news-record.com

The City Council candidates have taken off the gloves in dealing with their opponents and critics this week.

Monday, at-large candidate Danny Thompson took a jab at sitting council member Robbie Perkins over the Urban Loop controversies at the League of Women Voters Forum.

The neighborhoods in the area of the loop didn’t know it would be so noisy. Thompson said he would be embarrassed to have been a councilman for 14 years and failed to communicate the issue to the residents.

Thompson is hoping to build on his fourth-place showing in the primary to capture one of the three at-large council seats in November.

Over in District 2, meanwhile, Nettie Coad addressed the question of whether, at 73, she is too old to be a City Council member.

“I heard some Jim Kee supporters say during the primary that I am ‘too old,’” she wrote on her blog, http://voteforcoad.wordpress.com. “My response – walk a week … no, wait, a day in my shoes. And even then, exclude any election-related activities. I guarantee that you will sleep well when your head finally hits the pillow.”

And District 1 candidate T. Dianne Bellamy-Small expressed her exasperation over Bench-gate 2009. (In case you haven’t been paying attention, the city removed a donated decorative bench off the new downtown greenway after some neighbors complained about prostitutes and drug users hanging out there.)

Former District 1 candidate Ben Holder and others pushed for the bench to be removed.

During the News& Record’s editorial board interviews, she said police have spent 250 hours patrolling the area and haven’t nabbed a single criminal.

“This was a bad decision,” Bellamy-Small said. “It was based on bully politics.”