Help! Candidate Questions Written By You

It’s that time of year again. The kids are back in school and our thoughts turn, reluctantly, if you are like me, to election season. 

In Lakewood we already saw a little bit of it with the various candidates in the Fourth of July Parade and we could count up who had the most supporters or who threw out the best candy or who had the coolest T-shirts but now it’s time to get serious, we have some big elections in front of us and it’s very clear from looking around at the current state of affairs in Lakewood that who we choose will have a big effect on the quality of life in Lakewood. 

These people will make decisions that will touch your lives directly, make no mistake about it. It’s important that you know who they are, what they’ve done, and what they plan to do. It’s important that you hear from them in their own words so you can assess for yourselves what you think of them.

But how do you do that? You can read the campaign literature that gets stuck in your door. You can try to attend campaign events. Better still you can try to attend campaign forum nights or debates so that you can see the candidates assembled, if they all attend, and hear their positions on the issues and watch how they conduct themselves.  

But what if you can’t get out for those events, and what if you do attend those events, but YOU had a question that it seems the candidates never get around to answering?

This is where the Lakewood Observer, your community-written local paper comes in. 

During election season, the Lakewood Observer publishes “candidate questions”— questions that go to all the candidates who then respond in the paper. Each candidate gets the same questions, and the same number of words with which to reply.  

Where do we get the questions? From you. And from our editorial board, who will also go through the questions you send in to try to condense them into a form that allows for as many readers to be represented as possible, while making sure the paper covers the full range of issues that are out there. 

All you need to do is send them in. And of course, read the replies of the various candidates and VOTE for the ones you feel will do the best job.

There will be a prize for those readers who send in questions:

BETTER GOVERNMENT. BECAUSE OF YOU.

Send in questions for these candidates by September 10, 2019. Go to lakewoodobserver.com, click on Member Center, sign in, click on writer, and enter "Candidates' Questions" in Title box", click on Next, and paste/write in your questions. 

The questions chosen will be given to the following candidates:

Mayor's office:  Meghan George

                       Sam O'Leary

Council candidates:

Ward 1:        TBD in Sept 10 primary. Race is between  Matthew Fredrickson, Lindsey Grdina, Tess Neff and Laura Rodriguez-Carbona

Ward 2:        Brad Presutto

                    Jason Shachner

Ward 3:         John Litten

                    Jeff Wise

Ward 4:        Dan O'Malley

School Board candidates:

Emma Petrie-Barcelona

Linda Beebe

Michael Callahan

Tom Einhouse

Andrew Meyer