Camden's choices for mayor

Camden residents will pick a new mayor Tuesday, but the most powerful person in the city won't change: the overseer sent from Trenton under a 2002 state takeover law.

State control, which is set to expire in 2012, has been one of the signature issues of the race.

Dana Redd, a state senator and city councilwoman, said she expects the state Legislature to soon restore power to the mayor's office and transition control away from a chief operating officer.

"The mayor has to be a decision-making position if I'm going to facilitate all the programs that I talked about during this campaign," she said.

Angel Cordero said he has been an opponent of the takeover since its inception.

"This has been a debacle for the residents of Camden," he said. "The takeover must end now."

Mujiba Salaam Parker, who worked for the state agency that distributed $175 million to Camden as part of the takeover, said she "wouldn't mind the state being in control as it is until 2012."

The state's investment in the city has earned it a right to oversee Camden, she said, but she added that she felt the state would trust her, negating the need for an extension of the takeover.

Roberto Feliz said he would request immediate removal of state control upon taking office, citing growing city budget deficits since 2002.

"If state oversight has improved the city, then I would welcome it," he said. "But the evidence shows otherwise."

The four are running for the seat being vacated by retiring Mayor Gwendolyn Faison. While interim state-appointed chief operating officer Albertha Hyche controls most of the city's operations, the mayor has an official advisory role and earns more than $100,000 annually.

At a candidate forum this week, Feliz acknowledged that the mayoral race has been largely "bloodless." But there has been a clash over political affiliations.

Redd won the Democratic nomination in June with 86 percent of the vote. The three independent candidates - Cordero, Feliz, and Parker - have railed against a Camden County Democratic "machine" that they believe holds power over city politics, and have touted their relative lack of political affiliations.

"The machine has been running the government for the past three decades, and it's time for a change," Parker said.

Cordero said Democratic Party leaders "control everything and feed us little crumbs." During Tuesday's forum, he reached over and fist-bumped Feliz and Parker.

Feliz was more pointed, describing Redd's desire to give up a state Senate seat for a mayoral position without power as an attempt by the party to "use people as puppets."

Redd, vice chair of the Democratic State Committee, stood by her Democratic allegiance during the "machine" attacks, highlighting the relationships she has built with state and county officials.

"I certainly believe in working in the political realm," she said.

Each candidate says he or she is uniquely qualified to lead the city. Here are their stories:

Angel Cordero's road to his mayoral candidacy started in a prison cell.

"When I looked around and saw the different kinds of people in there, everybody had one common factor: None of these people were educated," he said.

Behind bars, the Woodrow Wilson High School dropout said, he learned to read and write. After serving a three-year sentence for dealing drugs, he was released in 1989 and hit the streets as an activist intent on ensuring a good education for Camden's children.

In 2007, he started the Community Educational Resource Network, a six-month home-school degree program for high school dropouts. The program, which uses volunteer teachers and donated textbooks, graduated 800 students in 2008, he said.

Cordero, 48, said he would promote smaller schools in Camden and use the mayor's ability to appoint three school board members to select "radical" and "out-of-the-box" thinkers who would be willing to travel to successful school districts to improve their ideas.

Born in Puerto Rico, Cordero has been the director of the Camden chapter of the Latino Leadership Alliance for five years and worked for E3, a school-choice group, for about a decade.

Cordero also said his efforts would include getting outside contractors to employ more city residents and advocating for community policing.

"You fight crime with jobs," he said.

As he knocks on doors of Camden voters, Roberto Feliz says he carries two newspaper articles written about him during his time as the city's director of public works from 1997 to 2002, hoping to jog memories and inform people about efforts to clean up the city.

"I have experience with disaster relief," he said. "That's what Camden is, a disaster."

The Dominican-born Feliz, who holds a master's degree in public-safety management from St. Joseph's University, worked for the City of Philadelphia for eight years as a housing inspector and community outreach director before coming to Camden. He also served as Camden's code-enforcement director from 2002 to 2006.

Using that experience, addressing the city's problem of abandoned property is high on the Lanning Square resident's list. He said the Public Works Department is too process-oriented and vowed to be more aggressive with measures that would make delinquent owners pay back taxes and accelerate foreclosures.

Feliz called a planned city program to monitor streets with video cameras "the most ridiculous piece of police prevention I've ever heard of," and said a holistic approach is needed to combat crime, drugs, and homelessness.

The most important issue facing the city, he said, is leadership.

"There's this elitist, separatist mind-set that we are incompetent buffoons and we need to have our hands held," he said.

When Mujiba Salaam Parker left her position at the state Economic Development Authority in December, it wasn't to move up the ladder.

Instead, Parker decided it was time to go all-in on her true passion, selling motivational books and CDs that she says use her interpretation of God's word to inspire others to pursue their dreams.

"Everything that I'm teaching I've used to excel in my life," she said.

A decadelong Camden resident who lives in Waterfront South, Parker began working with the city in 1998, directing federal funds for housing and development in select neighborhoods through the nonprofit Camden Empowerment Zone Corp.

"I think that the mayor of Camden needs to bring more money into the city and needs to know how to manage funds in the seven-, eight-figure range," she said. "That's what I've done for over 10 years now."

Parker, 37, began working in 2003 with the EDA's Economic Recovery Board for Camden, where she checked to make sure projects such as new facilities for medical clinic Camcare and Rutgers University's law school were on track before disbursing state funding.

"I know how the state works," she said.

Born in Newark, Parker has a master's degree in public administration from the Rutgers campus there. She would focus on properly marketing Camden in order to attract job hubs such as call centers and back-office operations.

Parker said she is tired of Camden's consistently ranking among the poorest cities in the country.

"It makes no sense with this prime location," she said.

Dana Redd remembers looking around at the groundbreaking for the Baldwin's Run community in 2001 and thinking back to the crime- and drug-infested streets of the Westfield Acres housing project that used to stand there.

"Can we do this in other parts of Camden?" she thought.

Over the next three years, the newly elected city councilwoman said she worked to obtain the same federal HOPE VI grant that made Baldwin's Run possible - except this time for the Roosevelt Manor housing project, where the Camden native often stayed with her aunt as a child.

When Roosevelt Manor was awarded the grant in 2004, Redd said, she felt satisfaction in "visualizing what can be."

Redd had worked for 20 years in Camden city and county government before joining the state Senate in 2007 to replace former State Sen. Wayne Bryant, who was convicted of corruption.

The 41-year-old would give up her spot in Trenton to take the mayor's spot.

"I don't see it as a step down," she said. "I see it as a step up to a challenge."

The two-term councilwoman has a bachelor's degree from Rutgers-Camden, where she majored in business management.

Public safety is her top concern, and one of her initiatives in office would be a pilot after-school program she is working to establish at Bonsall Elementary.

She also said she would partner with Camden County College and Rowan University to create job-training models that could give Camden residents the skills needed to work in the region's growing health-care sector.

This year's City Council race features seven candidates, including two incumbents, running for three at-large spots.

The incumbents, Gilbert "Whip" Wilson and Curtis Jenkins, are on Redd's Democratic ticket, along with Marilyn Torres, who the party hopes would take Redd's open seat.

Wilson, a two-term councilman and retired police lieutenant, said his efforts have pushed forward the city's street video-surveillance program and an installment plan to help residents pay water bills.

"Most of my ordinances come from citizens," he said.

Jenkins, a one-term councilman and business manager for a local labor union, highlighted an ordinance he introduced that set up meetings between the Camden Redevelopment Agency and residents to ensure community input for development projects.

Torres has worked for the Camden Board of Education for 27 years, linking parents with social services. She would aim to provide internship opportunities for high school students at local colleges, hospitals, and other places, she said.

Cordero's City Council ticket includes two former college athletes from the area: Arthur "OG" Barclay, who played basketball alongside star player Dajuan Wagner at Camden High School and the University of Memphis, and Preston Brown, a former wide receiver at Woodrow Wilson who played at Tulane University.

Barclay said he would work toward providing more after-school recreational opportunities for schoolchildren.

Brown said he wants to encourage parental involvement in children's lives, possibly by setting up workshops for the parents of juvenile delinquents.

The third member of Cordero's ticket, the Rev. Isaias Martinez, who runs a North Camden church, said he would focus on making sure residents keep their properties clean.

The Rev. Clyde Cook, who has lived in Camden for about five years after moving from the Bronx, is on Feliz's ticket. He said he runs an outreach ministry from his home and would want the city to be "federally monitored, not by the state," to ensure ordinances passed by Council are enforced.