly enough on actually growing revenues.
There’s a generational shift occurring right now. Urban living is much more popular among young adults and new empty nesters alike. Developers have been cashing in on this trend by building new apartments, condos and townhouses in the city.
You’d think that the city would be cashing in too, but that hasn’t been the case. There have been a lot of tax giveaways to the developers instead. The logic is that the tax breaks are a catalyst for the development, but this development would have happened due to market demands regardless.
Alex White is the only candidate who’s talked about making sure developers pay their fair share of the costs of the infrastructure they profit from. I’m tired of being asked to choose between closing a library or a rec center so that we can slash taxes on luxury condos. New leadership is needed across the board and I hope people look to the Green Party to provide it.
Democrats have held the seat of Mayor in Rochester since 1974. That’s 40 years. Forty straight years. Is our city better for it? Doesn’t seem like it. It’s time for a change Rochester.
Thoughtful, necessary and timely commentary. Thank you Mary Anna.
I am always commenting on the need for bold leadership, however bold leadership must be focused on the important issues. Unfortunately, this has not been the case in Rochester.
The last bold move by a Rochester mayor was rolling the dice on the fast ferry. About the only other bold announcements , which are actually somewhat common, are construction projects. …the still born Renaissance Square and PaeTec Tower, which now is not going to cast much of a shadow.
But how do things like ferries and office towers help with the true issues plaguing the city? They don’t. When all of our time, energy and money are poured into big dream projects, they isn’t any time, energy , money or interest in focusing on poverty and crime.
All local leaders are guilty of ignoring the important issues, but they can’t seem to ignore a building project. The short term creation of jobs gets hyped…then what?
Alex White is the only candidate for mayor who ever talks about the important issues. Alex White is the only candidate not being swayed off course by the distractions the other candidates fall prey to–money and powerful people.
Rochester need a truly good progressive mayor who knows what the real issues are. Rochester needs Alex White.
Alex White probably is the best candidate for the job, unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have much of a base. Additionally, Richards (the seasoned lawyer/businessman) will make it difficult for him to make any charges stick. Like it or not, this probably will come down to race… If Warren gets the vote out, she wins – possibly by landslide. And I truly hope she does as Richards’ blustering, arrogant style of governing (much like “Big Brother” Bloomberg’s or King Andy’s) quite literally infuriates me.
Primaries are healthy, as long as they’re restricted to a single match up between candidates (and with a run off if necessary). They are however disasterous when utilized in the manner we see every four years with our presidemtial primaries. As a result of far too much media hype and far too little intelligent weighing of the candidates by the voters in subsequent primaries, we now have a system where a few thousand individuals in Iowa and New Hampshire are for-all- intents-and-purposes, selecting the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates for the remaining 313,900,000 of us.
I think that a recent statement made by Mr. Aaron Wicks regarding this article is critically important, and in fact classic, i.e.,
“Serious damage.”
“It would be refreshing to have some discussion about precisely what kind of serious damage to our community would be done by talking about race during a campaign. We already know the damage from not talking about: clear disparities between whites and people of color in virtually ever measure of social well-being. THAT is serious damage. If one is concerned that feelings might get hurt or old wounds might be reopened — or, heaven for fend, some yelling and naughty words get uttered — perhaps that might be the type of damage we can endure to prevent the damage we have been perpetrating on ourselves for generations. Alas, the dark editorial supplies no indications of the serious damage that such a campaign would cause. It simply takes it as a given.”
Howard, your vision of the issue of race is completely one dimensional.
Who exactly are the “people of color” you have pitted against whites? The behavioral – not racist – division in Rochester is primarily between a significant subset of young African Americans and everyone else. That division is defined by the disruptive behaviors of the former.
I was recently at a meeting for a Rochester branch library facing a serious teen problem (almost all of whom were African American). That problem included assaults on the premises. In walked a tardy city official who commented ‘sorry I was at meeting discussing the problem of assaults on refugees’. No one had to ask who was perpetrating those assaults. Of course none of this was news – unlike your march in Greece – given the enormous barriers to honesty on the subject of race.
“this development would have happened due to market demands regardless” !?!?!?!? This is the essence of the Green Party fantasy. What market conditions are you citing? The worst economy since the great depression? Declining population and further concentration of poverty? The green party loves to compare the tax impact of actual development that has happened to the possible tax impact of magical fantasy projects that don’t exist (rather than to the non-revenue producing decay that they replace) without factoring in any of the other benefits of of these projects. If Apple computer moved its corparate headquarters to downtown rochester, built an architectural wonder on what was an abondoned parking lot , but was given tax breaks to do so, Alex White would be decrying the move. You don’t compare the deal to a pefect non-existent one – you compare it to the abandoned parking lot. White seems almost completely unaware of the almost generations of divestment from the city. Pretending that private equity is fighting to spend money on urban development and that tax incentives are needless give aways is frighteningly divorced from reality. It’s cheap and it attempts to turn complex economics into bumper sticker politics. If you loved how this group ran a campout in the park, you’ll love how they run a city.
Our current budget situation is pretty dire, we are at the point of closing down libraries and recreation centers, delaying critical infrastructure projects, and cutting community and youth services. I would say that asking whether the amazingly low property values these deals grant and the low taxes they allow businesses to pay is good for Rochester is a perfectly fair question. I don’t disagree that we should encourage businesses to grow in Rochester, but at what cost? How many jobs is a recreation center for at risk inner city youth worth? 10? 50? 200? We’re talking two issues, the taxes these deals set and the assessments granted, and I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask that Rochester businesses deal with a higher level on both of those scores so that we don’t pass all of the pain of our budget crisis to the residents who live here. Having a serious conversation about the budget and not talking about the tax breaks and property assessments for major development deals is unproductive and shortsighted. Tom Richards and Lovely Warren won’t even talk about this issue, and Alex White is making a valid argument. Maybe Rochester simply cannot afford these deals at the levels we have been granting them, we are simply passing on too much pain to the people who live here, we’re at risk of slashing the social fabric of Rochester in this budget season, and I think we need to change our priorities to benefit everyone in Rochester and not just the businesses that operate here. I think everyone would agree that Rochester needs a new economic vision, and 40 years of one party Democratic rule hasn’t brought it.
Also, just a note, the Green Party and Occupy are not the same group. There are many devoted and intelligent people active in the Green Party who never set foot at Occupy. The Four Pillars of the Green Party are 1) ecological wisdom , 2) social justice, 3) grassroots democracy , and 4) nonviolence, which to me is not a bad framework to approach public policy. Rochester needs a government that is inclusive, invigorating, focused on the entire fabric of our community. We have too much potential as a community to keep limping along like this. We need to give people a real stake in their neighborhoods, a real voice at the table, and empower them to help drive this city forward, which is what the Green Party puts on the table.