With Election Day looming, Madison’s mayoral candidates battled over the best way to confront the biggest issues facing the city and took stabs at each other’s records as mayor during a televised debate Friday.

Both former mayor Paul Soglin and incumbent Dave Cieslewicz said the state budget will shape the coming years for whichever candidate is elected into office.

“Of course I oppose [Gov. Scott Walker’s] draconian budget – this governor has proposed a budget that will divide us and take money out of the economy not just for state employees, but for others as well,” Cieslewicz said. “First of all, we need to diversify our economy and focus on buying local because every one dollar spent buying in our local community is circulated in our economy seven times.”

Soglin agreed the budget would cause drastic cuts for the city, forcing difficult decisions in order to build a strong economy, but said the city should focus on trying to build up the private sector. He said because tax dollars are so limited, the city has to reexamine how it manages the government and try to be frugal while still providing high quality services.

As protests erupted throughout the state in protest of Walker’s state budget and the budget repair bill, Cieslewicz has notably extended a number of union contracts with the city – a move Soglin said was not thought out and would hurt the city’s economy in the long run.

“You can be supportive of collective bargaining and these labor organizations when they are under assault … but the key thing here is the mayor has to know how to be a manager and say no to your friends,” Soglin said of the extended contracts. “When it’s been necessary I’ve been tough, and it seems to me that what we need to do is realize that there were some mistakes made by this city in the last several weeks in the rush to sign the contracts.”

Soglin said the contracts were poorly negotiated because of the rush the incumbent put on the process – a speed Cieslewicz said was necessary given what he said was the quick pace of the Republican agenda.

Cieslewicz said Soglin had no grounds to argue he would have proceeded differently given the uncertainty of the political atmosphere in Wisconsin throughout the past several weeks.

One of the contracts put up for debate was the negotiation reached with Madison Metro workers, which Cieslewicz said will save the city about $21 million throughout the next several years in order to increase city revenue.

When asked what the key policy difference was between the two candidates, Soglin jabbed at comments he said Cieslewicz made previously about the mayor not being able to do much about the city’s poverty level because it is a national issue.

“On the matter of poverty and the record rates [Cieslewicz and Soglin] got, there’s a critical difference between us – it’s the number one issue,” Soglin said. “The mayor must get up every single morning and be prepared to tackle it with a team.”

Cieslewicz said he has put a strong fight up against poverty throughout his past eight years as mayor and has seen a strong change that has created a stronger community. He said Soglin needed to catch up on a number of issues that need to be handled differently now than when Soglin served as mayor a number of years ago.

“I care deeply about the issue of poverty, but rather than just talking about how it was done 15 or 20 years ago, I did something about it when I came to office – I redeveloped Allied Drive,” Cieslewicz said.

Cieslewicz said there were a number of other issues Soglin was not up-to-date on given his long absence from office, criticizing Soglin’s plan to eliminate the public relations department in the mayor’s office – a move he said would prevent the community from achieving complete transparency from local government.