RELATED STORIES: City Commission candidates, mayoral candidates
By Tim Pallesen
The mayoral race rematch between Cary Glickstein and Tom Carney will allow voters to judge how Glickstein has performed after he defeated Carney two years ago.
“We have our city back on track. Let’s not go backward,” Glickstein told voters at a candidates forum last month.
“We are more divided now — not less,” Carney responded.
Four candidates also are vying for an open commission seat on the city’s March 10 ballot.
Glickstein narrowly beat Carney in 2013 by promising to restore fiscal responsibility and to preserve the city’s village-by-the-sea character.
City contracts then went out for competitive bids, allowing Glickstein to boast in his campaign that the new waste haulers contract alone will save taxpayers $8.4 million.
Glickstein also led the push for tighter downtown height and density restrictions that commissioners approved last month.
Carney, a former commissioner, served briefly as mayor before the 2013 election.
“Overdevelopment was allowed on my opponent’s watch,” Glickstein said at the Feb. 12 forum.
Carney responded by saying Glickstein has failed to attract downtown office buildings and accused him of showing disrespect to city employees.
“It’s an environment of fear,” Carney said. “That isn’t the way to run a city.”
Christina Morrison, one of the four candidates in the other race on the ballot, also urged better manners. Morrison was an interim commissioner briefly in 2013 before Glickstein got elected. “We need to be nicer and definitely more civil,” she told voters.
Morrison faces Bruce Bastian, Mitch Katz and Josh Smith in the race to replace term-limited Commissioner Adam Frankel.
Candidates in this race say it’s time for the commission to broaden its attention beyond the downtown.
“There is more to Delray Beach than just the six blocks from Swinton Avenue to the beach,” said Katz, who would be the first commissioner to live west of I-95 in 10 years if elected. “We need to put effort in other areas of the city.”
Smith told voters at the forum that he will be “the voice for the economically disadvantaged and disenfranchised, the vast majority of whom are African-American.”
Morrison says the attention now must be focused on residential neighborhoods that have been impacted by downtown. Bastion wants to attract businesses along Congress Avenue.
Both the mayor and commission jobs have three-year terms; when Glickstein was elected, the mayor’s term was two years.
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