With the spring general election just three weeks away, candidates were heated at last night’s mayoral debate, tackling housing and zoning, the city’s budget deficit, Madison schools, and public transit.
The debate, hosted by the University Hill Farms Neighborhood Association, took place at the west side Covenant Presbyterian Church.
Gloria Reyes, former Madison Metropolitan School Board President and Deputy Mayor under Paul Soglin, took charge before the debate even began, taking the microphone to introduce herself to the audience. That was cut short after an organizer asked Reyes to wait until the event formally began.
As with other debates, housing and zoning ordinances were the top issue for both of the candidates last night. Under current projections, the city is expected to see 70,000 new residents by 2040. While both candidates agree that more housing needs to be built, they differ greatly in how they intend to accomplish that task.
Reyes has criticized incumbent Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway for her strategy, saying that the city has not done a good enough job hearing from the community before building new housing structures.
“As mayor, you cannot rely solely on developers and staff on deciding the future of our city,” Reyes says. “We need a mayor that’s going to stand up for the residents of this city and develop a plan on how we move forward. What we are seeing is zoning changes and policies being thrown out there by council members without an engaged process and a leader that’s going to lead us through this crisis.”
But Rhodes-Conway fired back, saying that while the city can control things like zoning ordinances, they can’t tell a developer what and where they are going to build.
“I’m not sure if my opponent is advocating for Marxism or Stalinism, but we live in a capitalist society, and generally the way land-use development works is people who own the land get to decide what to do with it,” Rhodes-Conway says. “They bring in proposals to see if they are consistent with our zoning, land-use planning, and what the community can support. That’s the way it’s been done for years, it’s the way it will continue to be done. We lead on what we would like to see in our community with things like the comprehensive plan, and like neighborhood plans, which is an opportunity for us all to engage and set a vision for what we would like in our community.”
Reyes also pointed to the need to engage MMSD in more decisions about housing strategy, and says the incumbent hasn’t engaged the school board in enough decisions about housing.
Overall, Reyes says that the mayor’s office needs to have more open communication with the school district. Reyes says that, when she was school board president during the pandemic, she felt like the city left the schools out to dry.
Rhodes-Conway, though, pointed to her weekly meetings with MMSD Superintendent Carlton Jenkins throughout the pandemic. There, she says they worked on finding ways to support children both with their learning, and with other needs that in-person school provided, such as food insecurity.
Still, Rhodes-Conway pointed out that the Madison Metro School Board is its own entity, and while a seat is open to a representative from the school district on the plan commission, nobody has offered to take up that seat.
Reyes says that just offering a seat on a city committee, however, is not enough. She says that the mayor’s office should be working with the district not only to ensure that schools have high enrollment, but to create more after school programs for students.
Staying on the topic of schools, the candidates were then asked to weigh in on the return of police officers to Madison schools.
School resource officers, or SROs, were present in MMSD high schools until 2020, when the Black Lives Matter protests put increased scrutiny on police officers both in schools and the community at large.
While Reyes, who was serving as school board president at the time and a former Madison police officer, initially backed the inclusion of SROs in high schools, she later flipped her position after public demonstrations outside her home.
Nearly three years later, Reyes says that it’s time to reevaluate the decision to remove SROs from Madison schools.
“One of my responsibilities as mayor is to ensure that all residents, and community (members), and staff are safe,” Reyes says. “I can’t just leave this up to the school board and the school district. They do have the authority to make those decisions, but I’m going to make sure, by working with the Madison Police Department, to ensure that we are supporting our police department, giving them the resources that they need to engage, and fill that gap that they had while they were in schools, building trust and building relationships.”
Rhodes-Conway, meanwhile, declined to take a side either way, saying that this is a decision to be made by the school board.
“I think that school safety is a really important question for our community, but there are a number of ways to create safe schools, not just through school resource officers,” Rhodes-Conway says. “I’m willing to work with the district in whatever capacity they want to make sure that students are safe, not just in schools but outside of schools as well. That’s the work that we’ve been doing over the past four years.”
One of the final topics of debate was one of the incumbent mayor’s biggest passion projects: public transportation. With Bus Rapid Transit set to go into effect next year, and the bus system’s Network Redesign scheduled to begin later this summer, Rhodes-Conway has worked to update the city’s public transit system since she was first elected in 2019.
She says that she is excited to see the new Network Redesign come into effect.
“The Network Redesign is looking at our, frankly, antiquated bus system that is dependent on the transfer points, and has created a situation that is both not fit for our current land-use patterns because our employment patterns are, instead of being just downtown and campus are now all across our community, but also was resulting in deeply inequitable outcomes where people of color were having to transfer much more than white people and were having much longer transit times,” Rhodes-Conway says.
Reyes says that, not only is she concerned about the price tag, but she worries that the new bus routes will leave Black and low-income residents out in the cold. When first designing the routes, the city decided on a plan that would cause some residents to walk further to get to their bus stop, in exchange for faster bus services.
While the city did conduct an equity report of the new system, which found that the new routes would bring more good than harm to Black and low-income residents, Reyes says that the one report is not enough.
“The issue on this is that the same person, the same consultant that did the redesign is the same consultant that did the equity analysis,” Reyes says. “That’s not right. That is not fair for the residents of this city. We deserve better. We deserve a transit system that works for everybody. If you’re going to talk about equity and be a progressive mayor, then you actually have to see it through and be sure that we don’t have unintended consequences.”
The two candidates will meet again tonight at 7, at the Westminster Presbyterian Church. That debate is hosted by the Marlborough-Nakoma Neighborhood Association, and moderated by WORT’s own Chali Pittman.
Photo courtesy: University Hill Farms Neighborhood Association
