Boston City Council candidates addressed issues concerning unemployment, safety and the distribution of taxpayers’ money at an open forum on Thursday.
Incumbent Tito Jackson, of Roxbury, and opposing candidate Sheneal Parker began the forum, held at the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, where moderator Sarah-Ann Shaw asked them what platforms they planned to run on.
“We know that district seven has a disproportionate number of folks who are unemployed, actually double the unemployment rate in the city of Boston, so that’s an area that we’re going to continue to work on,” Jackson said.
Jackson said he helped in ensuring that small stores that sell weapons are licensed to prevent youth violence. He is also concerned with education, and cited his work raising the city’s high school dropout age from 16 to 18 with Councilor At-Large John Connolly.
Parker, whose husband was murdered when her son was two years old, said she also dealt firsthand with domestic violence and is invested in crime and its aftermath.
“The plan now is not working,” she said. “What I’d like to do now is look back at the Boston miracle which happened in the 1990s.”
She said she wants to advocate for more alliances between public officials, the clergy and law enforcement.
As a teacher at Boston Public Schools, Parker also talked about quality education and how she was concerned when a fourth grade student of hers could not read.
Incumbent Councilors At-Large Felix Arroyo, John Connolly, Stephen Murphy and Ayanna Pressley answered questions alongside challengers. Opposing candidates included Will Dorcena, Sean Ryan and former city councilor and mayoral candidate Michael Flaherty.
Dorcena talked about education and the importance it plays in keeping kids away from crime. He said that local students in Boston should be the first ones to attend local colleges and universities.
“The Boston Public Schools spend over a billion dollars a year and don’t even put textbooks in these kids’ hands,” Dorcena said.
Sean Ryan, a Harvard graduate, musician, teacher and member of the Boston Teachers Union, said he is running on a platform focusing on schools, services and safety.
“It’s been four decades now of government intervention in school, and just one Band-Aid after another. They haven’t worked,” Ryan said.
Ryan said that the council must reallocate money from bureaucracy and into the classroom.
The city needs to provide jobs for Boston residents, Flaherty said, specifically with people who do not have a spotless record.
“We give lots of tax breaks in this city. We give lots of tax breaks to the rich, to those big corporations,” Flaherty said. He added that large companies in Boston should hire local residents.
Dorcena and Murphy said they disagreed on the mayor’s incentive of adding one credit to the payment in lieu of taxes for universities if they hire someone from Boston. Murphy said he thought it was “ingenious,” but Dorcena said he disagreed.
“I don’t think it’s ingenious to give a tax credit to an entity that’s not paying taxes,” Dorcena said. “There’s no incentive there for them to really get this tax credit.”
Arroyo said he dealt with a personal blow when the candidates discussed the issue of violence. As an eighth grader, his best friend was shot. Now, as a current youth sports coach, he has comforted the parents of his athletes who have been murdered.
“I lost Sergio, and he was murdered on November 25th of 2008, and he was 18, and I coached him every year since he was 12,” Arroyo said.
Arroyo said that to him, fighting violence is not politics— it is real life. He added that the city should focus on keeping its money in banks that invest back in the community.
Pressley called for prevention of youth violence in the home, as well as fighting for job retention on behalf of people trying to keep their jobs.
Connolly said that the government should have better vocational education so that people who went through the Boston Public Schools will be ready to take jobs.
About 50 people attended the forum, including Jamaica Plain residents Jayme Ierna and Brad Russell.
“We were just saying that it was very interesting just to hear them both have to respond to some very good questions,” Ierna said. “It’s kind of our first time hearing at the local level, some of the issues that they’re talking about, how relevant they are to us in the community.”
Russell said that he liked the quality of candidates’ responses, and that they put a lot of thought into answering.
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Thanks for coming to the forum, Amelia! All the best. -Sean Ryan
Thank you, Pastor Steve, for reinforcing in me what I knew to be true when my husband of 8 years divorced me in the midst of my first go-round with dialysis and in waiting for a kidney transplant. I was abandoned at age 30.