Mayor Jonathan McCollar credited himself and the city with a nearly 30% reduction in Statesboro's poverty rate and other positive trends in the past eight years. Challenger candidate Raymond Harris asserted that Statesboro needs to do more about its drug problem and that he wants to "streamline" city spending without cutting key programs.

Those were some of the key themes, voiced at the beginning and echoed near the end of a roughly 45-minute mayoral candidate forum the Statesboro Herald hosted Tuesday evening in the Emma Kelly Theater at the Averitt Center for the Arts. About 50 citizens attended.

In response to questions along the way, both candidates agreed that Statesboro Area Transit, the small-bus system launched by the city during McCollar's tenure, is needed and should continue, but Harris said it could be run better.

They disagreed on the Floating Local Option Sales Tax, or FLOST, referendum, which for Statesboro voters appears on the same ballot as the mayoral race, for the Nov. 4 final Election Day but with early voting now underway in the elections office at the Bulloch County Annex on North Main Street. But their statements on those topics will be included in a later story.

McCollar opened by noting that he has been mayor since January 2018 and that his ancestors have been here in the Statesboro area since 1820, more than 200 years, some serving as counselors, ministers and business owners.

"We've built a legacy of helping people within our community," McCollar said. "One of the things that my great-grandmother taught me, growing up, as she was raising me, she said, 'If you want to get far in life, you help people.'"

So, he said, he follows a "servant leadership model" and listens to people to understand what their key concerns are.

Poverty rate down

"When we were sworn into office in 2018, we were facing some very serious issues, and our community had a poverty rate of 53 percent, a 10 percent unemployment rate, and a lot of families were struggling, and what we understood is that we had to do something to lift those families out of those conditions, and over the past eight years we've reduced poverty by 30 percent, cut unemployment by more than half and lifted thousands of families out  of poverty."

That, he said, is what his administration would continue to do "as we build a strong business sector and a community where everyone has a high quality of life."

In introducing himself, Harris said some people may still be wondering who he is, since for the last 10 years he has, in retirement, worked with his wife in business "and been her shadow,"

"I've been a soldier all my life," Harris said, also noting that he grew up in Winnsboro, South Carolina, a town much smaller than Statesboro, with "no college, just two red lights."

"I joined the military right out of high school. I also married my high school sweetheart, Felicia Harris," he said.

She and the mayor's wife, Adrianne McCollar, both attended the forum and sat near the front.

Incidentally, Jonathan McCollar, 51, and Raymond Harris, 53, aren't far apart in age. A native of Statesboro who attained a bachelor's degree in history and a master's in public administration from Georgia Southern University, McCollar currently works as a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker-Conner Realty. Earlier in his time as mayor he was employed by Georgia Southern at its Liberty Campus in Hinesville.

Harris, at least a 16-year resident of Statesboro but with longer connections to the area through his wife's family, has civilian business experience in information technology. He also worked for several months as a jailer with the Bulloch County Sheriff's Office. 

On stage, Harris called himself "a wounded warrior." He was injured in Bosnia, where he was deployed as a "convoy specialist" mechanic, but did more "blowing things up" in onsite demolitions than fixing things, he said in a previous interview. Harris served one year in the U.S. Army Reserves and then six years on active duty in the Army before being honorably discharged in 1998. 

He said some people encouraged him to run for mayor back in 2017-2018, and that his health wasn't good enough then but has greatly improved.

Smells drug problem

"The same problems we had in our community then seem to be happening now," Harris said. "Me and my wife ride motorcycles here at night, and there's one thing I know that drives poverty is drugs, and I smell it every night when I ride my motorcycle, and I want to address that."

Addressing the problem of drugs in the community would also help address crime, "so we fix that and we fix a lot of different problems that we have," he said. "But first, we have to have the tough conversation about the drugs we have in our community, and I want to have that."

One question to McCollar was whether now, after the exhaustion of pandemic-era federal grants under the CARES and ARPA programs and an obvious change in the national political climate, Statesboro will have to take a more conservative approach to spending and curtail some of its "community investment" efforts.

With $1.7 million under the CARES Act of 2020 and $12 million under ARPA, enacted in 2021, the city government directed some money toward park renovations and allocated the largest share to create the city's own Neighborhood Revitalization Program with funding for housing improvements and sewer line upgrades and extensions. The city also matched the county in ARPA funding shares for a $1 million contribution for the new Statesboro Food Bank facility.

Role of GICH

"But in the midst of all of that in January of 2020 we announced to the community that we were accepted into the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing," McCollar said, after having said "Well, actually we do not" to the idea that the city may have to curtail such spending. 

The city's acceptance into the housing initiative, or GICH, and subsequent participation in and graduation from that program "means that the city of Statesboro gets leverage when we apply for grants through the (Georgia) Department of Community Affairs," McCollar said, "and that means for the next 10, 20, 30 years we'll be able to reap the benefits of that."

When he qualified as a candidate earlier this year, Harris in an interview said he wants to "be the voice of reason when it comes to taxes, overspending, oversight" because he hadn't been seeing anyone address these things. So, he was asked to give one or more examples and say how he might cut spending.

"Just because I stated that we have wasteful spending, that doesn't mean we're going to cut key programs, or workers," Harris said. "I believe we need to just do better in streamlining what we're already doing."

Mentioning "workers taking (city) vehicles home when they don't have a dedicated vehicle," as an example, he said, "We're paying for gas for that, and that's happening a lot. … We don't need to be giving people vehicles to take home if they're not on call.

"We just need to be more efficient with our spending," Harris said.

'More income streams'

In regard to property tax increases, he asserted that people understood better when property taxes were almost the only source of revenue, but don't now that the city has more "income streams," referring specifically to the monthly stormwater fee and to a penalty charge for residents not moving their trash carts away from the curb.

"So I don't understand why we're paying more taxes or why the citizens has more taxes levied on them when we have more income streams than when you started in office," Harris said.

It was structured as a forum, not a debate, but the candidates did direct a couple of comments at each other. For the most part, though, they spoke directly to the audience after the Herald's editor and operations manager Jim Healy, serving as moderator, asked the questions.