Grace Crampsie Smith, a Bethlehem City Council member, has a lot in common with Mayor J. William Reynolds.
Both are Democrats, staunchly opposed to many of Donald Trump’s federal policies, are in favor of addressing the city’s lack of affordable housing and want to see the city’s public facilities like parks thrive.
But where they differ is enough of a gulf that Crampsie Smith has decided to challenge Reynolds as he seeks his second term in the Democratic primary May 20.
“I enjoy being on Council, but as time has gone by, I have had many concerns myself, and a sense of duty at this point to run, because I’m really concerned about the direction that the administration has been taking and continues to take in some ways,” Crampsie Smith said.
She said running for mayor was a difficult decision but one she felt she had to do after fielding concerns about city finances from residents. Specifically, Crampsie Smith said she opposed the city’s use of consultants for long-term planning initiatives as well as a 2.6% tax increase in the city’s 2024 budget.
Crampsie Smith is a Summit Hill, Carbon County, native — the youngest of seven siblings born to a working-class Irish family — who has lived in Bethlehem for around 30 years. She was appointed to a vacancy on City Council in 2019, and elected to a full term in 2021.
She obtained a degree in sociology at Bloomsburg University and a master’s degree in counseling at Lehigh University, and has spent nearly her entire career in public service in some capacity. She was an addictions counselor working in county prisons and an administrator for county programs on mental illness and developmental disabilities. Most recently, she was a school counselor at Easton Area High School before retiring last year.
Growing up in a frugal environment and working for counties with limited budgets drive her concern for fiscal responsibility, she said.
“On a personal level I had to be really fiscally frugal, because we were growing up poor, and then on a professional level, I also had to be very fiscally responsible because I was always working with taxpayer funds, serving those that were very much in need,” she said.
Most of Bethlehem’s large projects — including its comprehensive affordable housing and its parks plans — were formulated with assistance from consultants. Crampsie Smith provided a list of consultant contracts and their costs from 2021 to 2024 to The Morning Call, which totaled $1.6 million, although some were grant-funded at no cost to the city, and some predate Reynolds’ first term. Crampsie Smith said she felt those issues could have been worked on internally, including a community center feasibility study, the city’s climate action plan and an engineering survey of Friendship Park.
Crampsie Smith said the city would be better served via internal committee research — for instance, the city had an internal housing task force, which she served on before Reynolds took office, she said.
“That is what I would have done differently. In my past and working in government, we really shied away from consulting because we wanted that money to go directly to the services for the people,” Crampsie Smith said.
Reynolds has said all city departments — from water and sewer to community development — use consultants as a cost-effective alternative to hiring additional full-time staff, and that in the case of community development, those contractors work directly within the community and alongside city staff on initiatives like its comprehensive affordable housing plan.
Crampsie Smith also has favored more direct affordable housing subsidies as opposed to incentivizing more market rate housing; she successfully led a push on City Council to require housing developers receiving some forms of tax abatement to allocate 10% of their units as affordable, or pay a fee in lieu to a citywide housing fund.
“The thing that sparked my passion [for affordable housing] is I’ve just seen the number of my students and families and people I worked with become homeless, especially in the last like, you know, five, 10 years, and it’s a direct result of the lack of affordable housing,” she said.
As mayor, Crampsie Smith said she would push for an inclusionary zoning ordinance, which would require most developers building housing in Bethlehem — not just those seeking tax abatements — to designate at least 10% of their housing units as “affordable” to people who make below the area median income. She has met with officials from State College and Pittsburgh, which both have an inclusionary zoning ordinance, to learn more about how such a move could help Bethlehem’s housing stock.
Her record on City Council also includes successfully pushing an ordinance to ban commercial breeders known as “puppy mills” within city limits, and leading an unsuccessful effort last year to limit nonresident public comments before council meetings, allowing them to only comment publicly after votes had taken place, after anti-Gaza War protesters interrupted several meetings.
She has broken with the mayor and the majority of council on several votes, including voting against the demolition of the Walnut Street garage, which City Council narrowly approved in late 2023. She criticized the plans for not detailing exactly what the building that would replace the garage would look like.
To characterize her campaign, Crampsie Smith contrasted the two locations that the candidates chose for their campaign launch events in February — she held hers at Campus Pizza, a casual, take-out oriented restaurant in south Bethlehem, while Reynolds’ was at the Dream Boyd Theatre apartments, a newly constructed building near Main Street.
“We had beer and pizza and I was just surrounded by the typical people in this community and union brothers and sisters,” Crampsie Smith said. “My opponent had [his] at a development, a high-end luxury development, with apartments that are very unaffordable for most people in the city, so I think that contrast — I’m out there meeting with the people and getting where they are, let’s put it that way.”
According to the most recently available campaign finance reports, Crampsie Smith has raised $23,630 for her campaign efforts. Local donors include City Council member Bryan Callahan, former member Wandalyn Enix and former Northampton County District Attorney Terry Houck. She also received donations from several local unions, including the Plumbers Union Local 690, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 375 and Boilermakers Local 13.
Asked for her “Day 1” priorities if elected mayor, Crampsie Smith said she would look at reorganizing the mayor’s office — adding an operations director and community outreach specialist and possibly combining positions — as well as organizing meetings with all city departments.
“I’m a real people person, I love being out there, I love talking to people and I’m going to have a total open door policy,” Crampsie Smith said.
Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.
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