Mayoral candidate Dave Cieslewicz said he formed his first ideas about cities when he lived in Adams Residence Hall as a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin.

He said he was surprised by how well students treated the Lakeshore residence halls compared to students who trashed Ogg Hall, where he lived his first year at UW.

“It was one of my first experiences in realizing that people will treat the environment you give them in proportion to the respect it takes back,” Cieslewicz said.

He said he sees his run for mayor as a continuous career path based in an environmental background at the Wisconsin Chapter of the Nature Conservancy and the State Assembly’s Natural Resource Committee, because good cities are good for the environment.

“All of those contributions that you make to air pollution, water pollution, global warming and land use consumption are going to be so much less if you make your home in the city,” Cieslewicz said.

Cieslewicz has several ideas to further enhance Madison’s environment and clean up Lake Mendota, including stepping up street cleaning and redirecting and encouraging homeowners to channel their gutters into water-absorbent plants. He also wants to launch a public education program to reduce the amount of fertilizer residents put on their lawns, since it eventually drains into the lakes causing excessive amounts of algae to grow.

As a UW student, Cieslewicz said he always enjoyed walking down the Lakeshore Path to the Rathskellar for a beer at Memorial Union’s weekly folk band night.

Cieslewicz said alcohol is an issue that he is unsure how to confront, but also said he would sit down with bar owners and UW Chancellor John Wiley to find common ground and work out the kinks in the “strained” relationship between the campus and the city.

Regarding other student issues, Cieslewicz said that he wants to make sure State Street is redesigned to replace its “outdated” look from the 1970s and ’80s, uphold landlord-tenant laws and support the proposed mid-State Street parking ramp, meant to alleviate parking pressure. For the future, Cieslewicz supports a commuter rail system to relieve the traffic congestion downtown.

Cieslewicz said a rail system is one of the most important policy differences between himself and mayoral candidate Paul Soglin, who prefers to concentrate on the bus system before looking into rail. Cieslewicz also supports mandatory inclusionary zoning, which would require affordable housing in all new developments, whereas Soglin prefers a voluntary, incentive-based approach to persuade developers to build housing for low-income residents.

“Paul and I share a lot of the same goals, but we disagree about the ways to get there,” Cieslewicz said. “We’re just people from different generations; he came from the anti-war movement of the ’60s and ’70s, and I came from the environmental movement of the ’70s.”

Cieslewicz’s website banner contains a quotation by former Wisconsin State Assembly Leader Tom Loftus, reading: “Ideas are the only thing that can beat money in politics.”

Cieslewicz has raised $103,433 and Soglin has raised $144,591, according to campaign-finance reports released Monday.

“I’ll be outspent again in the general election,” Cieslewicz said. “But he spent more in the primary, and I beat him.”

Cieslewicz narrowly beat Soglin with 35.16 percent of the vote, with Soglin at 34.72 percent.

Cieslewicz said the experience of running for mayor has been, “exciting, miserable, edifying and humiliating all at once,” comparing his campaign to the university’s finals week 12 times over, but he said that the chance to be mayor is giving him the energy to push for the office.

“It’s the chance to make a difference and change Madison for the better,” he said. “It’s home, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than improve home.”