COLUMBIA, Mo 5/1/25 (Beat Byte) -- Eye-opening remarks from two Columbia Mayoral candidates -- incumbent Mayor Barbara Buffaloe and challenger Tanya Heath -- may help answer a frequent question on social media and local news sites: What exactly is Mayor Buffaloe's position on crime and homelessness now that she has been re-elected?
The comments showed a stark contrast between the two candidates at the annual League of Women Voters forum in March. Host David Lile's question also caught Mayor Buffaloe in a rare moment of frankness and aggravation during a campaign built on vague positioning with a smile.
Lile read a comment about Columbia posted on The Real Columbia Missouri Facebook page.
“What used to be an absolutely beautiful city in Missouri, and a pride for Missouri, is no longer. It’s horrendous, the crime, stealing, stores robbed, addicts laying around and homeless everywhere, constant shootings. It’s a real shame and it’s up to the voters to demand and get changes."
Lile then asked each candidate to respond.
"It's a horrendous quote. My reaction is that I disagree," Buffaloe said. "That's not the Columbia I see every day. You know, I'm lucky. My husband and I live close to downtown so we often ride our bikes downtown to dinner. We were just there on Saturday night.
"These opportunities to tear down our city are not helping," the Mayor continued. "I think we are seeing the same rhetoric on a national level.
"We have invested so much in public safety, and we continue to -- to bring down the crime numbers, which is why they are down. We are investing in social services because we believe that nobody should be forced to live on the street and to suffer from any of these ills. We invest in these things because we are a caring community and we will continue to be a caring community.
"So -- I reject the quote," Buffaloe repeated. "And I think it's an unfortunate show of what we are seeing now on social media and fake news sites."Heath at CoMo homeless camp
The contrast between Heath and Buffaloe emerged when Heath called for attention to all sides of the crime and homelessness issue, emphasizing property owners faced with enormous fines over mountains of garbage left in homeless camps trespassing on private property.
What would you like your legacy to be as Mayor? Lile asked.
"Let me pose a question to the audience," Heath began. "Have any of you been given a citation where you have five days to clean up a homeless encampment? And if you do not clean it out within five days, you will be fined fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000)?
"I know it's difficult to hear that. But I have talked to two different people who were faced with that. They had to rent equipment to take the needles, take the trash out of their property. They had to hire the people to help with the work.
"They had to incur all this expense in addition to doing the work, too. And there's NO guarantee that within a month, the people who are homeless and displaced won't come back.
"While we do not have a system where we have the steps to success that will help people who are displaced get the direction they need, my legacy will be to talk to ALL sides about the easy things and the hard things that we need to face as a community," Heath concluded. "So that we can brainstorm about how to handle all of it, with honesty and with courage."
BUFFALOE BLAST: Mayor calls out "fake news", Facebook to squelch crime, homelessness anger
