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.
“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.
