gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- Candidates for city office sparred Tuesday night on budget issues, with incumbents defending their moves to beef up Durham's infrastructure and challengers saying present officeholders spend too much on non-essentials.
Mayoral challenger Steven Williams spearheaded the criticism, saying that Durham residents pay "the highest taxes in the Triangle" and for their money get "the least return."
Incumbent Bill Bell, however, said his government has "been able to balance the priorities" defined by the community's needs and citizens' desires.
The exchanges came in a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Durham, Orange and Chatham Counties. The event was at least the sixth of its type some or all of the candidates have participated in during this year's election cycle.
Williams wasn't alone in attacking the city's tax rate and spending, as City Council challengers Donald Hughes from Ward 1, Matt Drew from Ward 2 and Allan Polak from Ward 3 all took shots at different aspects of the issue during the evening.
Hughes said the council has typically avoided tax rate increases in election years to mask what's happening, and also criticized officials for approving a string of water-rate increases going back eight years.
Drew singled out business-incentive deals, such as the $1 million pledge the council made Monday night to EMC Corp. And Polak criticized overseas sister-city trips by Bell and Ward 3 incumbent Mike Woodard.
The incumbents responded, as they have in other forums, by arguing that much of the added spending the city's taken in recent years has been voter-approved and in many cases an effort to address the neglect of their predecessors.
Woodard, for instance, noted that the city's road-paving effort in the late 1990s paved at times as few as nine miles worth of streets in a single year at a time when it needed to hit more than 30 miles to keep up with industry-standard maintenance intervals.
But none of the incumbents addressed Williams' highest-taxes-in-the-Triangle claim, though figures from the N.C. Department of Revenue indicate that that's false.
The state's numbers show that Carrboro and Hillsborough, in neighboring Orange County, have higher municipal property taxes than Durham. And taxpayers living anywhere in a town in Orange County pay higher combined municipal, school and county taxes than do residents of the city of Durham.
Hughes' comments about water rates, meanwhile, failed to generate any pile-on by his fellow challengers. Most of the candidates, challenger and incumbent, agreed that the city has catching-up to do in that department, particularly when it comes to nailing down future water supplies and encouraging conservation.
The candidates also discussed crime prevention and gangs.
Woodard and Bell mostly defended the city's approach to the issue, saying the right answer is a mix of police and social work. Ward 2 incumbent Cora Cole-McFadden said officials have to try hard to educate youth. Polak advocated zero-tolerance policing.
Drew and to some degree Clement, however, said the push against drug crime has been counterproductive.
Drew said local, state and national leaders have "literally created this monster" by setting up a system that's assured of giving many youngsters criminal records they can't overcome later in life. He praised President Barack Obama's administration for backing off on medical marijuana prosecutions.
Clement stopped short of advocating decriminalization, saying that officials "have to stay the course" because there aren't enough treatment programs to handle drug use as a purely medical issue. But he added that he'd "look with favor in moving in that direction" over time.
