The Destino-Kirk mayoral contest rolled past its last major checkpoint yesterday with the candidates helping each other reinforce their self-images.

The debate between Council President James Destino and School Committeewoman Carolyn Kirk brought out and amplified distinctions over issues — notably the Community Prevention Act, which is on the Nov. 6 ballot with them.

Destino supports its adoption; Kirk does not.

She described it as a “wedge issue” but urged the audience of business and political leaders at the Chamber of Commerce event at the Gloucester House not to be “one-issue voters.”

Destino said adopting the act and adding 1 percent to tax bills would leverage state-matching funds and add to the city’s cash flow, while Kirk questioned the expansive claims of advocates of multiple uses for limited new taxes.

In the course of the breakfast hour that they spent fielding questions from Chamber President Scott Memhard, the mood of the debate changed from good humor and cheer to mutual suspicion.

Kirk, who migrated here from upstate New York via Boston College while working her way up the corporate ladder as a business consultant, used the one question she was allowed to ask Destino to ask if he intended to “go negative” in an effort to “undercut my background.”

“I think the question was negative,” Destino said.

“I’m not the one with the Gloucester Daily Times in their pocket,” he added, without mentioning the widely known fact that Kirk’s

husband, Bill, is business editor of The Eagle-Tribune, the Times’ sister paper in North Andover.

Earlier, Destino described himself as the owner of a “mom and pop” store. Smiling at Kirk, he added, “I told you I’d get that in.”

It was a phrase Kirk used earlier in the tight campaign to draw a distinction between her business experience with IBM, Fleet Financial, Fidelity and other corporations and that of Destino, who with his wife, Judy, owns Destino’s sub shop.

Destino crafted a newspaper ad that sought to the turn the “mom and pop” phrase back on her.

In his one question for Kirk, Destino again sought to establish himself as the more locally dedicated candidate by asking her to explain why her campaign finance report showed “almost all your money was spent out of town” while “we spent almost all our money in Gloucester.”

Kirk answered that Destino was running a more richly financed campaign, leaving her to look for discounts in services and paraphernalia.

“I spent one half of what you spent,” Kirk said. “What I had to do was go to the Internet.”

The candidates’ contrasting backgrounds were more subtly reflected at other times in the second-to-last debate or forum before voters choose a successor to Mayor John Bell a week from Tuesday. They meet again and for the last time Monday night in Annisquam.

Kirk, for example, described her plan to modernize the Community Development Department — the 1970s model the city has left without a director for nearly two years — and rename it the Office of Economic Policy and Development to drive the expansion of the local economy.

But she said expansion will take time because the decision of firms to settle in Gloucester is “driven by confidence.” Companies are more willing to invest in places that are “on the right track,” she said.

As he described it, Destino’s economic development approach would be more direct: “proactive and aggressive,” organized like a “sales team” and armed with tax breaks — incentives he noted that Kirk does not support.

Destino’s oft-stated, overriding goal is a “customer-friendly” government, “delivering value and service every day” while Kirk’s is to make the city’s machinery hum more like a computer, producing true reports and financial projections, something she has often said the city has been unable to do.

She scoffed at the collection of such documents Destino obtained from City Hall and produced two weeks ago to prove her wrong. Kirk said the budget for next year was an unrealistic sales document meant to maintain Wall Street confidence in city bonds, not guide hard choices.

Discussing the city’s balky new financial software program, Kirk used the phrase “spaghetti code,” a piece of jargon she said she picked up from IBM while she headed a consulting team integrated into the corporation for a number of years.

Earlier in the event, Kirk also volunteered that when she wanted to end the traveling required by IBM and find a new job, she turned to a head-hunter — Alex Destino, the candidate’s brother.

Another exchange highlighted the difference in styles.

Commenting on her expectation for I-4, C-2, the seemingly permanent vacant lot on the waterfront that has outlasted multiple mayors, Kirk said getting the owner, Boston real estate magnate Jeffrey Cohen, to “weed-whack — that would be a win.”

“Cutting the grass ... is not good enough,” Destino retorted.

Instead, he said, he would do what previous mayors have done and “have a talk with Jeffrey Cohen.” Destino said he wanted to convert the two acres into an outdoor market.

He made no mention of another part of the plan, discussed at a Times debate a week earlier — to use personal leverage with his campaign treasurer, who is the president of the Building Center, to merge that waterfront site with I-4, C-2 to make room for a luxury hotel and marina complex.

Destino and Kirk finished 1-2 in the field of seven candidates in the Oct. 2 preliminary election that brought out more than 7,000 voters. Destino’s margin over Kirk was 28 votes.