South Bend mayor candidates to participate in Monday online forum hosted by Tribune

The Tribune will host both South Bend mayoral candidates in a forum Monday to discuss issues facing the city of South Bend.

The conversation will begin at 6 p.m. Monday on the Tribune's Facebook page. It will feature incumbent South Bend Mayor James Mueller, who is a Democrat, along with his Republican challenger, Desmont Upchurch.

Mueller defeated current Common Council member Henry Davis Jr. in the May primary and is seeking his second term after succeeding Pete Buttigieg as mayor after the 2019 election.

Upchurch served in the U.S. Army for two decades, primarily as a recruiter, before retiring in 2021. He moved to South Bend with his family in 2016 to recruit students from the University of Notre Dame for the Army's health care roles, he said.

Since then, he's become involved in the South Bend chapter of the NAACP and in a local gun violence intervention group. He lost a bid in 2020 for the South Bend Community School Corp. board of trustees. In November, he lost the auditor's race by half a percentage point — just 663 of more than 70,000 votes — to Democrat John Murphy.

Mueller grew up in South Bend and served as chief of staff under Buttigieg. He graduated from Notre Dame, where he studied mathematics, history, and philosophy, and has a doctorate from the University of Delaware in ocean science.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend mayor candidates to participate in Tribune online forum