E-Mail This Article to a Friend 2005 voters guide COMPILED BY KATIE LIESENER

Boston is at a tipping point. The city is struggling to stem its affordable-housing, crime, and education woes, and it’s doing so on a strained budget. We’re barely bringing in enough money to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, the political landscape is shifting, and the much-heralded "New Boston" is emerging in fits and starts as progressive and minority candidates gain traction. Next Tuesday’s city elections might not decide Boston’s future, but whoever wins will influence where we go next.

The Phoenix put a series of questions about the state of the city to this year’s crop of city-council and mayoral candidates. Their answers may help you decide how to vote on Tuesday, November 8, when the polls are open between 7 am and 8 pm. We’ve included candidates from the competitive district races; there are also less-viable challengers in Districts One, Three, and Four.

RACE FOR MAYOR

MAURA HENNIGAN, VIA TELEPHONE

What accomplishment from the past few years are you most proud of? I think the thing I’m proudest of is [that] my friends at the Boston Trailer Park were finally able — after 16 years — to feel safe and secure in their homes. It was because we fought hard, and I originally filed legislation to put them under the rent-control provision. Sixteen years later, we were finally able to negotiate a settlement for the residents of the Boston Trailer Park.

Identify Boston’s three biggest problems, and name a concrete way in which you would address each one.

Problem 1: We have a mayor who is not willing to defend his record. And who is not willing to go into a public format where the candidates can ask each other questions, where the media can ask questions, where the public can ask about what our vision is and hear [about] what direction we want to take the city.

Solution: (implied)

Problem 2: Public education is so critical.... Tom Menino claims to be the education mayor, and has failed to do that — as evidenced by the fact that our MCAS scores are continuing to go down.

Solution: We need to create educational models of excellence, and what we need to do is to begin the institution of the elected school committee to make people feel once again that they have a voice in their child’s future. And I want to extend the school day to mirror the workday so that each and every child in the Boston public schools can be the very best they can be.

Problem 3: When you look at public safety, where is the moral outrage that ... after 9/11 occurred, a major publication in the city of Boston takes the mayor’s plan and comments there is no way out. We have people who use our MBTA on a regular basis, and yet if they go into a tunnel, and God forbid that there should be a terrorist attack or some sort of natural disaster, our firefighters are unable to communicate with MBTA personnel. And this is years after 9/11, years after [the mayor] has had Carlo Boccia, who was supposed to head up our national end of the security issues in our city. And it is the city of Boston that is supposed to have a standard of having two drills a year for the fire department in our tunnels, and they have chosen not to do that.

Solution: We will train, train, and train with our firefighters, with our police department, with our EMS, with our first responders, and most importantly, we will collaborate. Because an evacuation plan in our city should be all about collaboration — and not about a big ego and thinking it’s all about you. And here we have a mayor who is bringing a man-made disaster to our city by locating a level-four biolab in one of our poorest neighborhoods in Boston, and then, not only will we be talking about lack of an evacuation plan, we will be talking about quarantine — and clearly, we don’t have a quarantine plan.

TOM MENINO, VIA E-MAIL

What accomplishment from the past few years are you most proud of? It is hard to identify one single accomplishment over the last two years that is the most significant because the city is moving forward in so many areas, including housing, education, neighborhood development, and business opportunity. However, one of the most important achievements for Boston’s future is the progress we have made expanding education opportunities for the children in our city. In the last two years we launched an initiative to expand early education while at the same time making dramatic improvements in our high schools by creating new small schools and learning communities. This year alone, we opened seven new high schools. The Boston Public Schools were recently recognized as one of the top five urban school districts in the country for the fourth-straight year.

Identify Boston’s three biggest problems, and name a concrete way in which you would address each one.

Problem 1: We need to continue to work to provide affordable-home-ownership opportunities and to preserve affordable rental units throughout the city.

Solution: The best way we can increase affordability is to increase the housing supply. While this is a regional challenge, under my Leading the Way II strategy, we are committed to permitting 10,000 new units in Boston by 2007. We are also committed to making sure that 75 percent of these units will be affordable for low-to-moderate-income households. We have already committed necessary funds to accomplish these goals.

Problem 2: Eliminate the achievement gap.

Solution: One way to close this gap is to focus on early education. Within four years, BPS will provide a seat for any four-year-old in the city who needs one. Boston will be the first city in the nation to guarantee this level of early education.

Problem 3: Keeping our city safe.

Solution: We need to take this collaboration between police and residents to the next level. We are designing and implementing measures to help our police work more closely with our residents and vice versa. These include technological innovations to make sure all who are addressing these issues can stay in touch with the latest real-time information. We also must increase more of the human interaction. That’s why we are implementing B-SMART, a new tool getting national recognition, that helps police work with communities and other human-service and basic city-service personnel to address the public-safety issue from many angles.