Neither candidate did, but they did pick on each other during their Thursday debate - about crime, broadband, taxes and open government.
Billings, the two-term incumbent, accused Bailey of misleading voters about crime levels.
Citing the 2003 Uniform Crime Report compiled by the FBI and the Justice Department, Billings said Provo's crime rate is the lowest of Utah's 13 largest cities, one place lower than it ranked four years ago.
"We've improved," he told members of the Provo Rotary Club. "There are 12 other cities, many of them much much smaller than we are, that have more crime."
But Bailey, a former Provo police captain, countered that violent crime is up 27 percent and that Billings has not made good on his pledge to hire more officers.
"We are undermanned," he said. "How can we bring business to Provo when we don't have the public safety officers to support it?"
On iProvo, the fiber-optic network the city bonded $39.5 million to build in 2004, Bailey accused Billings of raiding reserves to keep it afloat and mocked the mayor's claims that Provo has $65 million in reserve.
"This is baloney," Bailey said, holding up the mayor's "misinformation alert" campaign flier. "My figures come straight from the budget and financial reports."
The network is aimed at making available cable television, phone service and high-speed Internet to every home and business in the city. Bailey said Provo needs to make iProvo profitable and restore public confidence in the project by not misleading residents.
But Billings said the network met its budget last year and is more than $200,000 over projected revenues. He said the city has 3,700 subscribers and expects to have 4,000 by Thanksgiving. (About 10,000 subscribers are needed to put iProvo in the black.)
"It's doing incredibly well," Billings said of iProvo.
He called Bailey's assertion he was dipping into rainy-day funds for iProvo nonsense, noting that the network is an enterprise fund and is not tied to the general fund.
Bailey pledged to overhaul Provo's 911 call center, which responded to Scott Aston's distress call in October 2004 by sending medical crews to the wrong address. Aston died and the city eventually settled with his family. The challenger accused Billings of keeping the council and the public in the dark over the investigation into the incident and many other issues.
For his part, Billings said information in the report eventually was disclosed. The mayor said he regularly consults the council but sometimes withholds information when advised to do so by legal counsel for liability reasons. He called Aston's death a tragedy.
"But some are going to want you to believe the reason he died is that paramedics didn't get there," the mayor said. "This is a young man who had been ill for weeks or perhaps longer and had been encouraged by numerous people to get medical attention, but had not gotten medical attention. So it's regrettable that we weren't there. Could we have saved his life if we had got there? We don't know."
meddington@sltrib.com
