Who knew there were 5 hopefuls?

FIVE CANDIDATES seeking to succeed Mayor Nutter met onstage last night for the first of four debates ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.

Republican Melissa Murray Bailey, Socialist Workers Party candidate Osborne Hart and Democrat Jim Kenney faced off with independent candidates Jim Foster and Boris Kindij in a town-hall-style debate before a half-full conference room at the DoubleTree Hotel, at Broad and Locust streets. It was hosted by the United Way, the Urban Affairs Coalition and the Economy League.

For Foster, Hart and Kindij, it may have been the only opportunity to appear before an audience. Only Bailey and Kenney have been invited to participate in the three October debates.

Host Tamala Edwards of 6ABC quizzed the candidates on issues ranging from how they'd have handled papal-visit security to gentrification.

But the biggest issues of the night were bringing jobs back to Philadelphia and improving the city's beleaguered school district.

Kenney, a former councilman, largely stuck to issues he raised before the primary: instituting universal pre-K, ending stop-and-frisk and expanding the port of Philadelphia to boost blue-collar employment.

"We have 450,000 containers coming through the terminals down on Packer [Avenue]. We can double that," Kenney said, claiming that additional freight would add 8,000 to 10,000 jobs.

Bailey, a business strategist from Society Hill, recommended more aggressively courting companies, particularly foreign ones, to move to Philadelphia, and bolstering the educational system to align workers' skills with 21st-century employment.

"If you look on any jobs site, there's plenty of jobs," Bailey said. "We don't have people with the skills to fill those jobs. We need to fix that."

But the two candidates (Kenney is the overwhelming favorite to win in November, Bailey a distant second) overlap on many issues: Both support similar methods of boosting early education and building jobs off the port system. Both praised the Nutter administration for effectively managing the papal visit, and Bailey even made a point of distancing herself from national Republicans to appeal to Democratic voters.

The biggest political rift lay between Foster, an independent from Germantown, and Hart, a Walmart employee.

Foster railed against labor unions, corruption in City Hall - which he called a "silo of incompetence" - and "oppressive" city taxes. He wants to cut City Council from 17 to 10 members and force local labor unions to pay to reopen the city's many shuttered vocational-technical schools.

Meanwhile, Hart spoke at length about expanding government, the dangers of widening social inequality nationwide and "mobilizing workers" to form unions and win better wages.

Kindij, a Croatian-born South Philadelphian, supports a quixotic mix of policies - from abolishing the School Reform Commission and raising the minimum wage to creating more tax-free zones and having City Hall dole out money to companies that pay workers more.

But the upstart candidate also seemed unfocused: At one point, Edwards had to remind him which question he was answering.