LYNN – With one week left until the election, Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy and challenger state Sen. Thomas M. McGee (D-Lynn) highlighted their differences.
In a debate at Lynn Community Television studios that lasted more than an hour, the candidates staked out opposing positions on charter schools, the size of the city’s deficit, the right number of first responders, and where the next senior center should be located.
Moderated by the station’s former operations director Sean Donahue after former Mayor Albert DiVirgilio was replaced without explanation, the two debated issues facing the city.
On the question of charter schools, Kennedy said while she objected to the funding formula, she favored them.
“If people with money can have a choice of private, parochial or public schools, why shouldn’t people without money have the same choices,” she said.
McGee, with the support of the Lynn Teachers Union, has opposed charter schools and praised last year’s statewide vote to cap the number that can open.
“Charter schools create a financial hardship for any community that has one,” he said.
When it came to the question of Lynn’s budget deficit, they couldn’t agree on its size and whether last year’s financial review by an independent firm was a step in the right direction.
In a stark report presented to the city, a Philadelphia financial advisory services firm that specializes in advising municipalities, said the city should not issue any raises until 2022, freeze hiring, contract EMS services to a private company, and lay off three dozen city workers to eliminate an $8.6 million budget shortfall.
“The city is facing a substantial budget crisis,” McGee said.
The combination of last year’s fiscal review putting the deficit at more than $8 million and the recent downgrading of the city’s bond rating, means the city must recognize its expenses have outpaced revenues, he said.
But Kennedy called last year’s financial review by the PFM Group, “fantastical.”
She said City Hall is already down to a skeleton crew and it would be impossible to freeze wages for five years.
“If our public safety unions were to go to arbitration, a zero percent pay raise has never been approved,” she said.
On the right number of police officers and firefighters, Kennedy said the goal should be 190 in each department while McGee said the optimum number is 220.
When asked which new projects each of them would support, McGee said the plan to bring Amazon to Lynn is the kind of outside-the-box thinking the city needs.
“The Amazon proposal allows us to think big,” he said. “And if Suffolk Downs is selected by Amazon, Lynn is in a key location to take advantage.”
Kennedy said while it’s OK to dream big, what the city really needs is a hotel. She said her administration has overseen several projects that will help transform the city, including a new YMCA that is coming, construction of 300 waterfront apartments at the former Beacon Chevrolet site on the Lynnway, and 1,100 apartments at General Electric Co’s former gear plant.
The candidates agreed the city should build a new Senior Center, but they disagreed on where.
Kennedy said it should be built as part of a new fire station, while McGee said he liked what Swampscott did when they made it part of their new high school.
Each candidate was asked to define their greatest accomplishments as an office holder.
McGee said he is proud of the new wing of North Shore Community College that was named for his father, and
the E-Team Machinist Job Training program that teaches machining and manufacturing skills and leads to good paying jobs.
Kennedy said her two biggest achievements were construction of the new Thurgood Marshall Middle School, which she said was completed ahead of schedule and on budget, and the new Market Basket which was built on a site that had been vacant since the 1980s.
