4TH DISTRICT: THE FORGOTTEN DISTRICT?

CNY Vision
Staff Writer
2009 October 30th

When Howie Hawkins announced he had entered the race for the 4th District on the Syracuse Common Council, it didn't surprise many area residents. Neither was the reaction from the media and the public; one more race for Howie, many said. It would have been a surprise if he hadn't. Howie Hawkins has become a fixture in Syracuse and Onondaga County politics, having been a contestant in several races over the years. The races he has ran range from county executive of Onondaga County to mayor of Syracuse to congressman for the area's congressional district.

He is challenging the incumbent Tom Seals, who is seeking re-lection to serve another term. The question now being asked is: does the incumbent deserve to be given the chance to serve another term on the Common Council or is the challenger Howie Hawkins, a better candidate?

Winning re-election gives an African American another term on the Common Council. The other African-American councilor is Van Robinson, also seeking re-election. "Nobody is talking about the 4th district and the election is next week," said a political insider who called this publication to discuss his concern about the political situation on the Southside of Syracuse. The candidates, he said, weren't talking about the issues

TWO CANDIDATES: TWO DIFFERENT STYLES

Tom Seals and Howie Hawkins represent a study in contrasts, and couldn't' be more different in terms of their political affiliation, ideological orientation, professional background and community activism and experience.

Tom Seals is a retired police officer. He challenged Mike Atkins and succeeded in unseating him in 2005, and has been on the Common Council since. He was described in the media back then as not having had much involvement in politics. Yet he ran a good enough campaign on issues that resonated with the voting public, resulting in his victory. He notes that he won the seat without the endorsement of the Democratic Party. He is seeking re-election, again without the endorsement of the Democratic Party.

Howie Hawkins had not held any elective office, but has a long history of having contested just about all races for different elective positions in the city and county. He runs on the Green Party ticket and cites a protracted record of civic activism dating back to the Vietnam War days.

Having contested so many races, debated various politicians vying for varying seats, Howie has developed a highly effective way of articulating his views and opinions to the point where he doesn't sound like just another glib politician with a gift of the garb; he comes across as knowing what he's talking about, competent and potentially capable of leading, if elected. His style allows him to communicate, connect and get the attention of listeners seeking to know about the issues. And the Green Party gives him the perfect platform to share his ideas on what is wrong with society and the best way to get things done.

The Green Party has the right ideas, according to Hawkins. Issues on the forefront in most races now have been part of the Green Party platform for years, and have made it possible for the Green Party to make an impact, locally and nationally. Further inroads have been made into the African American community as a result of Hawkins' hard work and consistent outreach efforts. Not only has he lived in the community for many years; the office of the Green Party has been located on South Salina for several years, next to Carol Perry's Southside Newsstand, at one time one of the most popular businesses on that side of town, until it closed.

Tom Seals, by contrast, projects an image of solid respectability. He epitomizes what may be described as calm, moderate, and middle of the road steadiness. To a degree, his style is reassuring to many in the community. And belonging to a family that is well known in the community has helped in getting him recognized. One of the senior members of the family was a leading minister for several decades. Another was an outstanding football player, who played in the NFL. As a police officer for over three decades, he gained considerable popularity in his own right.

"He was my mate at the police academy. He was a good cop," said Dave Prater, former publisher of the Syracuse Gazette, also with a background in law enforcement.

Seals is a Democrat and focuses on problems ranging from lack of job opportunities to education for the youth. He has ideas on what can be done to solve those problems and seeks re-lection to be able to continue the work he has began, he said.

He has some opposition from the community to deal with. From those seeking a more rapid, even radical change, they advocate for the in your face confrontational approach, not the kind attributed to Tom Seal. He has been effective, using his own style, based on a pragmatic approach to solving problems, he said.

The district in question has a predominantly African population and was described in an article in the Post Standard as consisting of most of the Southside and certain sections of the Westcott Nation. .

The race between Howie Hawkins and Tom Seals appears to have generated scarce interest, and that bothers many area residents. For Hawkins, the drawback has more to do with his affiliation with the Green Party, which is still viewed by many as not fully mainstream, while demands are being made of Seals to get more things done for and on behalf of his constituents. "I want to know what's going on. What are these politicians going to do to get me to vote for them? I will vote for somebody, but I want to hear something first," said Nadia Williams, who describes herself as a long time resident of Bellevue Avenue.

CNY VISION INTERVIEWS HOWIE HAWKINS: CANDIDATE FOR THE 4TH DISTRICT IN THE COMMON COUNCIL

CNY VISION: What has prepared you to run for and become a city councilor?

Candidate Hawkins: I have been a community organizer since the late 1960s who has helped many movements win demands, from ending the war in Vietnam and ending US investments in apartheid South Africa to getting Living Wages and Public Power on to the agenda in the city of Syracuse. I have done a lot by pushing from the outside as an activist and candidate in past campaigns for Common Council and Mayor. I can do even more by pushing from the inside as a Councilor.

CNY VISION: Voter apathy is reported to be quite rampant in the African American community; true or false? And what is your party doing about it?

Candidate Hawkins: The lower voter turnout in the African American community (except for last year's turnout for Obama) is due more to alienation and disgust at broken promises by the established major parties than to apathy in most cases.

The Green Party works to increase voter participation, as well as activism on the issues between elections, in several ways.

Green Party maintains its city headquarters in the heart of the South Side African American community at 2617 S. Salina St, 474-7055. We encourage and welcome community groups to use the space for their own meetings as well as to participate in Green Party activities at the office. For example, the South Side Community Coalition's Grocery Store Project has been holding its Store for a Day in the Green Party headquarters when the weather does not permit an outdoor stand.

The Green Party registers voters year round and makes a special effort to inform ex-offenders, who are often wrongly told they can never vote again, of their right to get registered and vote.

The Green Party is active on the issues of concern to the African American community, including fighting against bank, housing, and job discrimination and for living wage jobs, full funding for schools and youth programs, and public power for affordable energy.

CNY VISION: What do you bring to the table that will convince or influence community residents to vote for you? In other words, what are some of the major achievements you have made that have directly benefited the African American community?

Candidate Hawkins: Two achievements: putting Living Wages and Public Power on the city agenda.

I was the first candidate in Syracuse in a council race in 1994 to call for a Living Wage Ordinance requiring the city and its contractors to pay a living wage on which a worker can support a family. It took until 2005 to get a Living Wage Ordinance passed. But the Mayor undermined its implementation, with the silent complicity of the Common Council. If elected to the Council, I will fight to enforce and expand the coverage of the Living Wage Ordinance.

As the Green Party candidate for Mayor in 2005, I got widespread support for my call for public power, a city-owned electric and gas utility to replace National Grid, like the village of Solvay has where electric rates are one-fourth of the rates in Syracuse. By 2008, as we continued to campaign for it through the Public Power Coalition, we got the Common Council to appropriate $150,000 for a feasibility study of public power. Unfortunately, the Mayor has directed the firm doing the study to focus on green energy generation options without municipal ownership. Green energy is good, but without municipal ownership of the generation and distribution systems, we will not cut our energy costs. Again, the Common Council has been silent while the study they authorized has been sidetracked. If elected to the Council, I will fight to insure the money is used for the purpose it was intended, namely, to study the feasibility of replacing high-cost National Grid with a low-cost public power utility.

CNY VISION: What kind of solution or suggestions do you have that will help to create more jobs in the city and end up providing employment opportunities for city residents?

Candidate Hawkins: To improve employment opportunities, we need to establish a Community Hiring Hall. To create new jobs, we need to establish a Municipal Development Bank.

The Community Hiring Hall would ensure that city residents, and ethnic minorities like African Americans, get their fair share of jobs with the city and its contractors. The Community Hiring Hall would be part of an improved Living Wage Ordinance. It would require city departments and city contractors to meet employment goals for city residents and ethnic minorities by hiring qualified people from the Community Hiring Hall if they cannot meet the goals from their own labor sources. The Community Hiring Hall would help city residents to qualify, get into, and stay in training programs and jobs with the city, its contractors, and other employers.

The Municipal Development Bank would be a city-owned bank with two departments: (1) A consumer loan department to provide home mortgage and improvement and other consumer loans to neighborhoods that have been redlined and discriminated against for decades, and (2) A business development department to help plan, finance, and advise new community-owned businesses.

By community-owned business, I mean owner-operated small businesses, worker and consumer cooperatives, and community corporations where voting shares are restricted to residents, like the Green Bay Packers. Although the municipal bank would consider proposals from any business looking to startup or expand in the city, it would prioritize various forms of community-owned businesses in order to create wealth that is anchored to and grows in our community by the businesses' community ownership structures.

To develop a new community-owned business, the planners in the development department would draw up a business plan, arrange the financing, hire the staff and train them to operate the business, and advise it as it got up and running. When the workers could manage it on their own, they would repay the financing for the assets of the business to the bank and own it as owner-operated proprietorship if was small, or as worker or consumer cooperative, or as a community corporation if it was larger.

The municipal bank could start with helping bring back needed retail businesses to downtown and neighborhood business districts. For example, a network of neighborhood co-op groceries downtown and in the neighborhoods is an obvious need. Another is helping aspiring small contractors in the city in construction and maintenance develop the capacity to run businesses that can bid on city and other sizeable contracts. The bank should also develop the capacity to help in the high tech, green tech, and manufacturing areas.

CNY VISION: How high on your priority is the problem of youth violence? What ideas or suggestions or plans do you have to help curb or stop youth violence?

Reducing youth violence has to be a high priority. We know that youth violence goes down when school achievement and good jobs go up. All policing can do is catch the perpetrators after the crime has been done. So it is cheaper to prevent violence with expanded youth opportunities up front than to incarcerate offenders at the back end.

That means the city budget should put a high priority on school funding, youth recreation programs, and job training and placement through the Community Hiring Hall that I propose. The schools, parks, and community centers should be open and staffed nights, weekends, and summers so younger children have a safe, educational place to play and learn when parents are working. The young adults in the community should have the right to a job at a living wage. The city can make sure they have an equal opportunity to get what jobs are available through the Community Hiring Hall. And the city should demand of our federal representatives that they finally fulfill the demand of Martin Luther King's 1968 Poor People's Campaign: the right to a job at a living wage, with the government as the employer of last resort when there are not enough private jobs to go around.

CNY VISION: Do you understand everything about the DESTINY PROJECT to the extent where you can say that it will or will not benefit our community, especially our African American community, and whether it should be pursued further?

Candidate Hawkins: The Destiny Project misused the African American community with highly publicized $60,000 a year jobs for showcase black employees, most of whom were dropped when no longer needed for show.

We should have known. This is the same developer who for eight years after the mall opened would not allow Buffalo city buses from the inner city to stop at its suburban mall, while charter busses of affluent shoppers from Canada routinely stopped at the mall. Black inner city workers who commuted by bus to the mall had to run across a 7-lane freeway with no sidewalks. The policy only changed in 1996 when 17-year-old Cynthia Wiggins, a single mom from inner city Buffalo, was killed running across that freeway to her job at the mall.

The phony Destiny for-show jobs notwithstanding, almost all the jobs with tenants at the Destiny mall in retail, hospitality, and maintenance were going to be low-wage, no-benefits, part-time, and dead-end. The city should not give the Carousel Mall 45 years of no property taxes in order to subsidize the creation of such bad jobs. This subsidy for Carousel also accelerates the decline of our neighborhood business districts as customers shift to the competing, subsidized mall. City economic incentives should be targeted for good jobs in manufacturing, construction, and green technology.

The Destiny/Carousel expansion should sink or swim on its own with no more taxpayer subsidies. If it sinks and no private firm will buy, complete, and operate the expanded mall, the city should commission a public plan to retrofit it into a mixed-use, mixed-income development, with public access to a recreationally oriented lakeshore park. The inner harbor should be developed as a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood that can model a green, sustainable neighborhood for the rest of the city, as originally envisioned in the Andres Duany plan still on display at the inner harbor.

CNY VISION INTERVIEWS THOMAS SEALS, COMMON COUNCILOR SEEKING RE-ELECTION

CNY VISION: What has prepared you to run for and become a city councilor?

Councilor Seals: I have over thirty years experience as a police officer. When I retired I took a job as a hall monitor in one of the local high schools. After three years in that position, I was handed my pink slip. It was at that moment that I was approached to run for public office. I declined immediately .Three days later, though, I decided that I would try to run. I've always been interested in serving my community and I felt that if I was elected I could represent constituents that hadn't had a true representative.

CNY VISION: Voter apathy is reported to be quite rampant in the African American community; true or false? And what is your party doing about it?

Councilor Seals: Sadly, I think that voter apathy among the African-Americans is still true. My party is trying to get out the vote by having vote registration rallies. We have also visited local high schools to make it easier for people to vote. I think that it is our responsibility as elected officials to prove to the voters that it pays to vote. We can't just make promises; we have to show our constituents that we can make the changes that they want. We can take their ideas and present them to the government. It's not enough to tell the people what the other candidate did, we must tell the people what we can do.

CNY VISION: What do you bring to the table that will convince or influence community residents to vote for you?, in other words, what are some of the major achievements you have made that have directly benefited the African American community?

Councilor Seals: I feel that my main contribution is in the area of economic development. One of my promises is to make sure that we have summer employment for our youth that live in the city. Too often in the past jobs promised to inner city youth have been given to residents that don't even live in the city.
I have also been working for years on establishing a minimum wage that people could actually live on! Our current minimum wage is so low that you couldn't live ion it without assistance.

CNY VISION: What kind of solution or suggestions do you have that will help to create more jobs in the city and end up providing employment opportunities for city residents?

Councilor Seals: First we have to clean up the streets and make the downtown area safe and a viable area for business. Look what the neighborhood did to clean up little Italy. Now businesses in that area are flourishing. The Westcott area is another area of the city where the community has come together and improved their area. We now need to do this on the south side. We need to get area businesses to hire our youth and clean up their environment.

CNY VISON: How high on your priority is the problem of youth violence? What ideas or suggestions or plans do you have to help curb or stop youth violence?

Councilor Seals: After serving my community as a law enforcement officer, I am very well aware of the problems that our youth are facing and that is why youth violence has a very high priority with me. I have tried to have summits with the hard core "troubled" youth in our city, but the last summit failed to materialize, If I'm re-elected, I want to try to reach out once more.
I want to encourage after school programs and as many jobs as possible for our youth.

CNY VISION: Do you understand everything about the DESTINY PROJECT to the extent where you can say that it will or will not benefit our community, especially our African American community, and whether it should be pursued further?

Councilor Seals: The answer to that question is both yes and no. If the project is completed, I feel that it will offer many business opportunities to our residents. I also feel, however, that the opportunities for minorities will not be as great. DESTINY came on stronger and offered workers %50.000-%60,000 dollars a year. Many individuals left high paying jobs to work on the project. Their employment only lasts approximately 5 months which meant that they couldn't even collect unemployment.
I do hope that the project will be brought to fruition and that many new businesses will decide to open a store here. If not, all we have is a big concrete mess.

Interview conducted and transcribed by Fawn Kohl