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Yesterday, the Friends of Downtown gathered in the Franklin Hotel for the first candidate forum of this municipal election season. All candidates for Chapel Hill Town Council, except for Jonathan Riehl, were present, as was Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt.
The forum allowed for an opening statement from each candidate, a question from the moderator, and then a follow-up question from the audience. In case you weren't able to attend, below is a Storify recapping the tweets from the event.
Come back with me to the summer of 2009. Filing just ended for the Chapel Hill Town Council and Mayoral races when powerhouse Council Member Bill Strom suddenly announced he was resigning and moving to New York. Strom was called "Machiavellian" and much worse.
First it was just the typical Strom haters that accused him of attempting to manipulate the process by waiting until just after the filing period, so that his replacement could be chosen by his friends on the Town Council. Strom himself claimed the timing was purely accidental. However, in the following weeks information trickled out showing that Strom’s actions were every bit as intentional as they looked to the skeptics.
Yesterday was the first candidate's forum. Lots of interesting questions and a great audience. I felt I was asked a great question--what do we do about flooding--and had the opportunity to share my ideas:
1. We engage the best engineers to deal with the problems we already have. (We have incredible know-how and world-class expertise right here, surrounded by the best universities and probably folks who have solved flooding in Bangladesh and other world-sized problems)
2. We don't build where it is not safe.
Mt introductory speech got "edited" as I spoke. I have tried to edit my notes to reflect what I actually said, but I may have missed some details.
I received two political phone calls yesterday. One was from Citizens United. It played a long speech from Mike Huckabee about health care. He repeated all the old odd statements about Obamacare even including "death panels". After it finished a human came on line and asked for a donation and an offer to send me a "free" book. I complained about all the false sttements Huckabee made and pointed out the need for universal health care. The Citizens United person politely thanked me for my opinion and suggested I look at their website. The next call was from PPP and surveyed us on our choice for State Senate. Do folks with only cell phones get these calls?
Via email, letters and phone I have received 9 invitations for Chapel Hill Town Council forums, 3 interviews and 4 questionaires. The Independent will send out their questions in mid September. Sierra Club/Chamber of Commerce and Friends of Bolin Creek/ Neighborhoods have not set the dates yet for their forums.I was able to attend 4 of the advisory board feedback meetings this summer and hope to attend the LUMO meetings in September.
Loren
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