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Green Party Candidate Hawkins Says He Would Outproduce Current City Auditor

Rob Romano/WAER News

  Three candidates are going to be on the Green Party ticket in this November’s elections. One of them is Howie Hawkins, who ran for Governor last November and earned about 5 percent of the vote.

Hawkins will be running for Syracuse City Auditor. He is not pleased with the job the current Auditor Marty Masterpole is doing.

“The city charter requires an audit of all the departments, the school district, the housing authority every year. It has not been done. The budget expects eight financial and performance audits and three special audits. Those have not been done. He has been doing four a year. The previous auditor was doing 14 a year”                  

Hawkins is a teamster and works for UPS at night, but says he has experience with auditing because of campaign finance audits and from working in the private sector. If Hawkins is elected, he wants to enact a version of New York City’s “Checkbook NYC”, an online transparency tool that tracks budgets, revenue, and other city spending in real time. He also says he would consider new environmental audits for Syracuse.

 

Credit Rob Romano/WAER News
Hawkins also says this election will be a "voters' audit" of Marty Masterpole's work as Syracuse City Auditor.

  “There are governments doing environmental audits. We have a goal of reducing carbon. Well let’s track it. What’s our air quality like? We are assaulted by coal plants to the west of us.  We are downwind from them. How does that affect our air quality? Those are the kinds of things it might be good to track”              

Hawkins says the problem the Green Party faces going into November is not that voters don’t like the party’s platform, they just don’t think candidates will get elected. That notion would go away, Hawkins says, if Greens win any of these positions come November. 

Other Green Party candidates are Raymond Blackwell, who is running for the Syracuse City School Board and Frank Cetera, who is trying to win the 2nd District seat on the Syracuse Common Council.

Credit Rob Romano/WAER News
Posters for old green party candidates line the walls of the party's Syracuse headquarters on South Salina Street.

Chris Bolt, Ed.D. has proudly been covering the Central New York community and mentoring students for more than 30 years. His career in public media started as a student volunteer, then as a reporter/producer. He has been the news director for WAER since 1995. Dedicated to keeping local news coverage alive, Chris also has a passion for education, having trained, mentored and provided a platform for growth to more than a thousand students. Career highlights include having work appear on NPR, CBS, ABC and other news networks, winning numerous local and state journalism awards.