On Saturday, October 2, Philadelphia mayoral candidates John Street and Sam Katz clarified their differences on the wage tax, job generation and school reform in response to questions from 20 members of the Citizen Voices project.

The 90-minute forum, held in the Zellerbach Theatre on the University of Pennsylvania campus, was the culminating event of the daylong Fall Issues Convention of Citizen Voices project.

The questioners were among the more than 100 citizens of the city who spent the day reviewing the candidates' positions and deliberating among themselves on the key issues in the election. The Citizen Voices project has identified these as education, jobs, public safety, neighborhoods, government reform and race/diversity.

The format had each candidate spend 30 minutes on stage alone answering questions from 10 citizens, followed by a 30 minute face-to-face dialogue moderated by Chris Satullo, deputy editor of the Editorial Board.

Katz was asked hard questions about his qualified support for school vouchers, about the risks of his plan to cut the wage tax, about the huge expense of this election and about what he would do to attack institutional racism in Philadelphia.

Street was pressed by citizen questioners about his attitude toward gays and the perception that the Rendell Administration focused on big corporations over small businesses in job development. In response to a question from a woman who wanted him to hire a new police commissioner from Philadelphia, he repeated his news-making statement of earlier in the day that he would retain John Timoney, whom Ed Rendell brought in from New York City.

One of the days lighter moments came when a citizen asked Street to comment on what the citizens perceived to be the "charisma deficit" both candidates had vis a vis Ed Rendell. Both Street and Katz reacted with mock indignation to the suggestion.