Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh is looking back at his two terms in office with pride and a sense of accomplishment.
Walsh said his administration largely succeeded in growing the city by sparking investment and developing housing, job training, and hiring programs aimed at historically marginalized populations. Walsh said they also improved large parts of the city’s transportation infrastructure. For example, in 2017, the year before he took office, he said the city paved only four miles of road.
“This administration over the course of 8 years will have paved over 100 miles of road," Walsh said. "And sidewalks, under the previous system, property owners were responsible for maintaining and fixing their sidewalks. That wasn't working. So we created a new municipal sidewalk program where everybody pays into it and we've been able to reconstruct 47 miles of sidewalks at this point.”
The city also doubled its fleet of trucks to plow those streets and hired a contractor to clear snow from many sidewalks. Residents were also asked to change decades of routine and buy-in to a new trash and recycling program using standardized bins.
Through it all, Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens has helped guide those changes. And now she’s preparing to take the reins in January. Walsh said it was clear she’d naturally transition to the role.
“She was the first person that I thought of early on that I knew was capable of doing it," he said. "I never pushed it on her, and I think early on when others asked and suggested that it would be a good fit for her, she was resistant to that idea. But I think she eventually came around to it, and I'm very glad that she did, because there's no one more qualified and no one more ready to run the city than Sharon Owens.”
Walsh said continuity is critical at this juncture as the city prepares for a future without I-81running through the heart of the city, and as the region prepares for Micron.
Listen to an extended interview with Walsh by clicking the tab at the top of the story.
