It was standing room only at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church on Albemarle Street in Northwest D.C., where the Ward 3 Democratic Committee‘s mayoral candidate forum was held Monday night.
Five candidates vying for the party’s nomination were there, including front-runners Council member Janeese Lewis George, of Ward 4, and former at-large Council member Kenyan McDuffie.
They were joined by former Council member Vincent Orange, cybersecurity professional Rini Sampath as well as real estate professional and Army veteran Gary Goodweather.
The forum, moderated by Sam P.K. Collins of the Washington Informer, came after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced last year that she will not be running for a fourth term.
The candidates were each given one minute to answer questions before passing the microphone.
There were few fireworks, but one notable eruption of applause came during a question about school crowding, when McDuffie said, “The best way to reduce school crowding in Ward 3 is to improve schools elsewhere in the city.”
For the most part, candidates agreed on the big issues.
All said they would stop D.C. police from cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and all agreed the District needs to be more careful with how it spends money — although they disagreed on some of the details.
They were asked whether, if elected, they would raise taxes on the wealthy or on corporations.
Sampath said she wouldn’t trust D.C. government with more revenue until it could more effectively spend the money it already has — a sentiment that was popular among the other candidates.
“I care about social programs here in D.C., everything from our child care subsidies to being able to provide housing vouchers,” Sampath said. “At the same time, we need to handle mismanagement in our D.C. government before we trust D.C. government with any more of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars.”
Orange pointed to his accounting background, saying he would look for waste and missing money in the city’s budget.
Lewis George brought up her previous experience on the D.C. Council, saying she saw unspent money being returned to federal agencies — something she said her administration would stop.
For his part, McDuffie, who said the District has one of the highest racial wealth gaps of any city in the U.S., said his policies when he was on the D.C. Council were aimed at making the city more socially just.
“It’s why I did the ‘REACH’ Act, The Racial Equity Achieves Results Act, to make sure that we have a structure in place to judge how our policies are impacting marginalized communities,” McDuffie said.
Goodweather didn’t say he would raise taxes, but said he would make changes to the real estate tax system that he argued would benefit renters as well as homeowners.
Another D.C. Democratic mayoral forum is scheduled for Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Festival Center in Columbia Heights.
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