Candidates for Starkville’s Ward 1 and 2 aldermen races got together in a Monday evening forum to talk about the issues, challenges and opportunities facing the city.
The forum, sponsored by the Starkville-Oktibbeha County Voter Education Initiative and the Greater Starkville Development Partnership, is the first of three scheduled for this month. Mayoral candidates will meet in a forum at 6 p.m. April 10, and candidates for Wards 4, 5 and 7 will meet at the same time on April 19. Each forum is in the Greensboro Center.
Republicans Jason Camp and Ben Carver, along with Democrat Christine Williams, are competing for the Ward 1 alderman seat. Republican Jesse Carver, Democrat Sandra Sistrunk and Independent Lisa Wynn are running for the Ward 2 seat. Wynn was not present at Monday’s forum because she instead attended a fundraiser for her campaign.
On business-friendliness
At one point, candidates responded to a question of how they would balance business-friendly measures such as tax increment financing (TIF), which obligates public funding to help certain portions of a development projects such as building access roads, against regulations such as appearance codes or requiring businesses to build and maintain sidewalks.
Sistrunk said the city has to lay out a clear policy on when it should use methods such as TIFs to help attract or encourage development.
“We need to know how we want to use those kinds of tools, and if we want to use them just as an economic development tool or not,” Sistrunk said. “The bottom line for all of this is we want to be a community where people want to live. Businesses will follow people. When we have a community that has the amenities that people expect, they’ll live here, and businesses will follow the people here.”
Camp pointed out that TIFs and other tax exemption policies don’t remove tax burdens, but shift them to the rest of the community. He said the city has to be mindful of potential consequences that might arise from that.
He also said he’s concerned about Starkville’s reputation as a “business-unfriendly” town.
“That’s something I’ve heard repeatedly,” Camp said. “I think something we need to do as this next board of aldermen is pull all of our businesses together and find out the facts and say, ‘What is it exactly that’s not making Starkville business-friendly?’ We need to address those head-on, but at the same time we have to remember that whatever changes we might make to be more business friendly have impacts down the road.”
Williams said she believes Starkville has to determine what type of “business-friendly” it wants to be. She questioned if the city wants to focus on bringing in big corporations or supporting and improving locally owned businesses. She echoed Sistrunk’s statements in saying that businesses will follow communities.
“Before we can say whether or not we’re business-friendly, we need to define that,” she said. “But we also need to remember that we’re a community. We’re not a group of companies that are just trying to get together.”
City budget
In response to another question, candidates discussed what in the budget they felt could use increased funding and what should be cut.
Ben Carver pointed out that aldermen only receive about $95,000 in discretionary spending for their wards — which he called “a drop in the hat.” He said that relatively low amount of money makes it difficult for aldermen to undertake individual projects for their wards.
He also said, as did other candidates such as Williams, the city needs to invest in its workers, and expressed a particular concern for raising police and firefighter pay.
“I thought eight years ago I would be able to say ‘Yeah, I can just fix this and this and this,'” Ben Carver said. “I can tell you what I can do — I’m doing the best with what I’ve been given and it’s not a lot. To create more tax base, we’re going to have to do something, and I think the answer is in the manufacturing park and job creation.”
All candidates pointed to infrastructure – specifically drainage and road repairs – as a place the city should invest more. Sistrunk, Williams and Ben Carver also talked about looking for ways to cut redundancies to save money.
On city inclusiveness
An audience member submitted a question asking the candidates about inclusiveness, as it related to an equality resolution and plus-one insurance policy that the city approved in 2014 and repealed in early 2015. The resolution — the first of its kind in the state — made it city policy not to discriminate based, upon other things, sexual orientation, and the plus-one insurance may have allowed workers to share insurance with a same-sex partner.
The candidates said, in one way or another, that everyone should feel welcome in Starkville, whatever their lifestyle.
Jesse Carver, who often spoke about looking at the “smoke versus fire” on issues, said that he believed the insurance matter should have remained a budgetary issue.
“It should have always been a financial issue,” he said. “Is this a good thing financially? It shouldn’t have been a social issue on the public policy level. …To me it didn’t make sense. That’s decided elsewhere, and I understand that in this community we all want to be accepted. It became a social thing versus a budget thing.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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