Candidates for mayor, City Council speak at Tribune forum

Oct. 20—In a two-hour forum held Tuesday evening without an audience in a large meeting room at Active Aging Inc., candidates for mayor and for two seats on City Council presented themselves to Meadville voters as two different teams of three members.

A team of Republicans touted the experience of its council nominees, incumbent Jim Roha and former member Nancy Mangilo Bittner, and offered a newcomer mayoral candidate who faces the difficult challenge of a write-in campaign in Marcy Kantz. Democrats on the other team — mayoral nominee Jaime Kinder and council candidate Gretchen Myers — wooed voters with an emphasis on inclusivity and a participatory approach to solving the seemingly intractable problems facing the city.

The pandemic-era setting of the Tribune-sponsored forum, with candidates spread across nearly the entire width of the meeting room, was evident from the outset: not only was the audience absent from the event, one of the candidates was as well.

Council candidate Jack Harkless, the third member of the Democratic team, was unable to participate, as he explained in a statement that was read at the beginning of the event.

"Unfortunately several of the people in my home have contracted COVID," Harkless wrote in the statement. "Following CDC guidelines I will be quarantining at home and cannot be around other people until we've seen this protocol to its end."

COVID-19 also came up in the evening's questions, with candidates asked whether they would support a vaccine mandate for city employees and contractors if they were elected. None expressed support for such a mandate, though several — Mangilo Bittner, Roha and Myers — stated that they had been vaccinated and two — Roha and Kinder — said they had contracted the coronavirus.

But while the pandemic shaped the form of the event and provided the topic for one question, most of the evening focused on the recurring subjects facing city leaders. The discussion was dominated, in fact, by the age-old issue of how to find the necessary revenue to continue providing the services expected of a city such as police and fire protection, road maintenance, parks.

For small business owner Kinder, who will be the only mayoral candidate on the ballot in November, one possibility that came up repeatedly was seeking more of a contribution from nonprofits. Kinder called for such organizations, which are exempt from real estate taxes, to contribute "30 percent" — presumably meaning that Wesbury United Methodist Retirement Community, Allegheny College, Meadville Medical Center and the many other nonprofit organizations that account for nearly 45 percent of the city's tax base should voluntarily pay 30 percent of the amount they would be assessed if they were not tax exempt.

Kinder, a political newcomer who would be the city's first woman and first Black person to serve as mayor, represented a clear change from the status quo in several ways, perhaps most noticeably in her support for a rental inspection program for city landlords — a program explicitly opposed by the Republican team.

Kantz, in contrast, made an explicit claim for representing a continuation of the way things have operated in city government in recent years.

Saying she set out on a write-in campaign to be the city's next mayor when Kinder defeated Mayor LeRoy Stearns in the Democratic primary, Kantz offered several options for squeezing more revenue out of city operations. Kantz, the owner of two downtown businesses as well as rental properties, called for increasing the efficiency of those operations in unspecified ways and making better use of GIS software, but one refrain dominated her pitch to voters: the French Creek Heritage and Entertainment District.

The vision of tourist-drawing development along the creekside in the city has won more than $2 million in support from state grant programs since being unveiled in 2018. Officials have also said that the strategy could take 10 years or more to realize — if millions more in funding to support it becomes available.

"I believe that we need to team up with our nonprofits, specifically with the French Creek corridor project," Kantz said in one of at least five references to the proposal that she made during the evening. "This could be the economic engine that our city needs."

Like Kantz, other candidates had talking points to drive home. For Kinder, a key idea was council's duty to hear from voices that she said have not been heard from in the past.

Describing her mother, who lived in the city for all of her 77 years, Kinder said that "she couldn't tell you who was on City Council."

"Not because she didn't care," Kinder continued, "but because City Council didn't care about her or people like her. City Council wasn't making life better for people like her and wasn't considering people like her when making the decisions."

Myers, who is campaigning jointly with Kinder and Harkless, echoed the same call for a participatory approach to city government, saying on several occasions that looking to residents for ideas and solutions was an important part of moving forward.

Addressing voters directly, the dance studio owner said that being elected "would be an incredible opportunity for me to serve you and to listen to your incredible and beautiful collective wisdom."

"I will listen with the intention to understand and I will definitely not talk over you," Myers added.

But while the Democratic team members emphasized a kind of crowd-sourcing approach to government, heavy on in-person input from a wide array of residents, Mangilo Bittner attempted to portray that approach as privileging a particular group that represents only a minority of city residents.

"We want to all pledge our best efforts all the people in the city of Meadville, not just a small group," she said, referring to herself, Roha and Kantz. "It isn't about calling a group together of 30 or 40 people. ... You cannot represent 12,600 people and then have 25 give their opinions on something and make it work."

Another refrain designed at least in part to affect the emotions of voters and heard from Mangilo Bittner and Roha was the image of the widow on a fixed income. The widow's age increased — first 89 when Roha described her, later 92 when Mangilo Bittner evoked the same idea — but what Roha called "the rather stark choice" between essentials and paying taxes remained constant.

"Do you heat or do you eat?" Roha asked, summing up the image with a ready catch phrase.

The implication, of course, was that raising city taxes would put seniors in particular in an unsustainable position, but none of the candidates were calling for tax increases. But they agreed that city expenses will continue to rise even as the tax base remains stagnant. And, as Roha pointed out, the truly viable responses are largely out of the hands of City Council: only the state Legislature can make such changes, according to Roha, and for decades it has declined to do so.

YOU CAN WATCH

The Meadville Tribune's candidate forum for mayoral and Meadville City Council candidates will be shown on Armstrong cable's Channel 23 and Channel 100 on Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m.

Mike Crowley can be reached at (814) 724-6370 or by email at mcrowley@meadvilletribune.com.