LYNN ― The three candidates for mayor faced off again Wednesday night with less than one week to the preliminary election.
In a debate hosted by The Item, La Voz and the Lynn Business Partnership at Classical High School, City Council President Darren Cyr and School Committee members Jared Nicholson and Michael Satterwhite discussed their plans to lead the city forward.
Housing was a big topic of debate, with both Nicholson and Satterwhite speaking in support of the recently-passed Housing Lynn plan, which Cyr voted against.
“Almost half the city is cost burdened because of how much rent has increased,” Nicholson said. “It’s really exciting news that the City Council overwhelmingly passed the Housing Lynn Plan, and it’s a strong indication that the city has to recognize that this is a top issue facing us and we’re now on the same page that we need to go forward.”
Cyr, on the other hand, said that the creation of more affordable housing will exacerbate the problem and not help deal with rising rents in the city. He called the housing plan “smoke and mirrors.”
“We do more than any other surrounding community and that’s the problem. That’s why there’s a need for affordable housing, because people from other communities are coming into Lynn,” he said. “Creating inclusionary zoning and forcing developers … to provide 10 percent (affordable housing), it’s not going to take care of the problem because developers are not going to come here.”
Another contentious topic was public safety in Lynn. All three candidates mentioned increasing staffing at the city’s police and fire departments, but Cyr was the only one to oppose the pilot unarmed crisis-response team that the city approved in July.
He said he was concerned about the safety of team members, adding that often, when someone calls the police on someone, it is because that person is out of control.
Satterwhite, however, disagreed with this assessment, sharing a story from 10 years ago when his sister called the police while his mother was having a mental-health crisis. He arrived home just in time to see police with guns drawn about to enter his home, but he was able to first go inside and defuse the situation without any police involvement.
“We’re not sending rookies that have no medical or background experience to do this job,” he said. “We know that there’s an issue here in the city with drugs and mental health, so how do we address it? What we’ve been doing has not been working.”
While all the candidates agreed that Lynn’s public schools need improvement, they had different plans for how to do that. Nicholson stressed that the district’s faculty and staff needs to better reflect the demographics of its students, and that the district should better meet the needs of its English-language learners.
“The dropout rate for English learners is too high,” he said. “The people that are arriving at Lynn Public Schools are arriving at different points in their education. Some students have a really long way to go to see a path for them that would keep them in school and encourage them to graduate.”
Satterwhite noted that many of the students in Lynn have other struggles as well, including housing instability and poverty, which make it difficult for them to learn. He also added that the district has sold off properties that could have been used as resources for its existing students, leading to a lack of libraries and other facilities in existing buildings.
Cyr reiterated his commitment to building new schools in Lynn, saying that students should be given more opportunities to learn technical and job skills.
“Every single child deserves a high-quality education. That’s not happening right now,” he said.
The full debate will be broadcast on Lynn Community Television at 8 p.m. Thursday and at 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Friday.
