When the nomination period for the upcoming municipal election closed last Friday afternoon, there were certainly some surprises, even for a municipal reporter.
The biggest surprise, perhaps obviously, was that nobody put their hat in the ring to run against current mayor Andy Adams for the top spot at City Hall.
But even if someone thought that might happen – I certainly didn’t – the fact that only four newcomers signed up to run for city council can’t have been expected. After all, how often do you hear complaints about how terrible this (and any, for that matter) council is at what they do? About how they misspend all of our tax money and are out of touch with the regular folks?
And yet, here we are. Only four people in the community who were not already on council are trying to earn seats at the table.
Bit I digress. What I really want to talk about in this space this time around is what I’m looking forward to (hopefully) hearing from the candidates in this election – and not just the ones running for council.
I’ll start with them, though.
I would very much like to hear their thoughts on what the city’s role is in addressing the housing situation in town. The last statistic I saw said there was less than a one per cent vacancy rate in our community, which creates a market where rents skyrocket out of control because of the increased demand. This rising cost, alongside the rising cost of seemingly everything in our world, is far outpacing the pay increases being given by businesses to their employees, and that is simply not sustainable.
And no, building new subdivisions full of $400,000+ houses isn’t an answer.
I was also excited when a partnership formed between the arts council, the art gallery, the museum and the Tidemark to host a forum on the arts. I think much more needs to be done to support the arts in the community (disclosure, I consider myself an artist during my non-newspapering time) and I think that starts with policy decisions that are made at City Hall.
Possibly more interesting than the race for council, however, is the fact that 14 people – more than signed up to try for spots on council, I should point out – have declared their desire to sit on our local board of education.
From those people, I am eager to hear why.
Why do they want to be involved with the public education system at an administrative level? What, exactly, do they want to see change?
I’ve seen a ton of change happen in education over the years – most of which I would consider positive. I am extremely interested to hear some concrete things from the candidates for trustee about what they don’t like about the way things are currently done and what they think they can do to change those things.
For that matter, I want to hear the same thing from the candidates for council.
I don’t want to hear, “I believe strongly in (vague concept),” or, “I think the city needs change,” or, “we all need to work collaboratively.”
I want to hear actual, concrete positions on what they feel will make our community a better place and how they intend to make it happen.
We’ll see if I get my wish starting tomorrow night at Rivercity Stage at 7 p.m.