Two of three mayoral hopefuls met for a second time last night at a candidate forum in Walnut Hills for a wide-ranging, hour-and-a-half debate.
A cancellation earlier in the day by incumbent Mayor John Cranley afforded an opportunity to compare his challengers, Councilwoman Yvette Simpson and former University of Cincinnati Board Chair Rob Richardson, Jr., head to head. The two threw jabs as they debated economic development, historic preservation, transit, police-community relations and other issues at the James Temple Church of God in Christ.
Simpson, in her second term on Council, is looking to prevail in the May 2 primary and unseat Cranley — an uphill battle against an incumbent mayor with a slew of labor endorsements and a large campaign war chest. Richardson, meanwhile, is seeking his first elected office and looks to boost his name recognition significantly ahead of the primary. Only two of the three candidates will advance beyond that election to the main event in November.
During the debate, Simpson fleshed out how her experiences — from growing up poor in a family struggling with mental illness and substance abuse in Lincoln Heights to her years on City Council — would inform her tenure as mayor, citing specific efforts she has undertaken and policies she would enact.
“Public service isn’t a job for me,” she said. “It’s truly a calling.”
Richardson challenged her from her left, painting her as an “incumbent” who hasn’t delivered results fighting the city’s racial and economic inequities during her time on Council.
“As you think about a politician, it’s not about what they say,” he said of Simpson. “It’s about what they do.”
Richardson worked his time at UC into most of his answers. He was elected board chair in February 2016 and served until December that year. Before becoming chair, he had served on UC’s board since 2008.
Richardson dipped into specifics at times but also often took a broad view to argue that the city’s challenges with poverty, addiction and violence are systemic.
These differences came up often during the debate. While Simpson would acknowledge at times the systemic nature of many of the problems facing the city, she would then delve into a particular program or initiative she has worked on.
On the region’s heroin crisis, she pointed to her efforts fighting sex trafficking, which is often tightly intertwined with addiction.
Both Richardson and Simpson agreed that the problem needs something beyond a simple “lock them up” approach reliant on law enforcement. But Simpson articulated a three-prong, public health-based “prevention, reversal, reduction” plan involving increased funding for treatment and counseling, educational efforts and fighting the supply of drugs farther up its supply chain instead of simply going after small-time local dealers.
Like the first debate, which included Cranley, a significant portion of time was devoted to transit. Both candidates seem fairly similar when it comes to their ideas on this issue; both say they’d like to see better bus service, and both touted a multi-modal regional transportation system that might eventually look like 2002’s MetroMoves regional transit plan. That idea, which suffered a big defeat at the hands of Hamilton County voters, would have created a region-wide, multi-modal transit system over the course of three decades at the cost of $2.6 billion.
Richardson would also like to see the city’s never-used subway tunnels fitted out toward that end.
“I like MetroMoves as a good initial model,” he said. “I would change some things about it, but it’s a good model. I want to revive our subway system. We’re the only city in the country that started a subway system and didn’t finish it.”
Simpson focused on rail above ground, but said the conversation should go beyond the three-mile loop the streetcar takes through downtown and Over-the-Rhine. She said she would like to see the transit project extended into Uptown and then up Reading Road into Avondale and beyond, if economic development along the route could make the expansion pay for itself over time, and if it hooked into the wider transit system.
“We need to start talking about multi-modal transit, not just the streetcar,” she said.
The debate also touched on police-community relations and neighborhood violence. Here, Richardson highlighted his time as UC board chair in the aftermath of the shooting death of unarmed black motorist Sam DuBose at the hands of UC police officer Ray Tensing.
Simpson highlighted her work with Cincinnati Police Summer Cadet Program, which works with students up to age 16, her work fostering dialogue between youth and police at the annual Cincinnati Youth Summit, a program she oversees, and her efforts to establish psychological trauma units, in which mental health professionals accompany first responders to provide trauma counseling to victims and witnesses of violence.
“I have friends who live this life,” she said, claiming both police shootings and neighborhood violence are the result of systemic disparities. Simpson said addressing poverty, treating trauma from violence and working with youth were the keys to ending shootings.
The debate moved into talk about equitable development. Richardson continually touted inclusionary zoning, an approach that, when written into a city’s zoning code, requires a certain portion of new construction be set aside as affordable housing. Simpson, meanwhile, shot back that zoning alone won’t accomplish truly inclusive housing and prevent gentrification. She highlighted her work on neighborhood plans in seven different neighborhoods, including the West End and Walnut Hills, that she says emphasize neighborhood residents’ control and ownership over development.
“Those developments will be inclusionary, but that’s just a word,” she said. “They will also belong to the neighborhood.”
Simpson also said the city can do a much better job leveraging the tax breaks and other financial help it gives developers.
“If you don’t want to work with us on this plan, you don’t get these dollars,” she said.
Richardson called that approach “piecemeal.”
“I have not heard tonight anything about holding developers or contractors accountable,” Richardson said. “Because that’s hard to do.”
Tensions flared often during the debate. A testy back and forth over Simpson’s record and Richardson’s non-elected service highlighted the positions the two candidates have staked in this election: Richardson is casting himself in the role of outsider, a new force who could take the city in a radical new direction.
Simpson, meanwhile, presented herself as the candidate who has fought incrementally for progress from her position on Council and who has the expertise and depth of experience to implement those policies as mayor in a way she couldn’t during the Cranley administration.
“I’ve spent years on Council battling the incumbent,” Simpson shot back at Richardson after one volley from him discounting her record on Council. “You need to know my record to talk about my record. I have fought. The community knows me. I don’t want to be erased.”
Richardson sometimes overstepped in his eagerness to paint himself as a radical change-maker and Simpson as a political insider. During a back-and-forth about transit, he claimed his campaign was the first to tout a return to a regional transit plan like MetroMoves. Simpson has discussed the idea of a regional, multi-modal transit effort in depth, including just days after launching her campaign in August, months before Richardson jumped into the race.
He also painted Simpson as a politician who has gone along with Mayor Cranley, “voting with him 98 percent of the time” — an assertion that would probably surprise the mayor. For better or worse, Simpson has been Cranley’s most dogged adversary on Council, fighting him repeatedly on human services funding, the streetcar, development incentives, raises for high-ranking city administration and other issues.
Simpson, meanwhile, didn’t always present rebuttals to Richardson’s challenges.
It’s unclear whether Richardson’s outsider message will resonate with voters enough to edge Simpson aside. Her campaign recently released a poll showing him getting just 11 percent of the primary vote, while Simpson and Cranley are in nearly a dead heat. But that’s one poll, and a lot can happen in the next two months.
The next forum — which Cranley will also not be attending — will be March 28 at Cincinnati’s Community Action Agency.
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2017.