Our Election-Season Pledge To You
Jul 25, 2007 19:05 - 4 Comments
At a recent Citizen’s Forum, >think-tanker and president of the College Gardens Civic Association Mark M. Pierzchala announced his candidacy for mayor. With that in mind, now is as good a time as any to let you know of Rockville Central’s city-election plans.
We’re a community news resource, and elections are a key part of community news. So we’re going to do our best to provide ordinary Rockville folks with the information they need to help make their decision this November. But we’re not a politics or opinion blog, so we will try to avoid “insider” pieces about the machinations of the campaigns, just as we will try to avoid pieces supporting this or that candidate for city council or candidate for mayor. We aren’t going to endorse anyone.
We’ll just try to be straight down-the-middle, and tell you what you need to know. We think that’s how we can be most useful.
Here is what you can expect us to try our best to give you:
- A way to know who is running for what City offices, with a link to their campaign website
- Significant news items or analysis that relate to their positions on City issues or the overall viability of their candidacy
- Interviews with candidates — written recaps and full audio (see below for how you can help)
- Personal opinion — tagged as opinion — about the election if it seems honestly helpful
- A direct statement from each candidate, either text or video or both
- A photo of each person running for City office
- Other information and that seems useful
We will try to make sure you won’t get:
- Screeds, rants, tirades, anonymous flame-wars, personal attacks
- Idealogical invective disguised as “news”
- Trumped-up “investigation” pieces that amount to nothing
- Glowing puff-pieces disguised as “news”
- Endorsements by Rockville Central
- Punditry, predictions, and insider politics
We will try our hardest to meet these goals. When we fall down, we hope you will help us out by letting us know. We will try to be as transparent as possible. But remember, we are just doing this in our spare time so try to give us a break!
Here are two important ways you can help us out:
- Between now and mid-September, we plan to interview each announced candidate for mayor and city council. We’ll ask them the standard kinds of questions, and also go into different avenues suggested by each conversation. But, we want to know what you would like to know from the candidates. Please use the comments section for this post, or drop us a line.
- And…if you are a candidate or can connect us to a candidate and help set up an interview, please let us know.
We hope you will find Rockville Central useful as we move into election season and beyond. This is a work in progress. Please tell us how we’re doing.
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I think this is an excellent and well thought out plan. With all this information just a click away, I hope people will participate in the process more and really pay attention to the issues.
An issue that many of the challengers cite is the trash service. I’ve been pointing out that residents who only want once-weekly service are forced to pay an extra $100 per year under the current system, and this is used to subsidize residents who want the more costly twice-weekly service. At the July 2nd meeting, I announced a $100 reward for the Rockville City resident who provides the most plausible justification for this subsidy. The announcement is on my website>
at http://rocktrash.org/earn100dollars.html.
[This is from Carl Henn, a candidate for City Council:]>
Part of why I am running is to help prepare Rockville for declining oil production. I’ve spoken about this at Citizen’s forum and in my campaign literature, but its still not broadly understood. My suggestion for a question to the candidates would be something like “When do think that global oil production will peak and enter decline? What role should Rockville government play in preparing for declining oil production?”
Another question that ought to be asked: Does Rockville have enough community gardens?
[...] the Rockville Central approach to elections (an article from the last city election on that is here). We see ourselves a resource for the people of Rockville, a safe space for dialogue and a source [...]