Editorial: What questions do you have for the mayoral candidates?

In 2013, as part of our coverage of that year’s race for mayor of Boston, we asked the candidates who made the ballot to respond to a survey prepared by our staff. The questions covered a range of citywide topics, including how to approach public safety, education, affordable housing, and redevelopment.

The survey also included a number of hyper-local questions, including one about whether they would seek to end what we termed the “Dorchester divide”— the misguided City of Boston practice of splitting our neighborhood into “north and south” regions.

All nine of the candidates who responded pledged to end the practice – and, to his credit, Mayor Walsh largely followed through on the issue.
Overall, the survey proved to be a useful and revealing exercise.

The Reporter staff is now crafting a new questionnaire that we plan to send to the mayoral candidates who qualify for this year’s ballot asking for their responses.

It will likely include some of the same questions we asked eight years ago when we asked the hopefuls to tackle a specific development issue as a sort of “case study” in how they might approach a complicated, long-standing problem in Uphams Corner: the Leon Electric Building, which hulks over the Fairmount Line station on a prominent block at the corner of Dudley and Humphreys streets.

The question yielded a few thoughtful and detailed responses, including one from the ultimate winner, Marty Walsh. Unfortunately, the Leon building remains a blight— and we’ll probably raise it as an issue again for the 2021 field of candidates to help us all better understand how they might approach redevelopment in a new administration.

But the city has changed dramatically in the last eight years, and there are new, pressing matters that need to be explored. We would like to get your input: What do you want to know from this current crop of candidates?

We expect that we will include questions about climate change, for example, which was not a major factor as an issue in the last wide-open race for mayor, but has clearly become a matter that many of us care deeply about.

Transportation and infrastructure improvements— think Morrissey Boulevard and Kosciuszko Circle— are key issues that the next mayor will need to lead on, particularly as major redevelopment projects loom on Columbia Point.

Police reform and public safety are of critical importance across the city, but particularly in our neighborhoods, where crime rates are traditionally higher than average. Too many of our young people have been killed, maimed, and/or traumatized over the years, and while there is no magic formula to eliminating crime altogether, we’ll expect our next mayor to outline a sensible, sustainable strategy to keep our streets, neighbors, and law enforcement officers safe and secure.

One of our readers told me this week that he’s waiting to hear from the candidates about how they plan to tackle two issues that are most important to him: Fixing the school system, as he put it. And finding a solution to the dreadful conditions along Mass & Cass, where hundreds of people— many homeless, most struggling with addiction— can be found daily. It is, he said, a disgrace that our world-class city has not yet found a way to end this problem in a humane, caring, and sustainable manner. He’s dead right.

There are so many other questions that we can, and will, pose. We hope you will assist us by contributing yours to the survey. Please send your questions to this address: newseditor@dotnews.com.

– Bill Forry


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