The two candidates for the D.C. Council’s top job went head to head on Wednesday night in their first debate of the campaign season, with incumbent Phil Mendelson offering up his long record in the legislature as a selling point while challenger Erin Palmer arguing that new — and more progressive — energy is needed to confront the city’s challenges.

And in a separate portion of the event, Councilmember Robert White (D-At Large) sharpened his attacks against Mayor Muriel Bowser, unleashing sometimes withering criticism of her tenure on everything from affordable housing to education.

The main portion of the two-hour forum sponsored by left-leaning D.C. for Democracy featured Mendelson, a 23-year member of the council and two-term chairman, and Palmer, a first-time contender and current Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Ward 4. In many ways, the dynamic that is evolving in the race is similar to the one Mendelson faced four years ago, when he was challenged from the left by Ed Lazere, then the longtime leader of the progressive D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.

At the time, Lazere said Mendelson — long known as a detail-oriented and low-key lawmaker, often derided or celebrated as a “nitpicker” — was no longer up for the job of leading a council in a city that was growing as quickly and becoming increasingly divided along lines of class and race. Mendelson handily won that race with 63% of the vote, but at the debate Palmer expanded upon Lazere’s message by pointing to the impacts of the pandemic.

“COVID-19 has highlighted the deep disparities in our city, but these disparities are not new. Every map of D.C. is the same, the result of decades of chronic disinvestment in many of our neighbors, including those east of the river. D.C. is rich in resources and we deserve a government that works for all of us. We need new energy, vision and compassion to make a resilient city,” she said.

Mendelson responded by pointing to his many years on the council. “I have a record. I’m not just promises,” he said, ticking off a list of bills he introduced or helped pass, from paid family leave and minimum wage increases to marriage equality and gun restrictions. “My record has been quite liberal and I am proud of that record.”

On a number of issues, Palmer and Mendelson were in agreement. Both said there should be more accountability and oversight of the Metropolitan Police Department and that police officers should be removed from schools. (Mendelson took credit for appointing the members of the D.C. Police Reform Commission that has proposed sweeping changes for MPD.) Both support a bill to give every D.C. resident $100 a month for Metro, both would respect the voters’ will if a ballot initiative passes next year eliminating the tipped wage (in 2018, Mendelson voted to repeal a tipped-wage ballot measure approved by voters), and both support full-time librarians for every D.C. public school.

The two split on whether 16-year-olds and non-citizen green card-holders should be able to vote (Palmer said yes to both, Mendelson said no); Palmer said police should be fully removed from traffic enforcement, while Mendelson said it would depend on the circumstances; Palmer said she supports Attorney General Karl Racine’s push to extend inclusionary zoning to buildings in downtown D.C., while Mendelson said he supported the idea in theory but said he’d have to assess the economics of it first. Palmer threw her support behind bringing ranked-choice voting to D.C.; Mendelson said he opposed it because he doesn’t think it would be “so much a change as a complication to the voting process.”

The two also split on the tax increase on wealthy households that the D.C. Council approved earlier this year. Mendelson said that while he has supported tax increases in the past, this one wasn’t necessary because of the large amount of federal COVID-19 aid D.C. took in (more than $2 billion). He also noted the fact that details on how the money would be spent (on homelessness prevention, early childhood education, and financial assistance for low-income residents) were not provided until shortly before the first vote.

“I would have supported [the tax increase],” said Palmer. “The causes were worthy, it’s money well-spent. A claim that we have enough federal money rings hollow to me. We absolutely have needs and this money is going to things that are essential.”

Palmer widened her disagreements with Mendelson on a question about whether parts of the city’s school bureaucracy should be more independent of the mayor, who since 2008 has enjoyed direct authority over D.C. Public Schools under the system of mayoral control. Mendelson, who opposed granting mayoral control during the council’s 2007 vote, argued that questions of who runs the schools wouldn’t get to the heart of academic challenges many students still face.

“The mayor is in control. We have clearer accountability,” he said of the current system. “We do have checks and balances in this, namely that the council is now the one that does the checks and balances. But I want to emphasize that governance is not what’s going to improve teaching in the classroom.”

But Palmer questioned whether the council’s oversight has been enough, citing the experience of schools during the pandemic. “We watched a complete fumble of kids in virtual learning, a complete fumble of the return to in-person learning. We saw schools that had 18 months to get it right for HVAC and HEPA filters, just failure after failure, and then a hearing,” she said.

The two also took on an issue that arose this week in the council: a bill that would have stopped D.C. from clearing homeless encampments during the winter months. Mendelson said he — along with a number of his colleagues — did not support the bill over concerns that the language was overly broad. A vote on the measure was postponed until Dec. 21, drawing criticism from Palmer.

“Encampment evictions are violent,” she said. “Encampment evictions are not necessary to providing housing. You can provide housing without an eviction.”

As the debate came to a close, Palmer and Mendelson did again agree on one point — they both said they oppose Bowser’s decision to rescind the city’s indoor mask mandate. Mendelson said he authored a letter signed by most of his colleagues asking that she reimpose it due to the omicron variant.

“I think it was a mistake that she repealed it. And I think that she will rue the day because we’re going to see that it will have to be reimposed,” he said. “The mayor is jeopardizing her credibility with regard to following the science in fighting the pandemic.”

White: Bowser ‘does not care about vulnerable people’

In the second hour of the forum, Councilmember Robert White (D-At Large) fielded questions about his bid to unseat Bowser. (Organizers said she was invited but did not respond; Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, also running for mayor, had a conflict.) While White declined to directly criticize Bowser when he first entered the race in October, he took the opportunity on Wednesday night to take aim at what he said were growing gaps between haves and have-nots under her leadership.

“We cannot afford four more years of a mayor who does not care about vulnerable people. We see that in the heartless and cruel clearing of encampments of homeless people who have so little already. We see that in the treatment of the people in our D.C. Jail, where a federal agency had to come in and tell us that these are inhumane conditions. We can’t afford four more years of slogans with no substance behind them. This is an administration that has a hashtag for everything, but an answer for nothing,” he said.

White, who is in his second term on the council, said he would focus on increasing violence interruption efforts as a means to stem rising homicide rates, try new approaches (like office-to-residential conversions and a possible rent freeze) to help lower housing costs, and push the D.C. Department of Transportation to be more responsive in resident requests for speed humps and stop signs. He also said he would get rid of the controversial IMPACT teacher evaluation tool, and repeated his promise to consider scrapping mayoral control of schools.

“As mayor, I put everything on the table. Whatever powers or authority you need to remove from the mayor in order to ensure that we are centering our children and prioritizing improving our public schools, I will do it,” he said.

In a first campaign ad Bowser shared on Twitter last month, she leaned on her accomplishments in office — including replacing the D.C. General family homeless shelter with smaller neighborhood shelters, pushing D.C. statehood, and creating Black Lives Matter Plaza on 16th Street NW — while saying “there are still challenges for us to tackle.”

Bowser attended a fundraiser on Wednesday night, where she told the crowd that some of the challenges D.C. is seeing (like the spike in homicides) are not unique to the city and that the arrival of the pandemic changed the nature of the job and her priorities.

Both White and Bowser (along with Trayon White) are taking public financing, which means they are required to participate in a debate before the June Democratic primary. The first significant filing deadline is Dec. 10, and both Bowser and White are hoping to tout significant fundraising totals as proof they are formidable contenders.