Upcoming CNY Speaks Forum

It gives me great pleasure to announce our next forum — 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 27, at Sophistications Jazz Cafe, 441 S. Salina St., in the heart of Downtown Syracuse. All three remaining candidates for mayor of Syracuse have agreed to participate. The venue is a bit smaller than our previous locations, and we expect a big turnout, so please register now to ensure yourself a spot and to help us adequately plan for the event.

Register by responding to this email with your name and the names of others that will be attending with you. Or, you can call me at 315-730-4621. You can also email CNYSpeaks directly at cnyspeaks@maxwell.syr.edu. As always, the event is free and open to all. Please help spread the word.

The October 27 event will be CNYSpeaks seventh forum on the topic of improving Downtown Syracuse, and it will continue to utilize the CNYSpeaks’ technique of facilitated, small-group discussions. Yet the forum will be quite different in both format and substance from our previous events. CNYSpeaks spent more than a year focused on identifying problems Downtown must overcome, as well as strategies for improving the city center. That conversation unfolded at our first five forums and on the CNYSpeaks blog. It also was informed by research from the Maxwell and Newhouse schools, journalistic articles in The Post-Standard, and a series of public surveys.

On Aug. 30, CNYSpeaks published the Citizens’ Agenda for Downtown Syracuse, a distillation of the conversation meant to guide policy makers working to improve our urban core.

On Sept. 8, nearly 200 citizens packed the Hotel Syracuse’s Persian Terrace and spent an hour discussing the Agenda in small, facilitated groups, with a focus on forming questions to ask the six candidates for mayor. The mayoral candidates then joined the discussion, fielding questions from citizens for two hours. The idea was to help familiarize citizens and candidates with the Agenda, to keep the improvement of Downtown as an issue in the campaign, and to begin to see how the candidates differed in their approach to bettering the city center.

Now we’re down to three candidates who will face off against each other in the General Election on Nov. 3. One will emerge as our next mayor. As such, the time has come to make direct comparisons between the candidates on how they will work to improve Downtown.  That will be the focus of the Oct. 27 event, which starts promptly at 6:30 p.m., with the doors opening at 6.

Instead of deliberating in small groups first as we have done in the past, we’ll start with the candidates, letting them talk about their strategies for improving Downtown, and following up with questions from citizens and from Maxwell Political Science Professor Grant Reeher, co-director of CNYSpeaks. After we’ve heard from the candidates and they have answered your questions, participants will then begin the deliberative part of the forum. You’ll work in groups to identify how the candidates differed in their approach to improving Downtown, exploring which is most effective.

It’s a format that should distinguish this CNYSpeaks’ forum from the others, while continuing to build on the work done by citizens at past CNYSpeaks’ events. Please participate and help us spread the word. The event is free and open to all — past participants and new ones, city residents and suburbanites.

Light refreshments will be served. There is ample free parking on the street that time of night. The Galleries Garage, located right next to Sophistications (http://www.sophisticationscafe.com) will be open as well. The cost is $6 a car.

Please register now, and don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions. I can be reached at gregmunno@msn.com, cnyspeaks@maxwell.syr.edu and at 315-730-4621.

For more information, you can also visit http://blog.syracuse.com/cny-speaks. This entry — http://blog.syracuse.com/cny-speaks/2009/09/now_it_gets_serious.html — gives you a little more information on the Oct. 27 event, as well as links to the Citizens’ Agenda, the candidates’ Web sites, and information on our previous events.