Columbia mayoral candidates address student issues

Candidates discussed drinking water quality and downtown police presence.

By Pierce Courchaine

Published March 12, 2010

About 30 students made it to Waters Auditorium on a rainy Wednesday evening to hear Columbia's mayoral candidates discuss student issues and their platforms.

The Missouri Students Association, Graduate Professional Council and Associated Students for the University of Missouri hosted the forum, which featured five of the six candidates.

Jerry Wade, Paul Love, Sid Sullivan, Bob McDavid and Sean O'Day were in attendance. East Side Tavern owner and candidate Sal Nuccio was not present.

After brief candidate introductions, some students in the audience wrote down questions that were selected at random and asked to all the candidates. The questions primarily regarded student issues including drinking water quality and college students being targeted by police in bars.

One of the question candidates were asked was what they planned to do about the future of the quality of drinking water in Columbia and the rising levels of total Trihalomethanes.

"We're seeing some of these chemicals we are creating flow into the land that we are getting our drinking water from," McDavid said. "There is really no way around this except to follow the TTHM, and at the point that the levels get too high, we're just going to have to change the way we deal with our waste water."

O'Day said the water must be treated before TTHM levels become poisonous.

"I do feel it's important that we probably get it under control before it reaches toxic levels," O'Day said.

Although it is important to clean up the city's water, Love said it might be unrealistic to treat it anytime soon.

"One of the problems we're having is we're using chlorine to treat our waste, and that's where you're getting those side effects from," Love said. "Alternatives are you can filter it, use high intensity UV. That'll take care of it. But honestly we're not going to have the money to take care of that in our budget the next few years."

Another issue addressed was whether policing the downtown bars was a good use of officers.

Love said students are the primary targets of police walkthroughs, but he would like to see those resources refocused to neighborhoods.

"If the choice is between arresting some college student who's peeing in an alley somewhere or catching somebody who's breaking into somebody's home, I know where I want the officer to be," Love said.

Sullivan said a larger police presence would stop crimes before they happened.

"We need to have police in a protective capacity, so they can deter the crime, so we're not having to have people arrested after the crime," Sullivan said.

During the "lightning round," a section of the forum where students could ask questions directly, a student asked about landlord-tenant relations.

McDavid said though there are ways of regulating landlords who don't keep up with city codes, there needs to be more agencies to assure codes are followed.

A collaborative effort from the city and the landlords would make sure landlords are up to date on ordinances, Wade said.

"There's an association of apartment landlords, and they are realizing that they have a problem," Wade said. "There's a lot of good ones, and they have a problem with the bad ones. They are beginning to work within their organization to define what some of those mechanisms should be."

Following the "lightning round," candidates were given two minutes to deliver closing statements, most of which was used to tell the attendance to get out and vote April 6.

The rainy weather and a long MSA Senate meeting kept attendance at the event lower than expected, MSA President Tim Noce said.