City Scuffle
Syracuse City Eagle
Walt Sheppard
April 5th, 2007
Howie Hawkins is talking like a candidate. Nothing unusual, since he runs for something every year. But this year he's talking like a candidate.
"I can win on the issues," he says of his Green Party effort to take one of the At-Large Common council seats on the November ballot. "People want to see things happen around here. The Democrats have had six years with the mayor and the council and things just haven't happened." Hawkins believes his raising the issue of public power in the 2005 mayoral race laid a foundation for an electoral victory, which has so far eluded the local Greens.
"If we win one," he says, "it will change the psychology of the city. If we win one, we can win another." Usually Green Party campaigns are focused on using debates or other candidate forums as vehicles to channel information to the citizenry about political reforms, environmental concerns or social and economic justice issues. But now Hawkins is also talking the mechanics of a campaign.
"The mayoral campaign laid a foundation," he says, "but I've got a long way to go. There's a lot of door knocking to do, and raising money for campaign literature and radio, maybe a little TV at the very end." The two At-Large seats on the ballot this fall are currently occupied by Democrats Ed Ryan and Kathleen [Callahan] Joy.
"The Democrats are handing me the public power issue," Hawkins observes, "by not putting money in the budget for the necessary feasibility study. They're telling me, ?[Mayor Matt] Driscoll will talk to you if you get [County Executive Nick] Pirro on board.' They passed the Living Wage, but it hasn't been implemented. And the Citizens Review Board goes year after year with no subpoena power, they can't get the Syracuse Police Department to participate."
While those are the three issues Hawkins sees as a major focus for his campaign, he will also be raising the issue of how the citizens of the city are represented. "Back in the mid-thirties," he explains, "there were 20 common councilors representing each of the city's 19 wards, plus a council president. The change to 10 councilors, including the president and four at-large came from progressive ideas filtered through corporate strategy, but actually made municipal government less democratic. The rationale was to break the corruption of the political machines, but it created the corruption of corporate politics. Ten councilors are easier to buy off than 20." The concept Hawkins will be promoting during his campaign will be the Green Party's expansion on a plan proposed by the NAACP in the early Nineties, which called for increasing the number of seats representing council districts from five to ten.
"Their plan was aimed at increasing the representation for communities of color," Hawkins notes. "The Green Plan, with ten district seats and 10 at-large seats, would also improve representation for different political orientations. The at-large seats would be filled by a process called Mixed Member Proportional Representation, currently being used most prominently in German and New Zealand. If the Greens won no district seats, but got 15 percent of the total vote, they'd get three seats of the 20 council seats. Right now the Republicans are underrepresented on the council. There was a time when they had one seat, 10 percent of the council, when their share of the vote total was way higher than ten percent. Winner take all elections can hurt everyone. Proportional representation gives everyone a fair share."
Hawkins would extend actual participation in the process of government through the formation of Neighborhood Assemblies, with meetings open to anyone in the district, similar to New England town meetings. Part of the city's planning and development process would occur in the Neighborhood Assemblies, which would each have a piece of the city budget to spend at their discretion, within a legal framework, for services and projects."
"We've talked about having the city set up a municipal bank," he adds, "owned by the people of Syracuse, with an entrepreneurial department to do market research on needs, like a low end grocery store for downtown, develop a business plan, finance the project, recruit, hire and train the workers. As cooperatives, the projects would be more efficient and more productive since the harder a worker works, the more the worker makes. Under the corporate system, the harder a worker works, the more money the boss makes."