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GREENSBORO — Mayor Bill Knight and his re-election challenger, Councilman Robbie Perkins , unleashed some of the fiercest barbs of their campaign during a debate Monday night sponsored by the News & Record, News 14 Carolina and the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress.

The conflict over ultimately failed efforts to reopen the White Street Landfill figured prominently, as both men took turns answering questions from panelists and the audience at Guilford College.

“It has been kind of difficult to focus on jobs like we wanted to because we’ve spent the last 22 months focused on a landfill and dividing our community,” Perkins said, adding several times that the process over the landfill decision had been botched.

He was responding to a question about what each man had done to spur economic development, which Knight answered by saying he had reached out to the business community and lobbied Raleigh for fewer regulations.

“I would say in the past two years I’ve probably done more for business than my opponent did in 16 years,” Knight said.

On the question of the landfill, Knight said that prior city councils — of which Perkins was a part — handed him and his current colleagues a costly problem with little long-term planning. He pointed to figures that show the city’s current system, which ships trash to landfills in other areas, costs $7 million more now than it did 10 years ago to operate the landfill.

Perkins said that focusing on reopening White Street with the help of a private contractor blinded the council to other options, including having city workers take up operations there again or working with neighboring governments to establish a regional landfill.

“How long are you going to have a landfill three-and-a-half miles from the center of your city,” Perkins asked.

The two men also took swipes when asked what they could do to get the council to work together.

“It takes cooperation of all nine council members to have orderly meetings,” Knight said, calling Perkins out for, “texting, talking, exhorting the audience not to cooperate during meetings.”

Perkins suggested it was the mayor who failed to keep the lines of communications open among council members.

“It’s the mayor’s responsibility to communicate openly with all the council members, not just the ones the mayor agrees with,” Perkins said.

On issues, the two men split several times during the evening:

• Asked about the funding to complete the downtown greenway, Knight said it would have to compete with other needs, such as filling police positions or funding libraries. Perkins said he would make the greenway a priority because it both gave Greensboro more recreation opportunities and helped developers, adding “we need to move it forward as soon as possible.”

• Knight said he favors having prayers to open the council meetings, adding, “We will have the prayer as long as I am mayor.” Perkins said that a previous practice of allowing for a moment of silence worked better. “It didn’t offend any of our citizens,” he said.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com