Mayor George Wallace was on the offensive Thursday night at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference candidates forum, taking repeated swipes at his opponent, Councilman Donnie Tuck.
Perhaps emboldened by the familiar surroundings — the forum was hosted in the City Council chambers at Hampton City Hall with Wallace sitting in the mayor’s chair that he’s run meetings from for the last two years and is now fighting to hold on to — Wallace occasionally interrupted forum moderator Wil LaVeist or SCLC Peninsula chapter president Andrew Shannon to try to undercut Tuck’s responses to questions.
Each time, Tuck responded only with a toothy grin and an incredulous shake of the head.
When asked how to address the city’s crime problems, Tuck said that he’d pitched the idea for the city’s summer youth employment program, aimed at keeping young people busy during the summer to help reduce crime.
Wallace jumped in after, saying, “the fact of the matter is the city manager put that program forth before the council put teeth into it.”
When asked his feelings on closed meetings, Tuck suggested that citizens are concerned sometimes about the council talking behind closed doors.
“I don’t think people are concerned about that,” Wallace said, because the council outlines why it’s going into closed session and verifies that it only discussed those matters when the body comes out of closed meetings.
Toward the end of the forum, LaViest opened the floor to allow candidates to ask a question to one of their opponents.
Wallace asked Tuck why he had “glibly misrepresented the facts on the issues with fear” and why he’d taken credit for things he hadn’t done.
Tuck responded that he’d suggested a taxing method to bridge the gap between an offer and the asking price for Langley Speedway — negotiations that have been ongoing for months — which the council agreed to offer as an incentive in closed session.
Wallace quipped that “that process was already in place.”
Tuck declined to ask Wallace a question.
At the end of the meeting, when Shannon was thanking the sitting council members again for voting to name a bridge between Phoebus and Fort Monroe in honor of SCLC founder Martin Luther King, Jr., Wallace interjected.
“Only six of the council members voted for that (the MLK bridge). My challenger did not,” Wallace said.
Tuck joined the council in a unanimous vote to name the bridge for King in February.
After dissent from parts of the community about how the name was chosen — some felt there hadn’t been enough citizen input and that the name should better reflect a historical figure with direct ties to the area — the council voted at a meeting in March to add the names of three famed slaves who escaped to Fort Monroe during the Civil War.
The council voted before taking comment from around two dozen people signed up to speak on the topic. Tuck cast the only dissenting vote against that hybrid naming measure, saying the citizens who packed the meeting should have a chance to speak to the issue before a vote was taken.
He said after the meeting the move was a protest vote against the process and not against the name of the bridge.
Candidates Billy Hobbs, Linda Curtis, Chris Snead, Shree Green, Edwin Boone and Jimmy Gray were also in attendance. The election is on May 3.
Murphy can be reached by phone at 757-247-4760.
