District candidates for Greensboro City Council appeared together for a forum hosted by the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress earlier this evening at the downtown public library. The event was notable for being the first time District 4 candidates Joel Landau and Mary Rakestraw have given voters a chance to hear from them at the same time.
Befitting an underdog with ground to make up, Landau made two sorties against Rakestraw in his opening statement.
“I have no ties to private interests," Landau said. "That’s a place where I’m different from Ms. Rakestraw. If you look at her 2007 campaign finance report for her campaign, you’ll see it full of donations from builder groups and from builders and from attorneys who frequently come before city council, and I think that’s a conflict of interest that should be avoided – financing a campaign on contributions from people that you know will be coming before you with financial interests at stake.”
That statement echoed a charge leveled by District 3 challenger George Hartzman against incumbent Zack Matheny, both of whom attended the forum. Landau continued with a thrust that seemed designed to exploit Rakestraw's polarizing effect on the electorate. Voters seem to either love or hate her.
“Personally, I’m tired of the discord and negativity that we’ve been seeing on council," Landau said. "I’m a voice for civility. I’ve been in the cooperative movement for decades where we seriously take how people work together, and listen to one another. And it doesn’t mean we have to agree; it just means we listen to one another and try to come to something that works for the common good. I have a history of working with others to get things done and to move Greensboro forward. And if you’re ready for a positive change, please support me in District 4.”
Later, in response to a question about the quality of city communication, Landau suggested his opponent is uninformed.
“One time that the city didn’t do such a good job is with the recent complaints about the rewrite of the LDO, the land development ordinance, to change the names of all the zoning districts," he said. "Council was briefed a year ago actually, in August – Aug. 4, 2008 – even though Ms. Rakestraw claimed at a meeting this summer that they didn’t know about it.”
Rakestraw explained her position on a variety of issues but largely refrained from acknowledging Landau's attacks. She used her past experience working for the Guilford County Board of Elections to set up an explanation for her role on council regarding the ongoing police controversy.
“Some of our senior citizens didn’t know how to ask the right questions," Rakestraw said. "So that’s what I do on city council: I ask questions for everybody. I ask questions that may not be popular. I may ask the questions that you might not like but you ultimately want to hear the answer to.”
The candidate, who currently serves at large, presented the softer side of her public service, describing volunteer work with the American Red Cross receiving Hurricane Katrina evacuees in 2005.
“Everything that I have done from the Red Cross, from the Department of Social Services, from Court Watch to also Summit House," Rakestraw said, "has been involved with people who have had a hard time getting a fair shake in life, or just didn’t make the right decision.”
Then she briefly returned to the issue of the police department.
“Do we have a problem in our police department?" she asked. "Yes, we have some problems in our police department.”
Landau treaded carefully around a question about interim City Manager Bob Morgan’s decision to reinstate police Officer AJ Blake, who was acquitted by a jury of assaulting two women at a drunken police party, and who has said the gang enforcement unit abused its authority in its treatment of members of the Latin Kings.
“I think it’s very odd to have the city manager overturn the police chief," Landau said. "I think within the department there needs to have clarification of what is expected behavior and what’s not. And the chief may have to make some examples of people who don’t perform those behaviors and increase the internal affairs staffing.”
Rakestraw seemed comfortable describing her role in the controversy.
“When this decision was made by our interim city manager I did ask for a meeting of our city council with our mayor, my colleagues, the city attorney and the interim city manager," she said. "The police department has standards in place. They know what’s expected of them, but for some reason – and I cannot tell you this – they’re not being enforced. And these are the kind of things we need enforced. Because we want it across the board. We don’t want special rules and regulations for different people. Everything should be across the board in the police department. We did have our meeting. We went into closed session. I can tell you that I still feel somewhat concerned with this because I feel that Chief [Tim] Bellamy has been under fire, and a review board made this decision for the termination of Officer Blake. And then it went to Chief Bellamy who also upheld that recommendation…. When his decision was overruled it concerns me because he looked like, Well, who’s running the police department? And it looked like his credibility was compromised as well as his decision-making ability.”
District 1 incumbent Dianne Bellamy-Small, whose opponent Luther T. Falls Jr. left early in the program, seemed to be running against Rakestraw also.
“We have a process," she said, giving her take on Blake's reinstatement. "There is a legal process that is mandated by the state of North Carolina personnel act. Each one of us here has made a mistake. And we would want the right to appeal. The way the process works is the way it worked. He was put on suspension. He went to trial for what he was accused of. He was acquitted. He was recommended for termination. He had the right to appeal. City council does not have the right to be involved in any personnel matter except for one person that we hire and fire, which is the city manager. Now, we cannot make special rules because perhaps we do not like the fact that this time the rules didn’t favor who you wanted it to favor. We’re getting into some dangerous territory here.”
In her opening statement, Bellamy-Small described what she considers one of the significant achievements of her current term.
“I also feel that I’m a voice for those who sometimes don’t have a voice, like our homeless population," she said. "And I’ve been working very hard and closely with other organizations to try to bring about a day center. And though you may have seen in the newspaper recently that they don’t have enough money, they will get the money because I believe Greensboro has the will to finally do something to help folk who are standing out in the cold and in the rain once they get out of the shelters at night. They’ve got to have a place to go where they can become whole individuals again if they choose to.”
Bellamy-Small expressed confidence in the police department, striking a contrasting note to Rakestraw's statement.
“As far as the police department’s concerned I believe we have one of the best police departments in the nation," she said. "I think that you have to look under all the rhetoric, and look at what Chief Bellamy inherited as far as what he’s been dealing with, with the police department. And I think the Buracker Report that we funded, which was a quarter of a million dollars, did say that he was one of the best chiefs that they’d seen in our department, though had some issues, but for the most part was a very well run police department, and it received the highest national accreditation that a police department can get.”
Bellamy-Small also spoke about the removal of a set of public-art benches in the Warnersville neighborhood, which was a cause championed by one of her primary-election opponents, Ben Holder.
“It’s interesting how certain people come out of the woodwork whenever it’s election time. And then they decide – what I call bully politics," she said. "I’ve been involved with the Warnersville community as it relates to the greenway and the benches for two years. We had numerous meetings. Over a hundred people gave their input. The benches were designed by what the people said. The benches represented the fact that Warnersville is the oldest black neighborhood in Greensboro. Those words “hope,” “triumph,” “endurance,” “faith” were put there as a symbol. The reason that they wanted benches was because most of the people who were involved in the sit-in movement came from Warnersville. So they wanted a recognition of the fact that they were involved in that."
"I went and sat on the benches, and I had the police called on me because they were looking for a prostitute," Bellamy-Small continued, provoking laughter. “I sat on those benches on four different occasions, four different times, including 11:30 at night. The benches were not at fault. What you saw there was a person given an opportunity to be able to have her 15 minutes of fame, with some people pushing her that have not been in that community. I’m very disturbed about it; I’m upset about it. I went out to the benches last Tuesday and took a picture. Let me tell you what I saw: On the side where she lives there are trees. There were two brothas sitting up under a tree, and they were smoking a cigarette, and it was not a Newport. So now we’re gonna root up the trees? Come on, we gotta do some common-sense kind of things, and stop being the victims of bully politics.”
Triad Elections '09
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