Roundtable discussion with candidates for Columbia mayor and city council centers on equity, community violence
Race Matters, Friends hosted a roundtable with city council and mayoral candidates Sunday giving them the opportunity to address topics including equity, communication within council and community violence.
Each candidate was given time to introduce themselves and their platform before diverting to questions from mediators and audience members.
Candidates for mayor include University of Missouri professor Tanya Heath, Columbia Public Schools board member David Seamon, former sustainability manager Barbara Buffaloe, business owner and former Sixth Ward city council candidate Randy Minchew, and chair of the city's Finance Advisory and Audit Committee Maria Oropallo.
Roy Lovelady and incumbent Karl Skala are both running for the Third Ward seat. Lovelady is a local small business owner. If elected again, this would mark Skala's fifth term in the seat.
After current Fourth Ward councilperson Ian Thomas announced he would not be running for reelection, Erica Pefferman and Nick Foster announced their desire to run for the position. Pefferman is the owner of COMO magazine and Columbia Marketing Group. Foster is the former director of the Voluntary Action Center.
The attendees were asked to answer questions through the lens of tenets of importance to Race Matters, Friends including disparate impacts, shared benefits, accessibility, engagement, capacity, alignment and partnership, and relationship building.
The full discussion remains available on the Race Matters, Friends Facebook page.
What does equity look like to you?
Oropallo: For me, the example that I come up with is how we looked at the budget. One revenue stream is late fees. Who suffers most from unpaid late fees? People with a limited income. Restricting that as an issue of equity might seem very specific, but once you start addressing things like how does the system cause people to have late fees and it benefits the city; that's an issue of equity.
Seamon: Equity to me is ensuring that my children have the same opportunities as everyone else. When we went to virtual schooling, we knew that there were families who are living in areas that decades ago were redlined off where broadband access is not accessible. When we handed out our mobile broadband devices, we made sure that at the beginning of that process, we identified those families first so that we were not simply putting everyone randomly in a line and just giving folks who have decent broadband access a device before someone who has no access.
Buffaloe: When we think about equity, one of the things I often break it down to is procedural equity, making sure that access to power is inclusive, accessible and authentic so that we have representation in those processes. Distributional equity, thinking about how our programs and policies are unfair in distribution of benefits and of burdens. When we think about structural equity, we're thinking about how do we institutionalize the process into how we're accountable to our constituents ... thinking about generational impacts and the decisions that we make today so that they're not having an unfair burden on the future.
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Pefferman: My work has shown me how hard it is sometimes for people to enter the workforce ... There is a need for people to be able to get access to things in a way that they don't now. The other thing I will say is our meetings for City Council are not inclusive. I think that when they're had and how long they go keep voices away intentionally.
Lovelady: My definition of equity is two interchangeable words: equal and fair ... giving everybody a fair and equal opportunity for housing, for work, for education. In my opinion, being equitable is the equivalent to being fair and equal across the board, no matter race or gender.
How would you work to change the way the city communicates with the public?
Seamon: Access to city and governance is typically cut off from certain folks. Columbia Public Schools will send out a survey, for example, asking about the students. What we tend to find is that we receive over 60% of the surveys from two neighborhoods. That is not representative of our city and not something we should be basing our policies and ideas on. One thing you can do is, and I think that we forget, we can go knock on doors. Knocking on doors is how we get people to come out and vote. It's the same thing that should be done once we enter into office.
Heath: I've spent all my career doing advertising and public relations, which is all about communication ... For example, when it went to the two-bag policy for garbage collection, I think they should have put that in a neighborhood and tried it out for the summer. They should have published the results and gotten feedback from the people in the neighborhood and those that were going to have it soon before they went to the city. Overall, we can do a better job.
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Buffaloe: Council is seven people and they have that duty and responsibility to listen to constituents and help get that information out. We also employ volunteers on over 50 boards and commissions, which are hundreds of people that are dedicated to give time to our community. I think one of the really good ways we can think about this is activating them to help be that funnel of information to our community members.
Minchew: I've had communication with city council members just as a citizen and did not receive any replies back. I think if you signed up to be a city councilperson that ought to be one of your tasks, to make sure you are communicating with different community leaders. I think the key is getting to the leaders of different levels, whoever does the talking for each community would be the ones that information needs to get out to. I don't think it's a problem that can be solved, but that doesn't mean you don't keep working.
Foster: I think that it's really important that the city take a more aggressive stance when reaching out and getting the information that is needed. Very often we are reaching out to the people who have the greatest capacity to reach back to us. We need to keep in mind that there are some who are not going to have the time or the resources to be able to do the same thing that many other community members are able to do. I don't know that a lot of citizens recognize how much of a voice they have in responding to a survey.
Provide your perspective on how the city can address community violence.
Oropallo: We either have to make a decision that this is an important thing for us that we give public safety more tools, so that they're not having to go in with the big guns when really a softer approach might be useful and needed and allow them to get back to their jobs.
Lovelady: Community policing is just good policing. My goal is to make sure there are voices, that this situation is definitely handled from an equitable standpoint and that everybody listens to all voices ... Crime is not only happening in the Black community; we want to be at the table so that you can get a better understanding. It's one of those things that is going to take time, but we have to start the process.
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Foster: When it comes to policing, the question, for me, is what do we want to ask our police to do? I think we do ask our police officers to do a lot of things that they probably don't get into the business to do. I think there are a lot of situations in which we could bring in other resources that would make these situations work out better. I think we need to have a deep, honest conversation with one another, keeping in mind that we all want to live in safe communities.
Pefferman: We all want a safe Columbia. We all want a police force that we can trust to communicate with. Trusting our police officers is something I'd like us all to be able to get to at some point. Communication is a big problem with that there is no communication ... When it comes to our police department, we are not financing them. We are a city that's way too big and way too short-staffed.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Columbia mayoral, city council candidates participate in roundtable
