City Scuffle
Syracuse City Eagle
Walt Shepperd
August 2nd, 2007
Samadee listened thoughtfully as Ed Ryan talked calmly about his chances in the currently four-way race for county executive, in which he hoped somehow to become the fifth wheel.
"Money is the factor," Ryan said. "If we raise it, we can win. If we don't, we probably won't. I know about county government than any of the other three, but that won't win it." The money was mostly for television advertising, Ryan added, the key to a county race.
Samadee has no money and had pledged to take no campaign contributions. Having lusted after the county's top job for the 42 years since he moved to town, he was overjoyed when, last April, Meghan Rubado neatly summarized what it took to hold down the position on the Daily Dose page of the Post Standard. Samadee also had no campaign staff, no volunteers, no signatures on petitions and no party endorsement. None of that worried him much, since he hated going to meetings.
He was, however, distress that his turf had been invaded, politically speaking, when Joanie Mahoney opened her campaign headquarters in the old Stereo's Landmark space on Hanover Square, directly across from the outdoor table where he held strategy sessions with the Has Been and the Wannabe, nightly, as long as it didn't rain. And while he had seldom found himself on friendly terms with conventional reality, Samadee knew that, realistically, he would never get much ink for his quest beyond the pages of City Eagle unless he could score a party endorsement and find an issue so unique that none of the other candidates could possibly touch it.
And as the city's 14 certifiable political junkies hovered on chill, waiting for the official after Labor Day jump off for showing awareness of such things, even with two primaries looming, including another Irish-Italian Democratic face off, the county executive race was establishing itself as the most boring electoral exercise on the young century. Nevertheless, there were some good peoples. The Green Party had not yet designated a candidate, and no one had mentioned Joe Nicoletti.
Samadee called Howie Hawkins, who politely replied that the Greens were going to stay entirely away from the race, concentrating solely on getting Hawkins elected councilor-at-large. Undaunted, Samadee asked if Hawkins felt he no longer had to personify public power, the single most issue he had hammered on during the 2005 mayoral race.
"The Public Power Coalition and the Greens have to stay on the case," Hawkins told him. "The Council put the feasibility study in the budget. It hadn't been [Mayor] Driscoll's original proposal, but he left it alone. When Bill Ryan got convinced, everything started to move, although Pat Hogan had been pushing it on the DPW committee for months. We've got to make sure the city gets a competent engineering firm to do the study, and that they do it this year, so it can get on the ballot as a referendum in 2008."
Coming away from the conversation with neither an endorsement nor an issue of his very own, Samadee settled back to read Hawkins' latest campaign flyer. Quoting the findings of the 2005 U.S. Census update, it noted, "Syracuse has the third highest poverty rate ? and the highest black poverty rate ? of the 100 largest U.S. cities." It called for expanding the existing Living Wage Ordinance "to cover all workers in the city through a citywide minimum wage, as Santa Fe, N.M. has done. Attach to the Living Wage Ordinance minority and city resident hiring goals for all jobs with the city and city contractors and a Community Hiring Hall to help reach those goals." The flyer proposed raising city employment goals for people of color from 8 percent to 40 percent, reflecting the percentages in the city's population, and redirecting the $6 million to $8 million the city spends on enforcing drug laws to harm reduction and prevention efforts, treating drug abuse as health problem, not a criminal problem.
But it was Hawkins' position on job creation that most resounded with Samadee. He advocates "building partnerships among unions, community organizations, contractors, manufacturers, and the city to provide a skilled workforce through a Green Tech Training Center and Green Job Corps at the Community Hiring Hall, especially for at-risk youth and ex-offenders."
Maybe even he could get a job, Samadee reflected. Then he could afford to print his own campaign flyers, and distribute them at the outdoor tables on Hanover Square, as long as it didn't rain.