Mortgage lender Paul Fitts is running for Raleigh mayor.

Incumbent Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin is not seeking reelection.

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While the mayoral race is non-partisan, Fitts is registered as a Republican. The other candidates running are:

Fitts ran for Raleigh mayor in 2007, garnering 14.74% of the vote behind Nancy McFarlane (48.42%) and Charles Francis (36.73%).

Fitts grew up near Wendell and attended East Wake High School. He also attended Pembroke State, which is now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

WRAL News spoke with each candidate about their views before Election Day on Nov. 5.

Note: WRAL News’ questions in bold and candidate responses follow

Affordable housing is a huge issue in Raleigh. What's your plan to address this?

It’s a two-fold plan, actually. Number one, I want to use state-owned property. The city of Raleigh has 161 state-owned properties. They don't contribute any property tax to the city.

I need the state to give us property, so we can turn that into housing, and we need to, because of our economic downturn, especially in downtown Raleigh.

So, there's no land acquisition cost for the developer. Therefore, you can make housing cheaper, more affordable and make it more available at the same time.

On your website, you talk about wanting to move the prisons from downtown Raleigh.

The state of North Carolina, over the last five years, has decommissioned three prisons. Why they left two prisons in the most expensive real estate in the entire state just boggles my mind. Both prisons are outdated.

Central Prison came into effect sometime in the late 1800s.

I believe both facilities could easily be removed and allowing housing to take place in those areas.

Again, it's a nontaxable space if we don’t have housing. If we have owner-occupied housing on those spaces, that land becomes taxable. Then, those properties start to contribute to the city of Raleigh.

Let's talk now about downtown revitalization. What's your plan to build a greater sense of character and more continuous energy and vibrancy throughout the city?

The city of Raleigh has about a million square feet that's completely underutilized as far as commercial property is concerned, but going back to the state-owned properties, we have to make downtown more livable now, to make the city more vibrant.

If you go back to 2017 when I ran for mayor, then, the hot topic at the time was light rail, and I said I was against light rail. It was a 19th century technology, and we're a 21st century workforce. What I meant by that was we were building a telecommuting workforce.

Well, when we've done that, we vacated 20% to 25% of our workforce in downtown Raleigh. They're now remote.

Since they're remote, they're building their communities. They're building Clayton, they're building Wake Forest, they're building all the other towns around us.

Nobody is coming into downtown Raleigh anymore. So, since the economy has shifted, we have to shift our game plan with it, which we have not taken any steps to do that.

I know we're building apartments downtown, which require services. Businesses will flourish, but we need more owner-occupied properties.

We have to step off the 10-year lease, and we need to focus on the 30-year fixed [mortgage]. If you make it owner occupied, people invest in their communities more that way.

What's your position on land-trust acquisitions, like where they the homeowner owns the home, but the city or the state owns the property?

I don't like it. As a mortgage lender, it also makes it a little bit more difficult, and you have to come up with different ideas for financing those properties.

The truth is, the people who buy those properties are not getting the same amount of equity back. If they're going to put their investment into that area, they need to be rewarded if they sell that property.

But you have to realize now that taxes have increased on a lot of people. You can consider a worker who worked for the city of Raleigh for 30 years, and he's paid off his property. He's lived in it for 30 years.

Well, now his property taxes are doubled. If he's on a fixed income, he gets a little bit of Social Security, a little bit of a pension.

Now, he can't afford to live in the house he paid off years ago. We have to think about these things that diversify our tax base.

To public safety now. You talk about wanting to support our officers, in fact, by adding 400 of them. How do you recruit and retain 400 officers? There's a lot at a time when it's very difficult to recruit and we already have vacancies.

I'm a Republican, obviously, the only Republican candidate in the race. The last Republican to be mayor of the city was Paul Coble, and at his time, in 2001, there was a baseline of 800 police officers. We're still using that same baseline.

Twenty-three years later, our population has doubled, our area has grown. We need to get away from that baseline and understand that the matrix has changed a little bit now, recruiting and retention.

It's been very difficult to say that it's been a focus on the city of Raleigh to recruit police officers. They focus more on parks and a few other projects.

I don't think they really had their focus on bringing police officers in. We've got a lot of cities throughout the entire nation who have decided to defund their police departments, and so police officers are leaving those police departments.

I think it can be an incentive for them to come here, as long as they know that we can pay them to be here and work for us.

How complicated and difficult will it be to try to rally the council to make that kind of significant financial investment?

Everything is complicated, but it shouldn't be. Again, if it was easy for the council to say, hey, we can put a bond on the ballot for parks for $500 million, we can't invest in our public safety.

I think if we change our focus and understand that these are kitchen table issues. These are people who want to be protected, and they're paying double their taxes now. I think they want to invest into it, but I think they want to invest in the right reasons.

I think the council is coming more around to a public safety mentality.

Now, there are five candidates for Raleigh mayor in this race, most of the issues that all candidates talk about on their platforms are the same, affordable housing, public safety, transportation, etc. You have a proposal in your platform that is different than any other candidate, and that is that you want to build a casino in Raleigh. Why and how do you do this?

Gaming is coming, whether we want it or not. I can just tell you that if you go west, the Cherokee [Nation has] two casinos west of [Interstate] 26 down in Kings Mountain, which is west of I-85 … and the Cherokee tribe also has a facility in Danville, Virginia.

Now, gaming is all is all around us. If you go to the Danville facility, there's hardly any Virginia license plates in that parking lot. There are North Carolina license plates through and through.

Our workforce and our population [have] diversified. They came from areas where they (casinos) were just around whatever city they lived in. If they were New York, they were (close to) Atlantic City, or if they were in Philadelphia, they were close to Atlantic City. A lot of these major cities now have those facilities already in place. It's not difficult to bring one here.

The only difference between myself and what the General Assembly was trying to do, they want to tax the casinos for 22%. I want to tax them for 22%, but I want all of that money to go into public safety.

We don't have a problem talking about the education lottery. We shouldn't have a problem talking about the public safety gaming that we can gain.

I'll further it. We have a lot of illegal (gambling) facilities here in Wake County now. It is up to the [district attorney], it is up to the sheriff's [office] to shut those down, but if you drive four miles from my house, I can show you a dozen of them that exist.

I mean, if we have these things going on now, I'd rather shut those down and have a taxable facility where we'd have better shopping, better dining, arts and entertainment.

I would like to see the casino entertainment side take away shows from DPAC and leave them here in Raleigh.

I think it would be better for us, and we wouldn't have to drive to Durham to spend our money on shows.

OK, if you're elected. Day one. What's your first priority?

[The] first priority is police. I will talk to [Raleigh Police Chief] Estella [Patterson], and I will ask her what she really needs.

I believe our police force is completely overworked. They're underpaid. I feel like they need some help.

And, I know everybody says that the studies show that we only need 100, but the when you look at the exponentials in our city's growth, they can't make all the calls that they get every day.

It's almost impossible for them to do what they do. Police are the number one issue for me.