Cherelle Parker and David Oh talk 76ers arena, wage tax during their first joint interview

Democratic mayoral nominee Cherelle Parker wants to continue the city’s practice of gradually lowering the wage tax, while her Republican opponent David Oh wants to more aggressively reduce the levy.

Oh opposes the 76ers’ proposal to build a new arena in Center City, while Parker says it’s an economic development opportunity that Philadelphia can’t ignore.

Both want to recruit many more cops and require officers to do a better job of building relationships with the neighborhoods they police.

Those issues were among the key policy areas the two candidates discussed Friday during a joint interview with The Inquirer’s Editorial Board. In their first in-person encounter during the general election campaign, the candidates largely avoided sparring with each other and instead laid out their visions for the city separately. (The Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom, but it allowed a reporter to sit in on the interview.)

Oh has pushed for a series of televised debates, but Parker has only agreed to a handful of joint appearances. On Thursday morning, they will debate on KYW Newsradio.

Parker emerged from a crowded field to win the May 16 Democratic primary in what turned out to be the most expensive mayoral election in Philadelphia history. Oh ran unopposed in the GOP primary. Both are former City Council members.

Parker is widely expected to win the Nov. 7 election thanks to the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate. Philadelphia has not had a competitive general election in a mayor’s race in 20 years, and the GOP nominee has not won since 1947.

» READ MORE: Cherelle Parker is proud of her West Oak Lane roots. As mayor, could she save Philly’s ‘middle neighborhoods’?

But Oh said Friday that he believes Philadelphians are looking for something different this year.

“They want a dramatic change. They want a wholesale change,” Oh said. “What we’ll see on Nov. 7 is the people voting for a change overall. … I would say that I represent the greatest opportunity for change.”

» READ MORE: David Oh isn’t a typical Republican. He likes it that way.

Parker touted her experience as a state legislator and Council majority leader and said voters are looking for someone who has a proven ability to get things done.

“People want to have an executive of this city who has the skill to use government as a tool to change their life and their communities,” she said.

Following two years of record-setting shootings and homicides, both candidates have focused on public safety issues on the campaign trail. They largely agree that the city needs to do more to provide a sense of order by bolstering the short-staffed Police Department and holding criminals accountable.

But on Friday they highlighted some differences in their public safety plans. Parker, for instance, supports increasing the use of the controversial policing tactic known as stop-and-frisk, which Oh opposes.

Meanwhile, Oh criticized District Attorney Larry Krasner for failing to more aggressively prosecute criminals, while Parker avoided directly attacking the progressive prosecutor.

Both Parker and Oh agree that Philadelphia needs to reduce its widely criticized wage tax. But they’re not on the same page when it comes to how the city should lower it.

The wage tax is 3.75% for Philly residents, and 3.44% for people who work in the city but live elsewhere.

Since the 1990s, successive mayoral administrations and City Councils have worked together to adopt small cuts to the rate most years. But it remains the highest flat municipal wage tax in the nation.

Oh said City Hall needs to more drastically reduce the tax to compete with the suburbs and other cities and bring jobs back to Philadelphia.

“The wage tax has been identified in two separate tax commissions as being the major problem with Philadelphia,” Oh said. “You cannot simply cut taxes. You have to cut taxes to the degree that makes sense to obtain investment.”

Parker said that while she wants to see the tax cut and potentially eliminated one day, she doesn’t think the city can rush any reductions to its largest revenue source when it needs resources to improve services.

“Do I want to see Philadelphia have a more competitive business tax structure? Yes, indeed,” Parker said, before qualifying that “until we grow the economic pie here in our city, we’ll continue to see the gradual reductions.”

Parker, however, opened the door to a way the city might speed up cuts. She wants to revive an effort to amend the state’s “uniformity clause” — which requires tax rates to be applied equally to all people subject to a given tax — to allow Philadelphia commercial property owners to pay a higher real estate tax rate than residential owners.

That would require a state constitutional amendment, a heavy political lift. But Parker, who as a state lawmaker was involved in a previous attempt to uncouple commercial and residential property taxes, said she wants to try again.

“The uniformity clause should be changed, and that should be our goal,” she said. “If I’m mayor, we’re going to go at it again.”

Council is expected to decide next year whether to approve the 76ers’ plan to build an arena at 10th and Market Streets, making it one of the first major issues that will land on the desk of the next mayor when he or she takes office in January.

Comcast Spectacor, which owns the 76ers’ current home at the Wells Fargo Center, has lobbied against the plan, as have advocates for Chinatown who fear it will displace businesses and residents in the historic neighborhood, which borders the proposed site.

The 76ers have won endorsements for their $1.55 billion plan from the building trades unions, which backed Parker in the mayor’s race, and from Black business leaders and clergy members.

Parker has not committed to the plan, but has consistently spoken positively about its potential economic benefits for the struggling East Market Street corridor and the city as a whole. She repeated that stance Friday.

“We are the sixth-largest city in the nation and the poorest big city in the nation, and we can’t give a knee jerk ‘no’ to any big economic development project,” she said. “I remember what the economic vitality of Market Street looked like, and we have seen it decline.”

If she becomes mayor, Parker said she will ask all sides involved in the debate to present her with data on its potential impact.

“I want to see as much data and information as possible — cost-benefit analysis, potential return on investment, DEI from top to bottom,” she said.

Oh, a longtime champion of Chinatown’s interests, said the 76ers’ plan is too vague for Council to approve it at this point. The team doesn’t plan to open the arena until 2031, and it hasn’t published a final design for the facility.

“In general, an arena on East Market Street is not a naturally occurring thing. It would be very artificial,” he said. “It’s very much incumbent on the Sixers to not just announce an arena but to give documentation about what it actually is.”

He also objected to how the 76ers have gone about building support for the project.

“The way they rolled it out — how they pitted one community against another — has been very negative and very divisive,” Oh said.