Post-Standard
By Howie Hawkins
Mayoral candidate
The two major party candidates are arguing over which of them can best manage the status quo. I want to change the status quo.
Some key elements of the Green Platform I am running on are:
Public Power: The people of Syracuse are clearly fed up with National Grid (formerly Niagara Mohawk). The rates are too high and customer service is atrocious. Almost everyone knows that next door in the village of Solvay, where there is a municipally owned power company, they pay one-quarter what we do to National Grid for electricity. When you have a billing or service problem in Solvay, you can go talk to a real person to resolve it instead of struggle through a maze of phone menus with National Grid.
Syracuse should replace National Grid with a city-owned power company to provide affordable power and responsive customer service. As a public power utility, Syracuse will also be able to develop its own clean, local, reliable, renewable sources of energy. This renewable energy base will become increasingly important in an era of rising oil and gas prices. The more affordable cost of power will not only help households. It will also be a strong incentive for economic development in the city.
Sustainable Syracuse: Probably the most important issue in this election is whether Syracuse will subsidize Destiny USA or develop economically and ecologically sustainable alternatives. That decision will shape Syracuse for at least the next generation.
The Green Party opposes the Destiny USA project because it subsidizes a private developer to be the cityÂ’s planner. Its marketing hype about renewable energy on site does not change its unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels to transport tourists and products to it.
Destiny USA would make Syracuse a barracks for thousands of low-wage workers who service upscale tourists. The economic impact studies commissioned by the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency found that the jobs would pay an average of only $6.67 an hour.
The Green alternative to Destiny USA is Sustainable Syracuse: neighborhood-directed development using green technologies and widespread community ownership to create living-wage jobs in a city that is ecologically and economically sustainable. It means a focus on creating $20 an hour jobs in ecological manufacturing and construction.
Sustainable Syracuse would retrofit Syracuse with green technologies: renewable energy, biological sewage treatment, and new ecological industries based on nontoxic, recyclable materials. Instead of a phony Erie Canal under the Destiny dome, it would restore the real Erie Canal to create waterfront property along an East-West corridor that would serve as an eco-industrial park. A North-South Onondaga Creek corridor with a restored creek would create more waterfront property to stimulate development in the depressed Near West and South sides.
On the lakefront itself, we would develop a PeopleÂ’s Waterfront with mixed-income housing, mixed-use development, parks and public access, with widespread community ownership of the homes and businesses, instead of one giant corporate entity called Destiny USA.
For more details and some graphic depictions of what could be with Sustainable Syracuse, visit my campaign pages at www.syracusegreens.org.
Neighborhood-Directed City Government: Instead of eight big and merely advisory TNT sectors, we need empowered Neighborhood Assemblies in each of the 25 or so real neighborhoods that people identify with. These assemblies would be like New England Town Meetings where every resident has voice and vote. They would plan neighborhood development, guide the delivery of city services in their neighborhoods, and elect neighborhood representatives to Common Council, the school board, and other citywide commissions.
A Municipal Bank to Create Good Jobs in Community-Owned Enterprises: The city needs a much more direct and aggressive approach to developing new businesses, particularly in depressed business districts like the Near West Side and South Salina corridor and to create good jobs in eco-manufacturing. We need a Municipal Bank with a strong business development department that can identify a business opportunity, draft a business plan, arrange financing, hire the workers and management, and provide advice as the business gets up and running. As it begins to make money, the new business can buy its assets from the bank over time out of its revenues and own itself as an owner-operated small business, or, for larger businesses, as a worker cooperative or a community corporation (like the Green Bay Packers) where voting shares are restricted to residents.
Crime Prevention through Youth Jobs and Recreation: The most effective measures we can take to reduce crime and violence in terms of both costs and results are those that provide our youth with viable alternatives to the illegal underground economies of the streets. That means public jobs on public works at living wages for unemployed young adults and ex-offenders and supervised recreation programs for children and teenagers in the schools and parks afternoons, evenings, weekends, and summers.
Progressive Tax Reform is how we can eliminate the city's ongoing $15 million structural deficit and provide the funds we need to make our city schools world class, our recreation programs available to every child that needs them, and the rest of our city services first rate.
Currently, the poorest 20 percent pay 14 percent of their income in local taxes (sales and property) while the wealthiest 20 percent pay only 7 percent. If the top income brackets paid their fair share, the city would have the funds it needs and could provide tax relief to low- and middle-income people.
The way to make the tax system fair is to cut property taxes and make up the difference and more with a graduated city income tax that includes a commuter tax on the incomes of the over 40,000 commuters who work in the city but make no contribution toward covering the costs of the city services they use.
Vote Strategically: Since the 1960s, we have had Republican, Democratic, Republican, and again Democratic administrations in city hall. Yet the problematic trends persist: manufacturing job loss, declining wages, and depopulation; growing youth gangs and mass incarceration; an eroding tax base and mounting fiscal constraints. We can only expect these trends to continue if we continue to put the same old parties in power.
If you support my program but choose to vote for one of the major party candidates as a lesser evil that you think has a better chance of winning, your vote will be taken for granted. Voters who agree with my platform should vote for me and make whoever is elected deal with that vote. Use your vote to set the agenda. Make the politicians come to you on the issues. Use your vote strategically.
At the least, your vote for Howie Hawkins will help set the agenda. Remember Ross Perot's 19 percent vote in the 1992 presidential election. He didn't win the office but he set the agenda. Both major parties moved quickly to balance the federal budget, Perot's central demand, in order to get those Perot voters back.
If enough voters vote for my platform, I will be the next mayor. It can happen. Over 200 Greens hold office around the county, including several mayors, such as Jason West in New Paltz NY.
Vote your hopes, not your fears.
Posted by syracusegreens at October 30, 2005 07:52 PM