Today, starting on page 5, we present City Council candidates’ answers to questions about some of the council’s biggest discussions over the past year.
Voters in Sweet Home are privileged to have a full slate of nine candidates for four seats. (One is a write-in candidate, for reasons that are explained on the next page.) Ballots for the Nov. 6 election are scheduled to be in the mail starting Oct. 19.
We have choices to make between candidates who clearly care a lot about their community and want to help make it better.
Our goal in “interviewing” the candidates this way was to give ourselves and our readers an idea how each prospective councilor might vote on these issues, some past, some current. The candidates were fairly limited in their responses because, well, we have nine of them and this isn’t a forum for persuasion on any of the topics but simply identification of where a candidate stands.
We expect that anyone running for council should have some kind of clue about these issues, and we hope to find candidates who have solid views on how to deal with them.
Ideally, we can look and see how each one feels about short-circuiting Measure 5 compression problems with funding that have adversely affected Sweet Home’s, particularly in funding its Police Department. While they won’t directly decide that issue, the League of Oregon Cities represents our city, and it will be lobbying for changes to address police funding.
Our council’s voices will matter on this issue. And when we choose to vote for candidates, we should make a decision based on their opinion on this issue, as well as others.
The council made a decision on chickens, along with a few other changes in the animal ordinance. Some folks weren’t happy with the decision. Others were ecstatic. Fact is, people are eating eggs they got out of their back yards and, other than occasional over-exhuberant clucking by some hen that’s done her duty, it appears the chickens aren’t causing any major problems.
We chose these and other questions because they are the topics our council has been discussing. They are the sorts of things our council does.
We appreciate our City Council. We appreciate the fact that they can state their opinions, which aren’t always in agreement, without personal insult.
Our city faces a challenging and interesting future as we climb out of this recession, as we work to iymprove our local economy, as we develop resources both within our borders and in the surrounding areas that, it is hoped, will make Sweet Home an even better place to live. We need council members who can help direct the process of getting these things done, who are engaged, who can work together and who have vision, who will do more than simply show up for a meeting every couple of weeks.
The brief candidate perspectives we offer today will hopefully help us figure out who most closely represents our own views in this election.
We need to look for those who we feel are best informed while holding opinions closest to ours. Our council voter’s guide should help us do that.