Loading...
Meet the Candidates Night
Posted by garym on September 10, 2006 - 5:31pm
10/05/2006 - 8:30pm
12/31/1969 - 8:00pm
The Amabel Property Owner's Association
is sponsoring an open
Meet The Candidates Night
7:30pm to 9:30pm
Sauble Beach Community Centre
Come out and meet the municipal candidates for Elections'06
everyone is welcome; please bring hard questions :)
User login
Blogger Talkback
Latest Bloggings
Custom Search
The Crackerbarrel
New Crackers
Editorial Lint
| this is our story the sbp community portal is a not-for-profit volunteer community communications project giving a free internet voice to residents of the town of south bruce peninsula through an easy and open public forum. the framework for the sbp is ©2007 Gary Lawrence Murphy Sauble Beach, Ontario sbp @ teledyn.com |
|
      community plumbing for the web |
Local Weather
or visit our
environment canada forecast
and our
marine forecast
something is wrong with this picture
Below you will find a copy of an e-mail sent today (Sept.14) to Mrs. Orma Lyttle, President of the Amabel Ratepayers Association. As you may know, the format of this group's proposed All-Candidates meeting has been a topic of discussion in the media for the past two days. Since writing this e-mail, I have contacted all five Mayoral Candidates and four of the Ward 3 candidates (Jessika Husak, I have left a message with). Of these, all, with the exception of Ana Vukovich, have agreed that having an All-Candidates meeting on a weekend is logical. ALL candidates want to get their message out to as many of their electorate as possible.
In a subsequent telephone conversation with Mrs. Lyttle, she has informed me that no candidate will have standing in any meeting regarding the format of the proposed All-Candidates meeting.
Eight of 10 candidates for Ward 3 and the Mayor's Race agree they wish to discuss the issues facing us in front of as many constituents as they can. (To be fair, Ms. Husak has not yet a chance to return my call). All candidates are running for office and they have been conducting themselves in an equitable fashion. One must then ask the question - why has the Property Owners Association not done so likewise?
The letter I sent to Mrs. Lyttle reads:
September 14, 2006.
Dear Orma,
Thank you for returning my phone call so promptly today. I had the impression from listening to the radio this morning, you would be unavailable today, so I do appreciate your attention to this matter.
As you know from our phone conversation of this morning, I am the campaign manager for Mark Wunderlich who is seeking re-election in Ward 3 of the Town of South Bruce Peninsula.
I was happy to hear on your pre-taped radio interview that your group would be holding a meeting on Saturday, Sept. 16 to discuss the specifics of your proposed All-Candidates meeting.
As I know you are aware, there are many concerns about this meeting. Unfortunately, you have denied my request to have status at that meeting to share those concerns. That is unfortunate. If, as you claim, you are working with the Sauble Beach Chamber of Commerce to conduct this meeting, it must seem to be non-partisan and unbiased. The Chamber is a non-partisan group and if you are going to invoke their name in connection with your event, then you too must appear to have the same unbiased intentions.
Orma, you claim that there are no other facilities at the beach available on a weekend to conduct your meeting and that is why you have chosen a weeknight to hold your meeting. That is simply not true. As of 11 a.m. this morning, the facility at the Amabel Sauble Public School was available either on Sat. Sept. 30 or Sun. Oct. 1 – the weekend before Thanksgiving. While these dates are not as attractive as a Thanksgiving weekend, at least it would give the seasonal residents a chance to attend.
Holding a meeting during the week is a self-defeating proposal and many wonder whether your organization has other motives in mind rather than informing your membership and the general public of the views, positions and platforms of the candidates.
As well, as it was pointed out on the radio show yesterday, some candidates would prefer an unbiased moderator/facilitator who has no connection to the Chamber, your group, or any of the candidates. I was gladdened to hear John Divinski offer to provide his expertise and I urge you to take him up on his offer.
I have been a communications manager at the federal (Larry Miller, MP) and provincial level (Bill Murdoch, Jim Wilson, Frank Klees MPP). Never once have I been put in a position where an all-candidates meeting is held without some input from ALL candidates.
I truly hope you not only reconsider your position on this matter, but that your group does what is best for the people who you claim to represent – the ratepayers.
Thank you and please accept my best wishes.
Sincerely,
Melissa Mockler
Campaign Manager
The Campaign to Re-elect Mark Wunderlich
519-935-7600
416-998-0112 cell
My Picture Is Just Fine Thanks Anyway.
I have been a property owner here for a long time through the years with Bill Ferris and Vince Artuso in Amabel and Al Given and Carl Noble in the combined town.
The Amabel Property Owners Association is a volunteer group that has put up a meet the candidates night without incident through the years going back to Bill. The format is always the same and there is not a whole lot of ground can be covered in two hours. Each candidate is given a few minutes to speak in turn then there are questions from the audience and each candidate again can speak to the questions in turn. Attitude is left at the door and no personal attacks are allowed. A note of thanks to all the truly local citizenry who helped out with this event in the past.
Mark was at the meeting in 2003 without a high pressure campaign manager in tow and he did well in the subsequent election. The Wiarton BIA has also successfully held these types of community meeetings.
So where was the Mark's big city manager in 2003 with these insinuations that something is wrong? This reminds me of the Jamor article accusing us local folk of being short sighted and proceeding to tell us about the high priced help they were bringing in to this election campaign so they could have their way with us.
There are 700 members of the APOA and they will get a report of the meeting and yes the association will pick some candidates to support after hearing what they have to say and careful consideration of the candidates views. There is no secret agenda here it is all out in the open. Candidates who genuinely want to answer to the community for the next four years will be there.
Candidates who want to answer only to themselves in the next four years may not fare well. That is likely what Cliff Billyea is afraid of. Cliff Billyea called Orma Lyttle to demand some sort of control over the meeting and I have no doubt he is the prime mover and shaker here. This election is like no other in that the established business community is about to lose voting control of the Town Council. They have been trying a little too hard to make the Amabel Property Owners and by association the community at large look bad.
This potential loss of control in Council is what it is all about and I detect a genuine fear out there. Otherwise why is there so much worry about a routine local event that takes place at election time? Why the panicked, totally confused and dead wrong letter from Mayor Noble in the Echo threating water users on small systems with $17,000 bills?
If Mark really needs the exposure why not rent the school for a Mark Wunderlich weekend? Invite anyone you want. Meanwhile stop trying to butt into a local tradition.
No worries, I think Mark Wunderlich will be re elected. The next Council will be a balanced one and Mark will provide some of that balance. He could start by working with the community and the ratepayers.
CFOS chimes in
Seems the CFOS news site has caught up with The Peninsular ... except WE have already posted the letter :)
I note also with some glee how their story seeks to incite discord by speaking only he-said she-said snippet quotes from one side, and how it's only us on our humble little blog site where we have the best arguments from both sides presented in full and some ideas on resolution while the 'responsible media' carries only out of context cat-calling. Makes ya think, eh? About who cares, I mean.
mmockler pulled me aside at the school meet-and-greet last night and she told me she'd asked the APOA, but they'd said no other venue was available. mmockler says the community school was free for the weekend and wondered if our website would want to sponsor the event.
"but we're not any org looking for 'exposure', we're just us, a little blog site!" the the corkboard at a laundromat (if we had one ;) -- I suggested maybe one of the Chambers would run with the idea, but really, the more I think about it, isn't that just more shady politics to even need to have TWO all-candidates meetings?
Really, if the timing or the format of this meeting really is any tangible issue (and not just more lame attention phishing and self-centred political posturing) then the only sane and reasonable solution is to work with our traditional event hosts and, if there is truly a reason and an available alternate, then it should be a simple matter to nudge APOA to take a hard look at the weekend school-aud option. Like, how difficult is that?
Then again, maybe that wouldn't fit the general frantic panicked tone of this election, the fairness, respect, cooperation and humanity, I mean.
Ana re-quoted
Had a brief visit from Ana Vukovic this afternoon; her canvassing route just happened to include my door, and her first opening was to ask if I had any issues.
"Issues?" sez I, "Who in this town doesn't have issues?"
Well, we laughed about that, and a talked over good many other funny and not-so-funny things on this election mix, especially once she knew who I was (wow, the SBP has fans!) but there's one item that arose in the conversation relating to mmockler's APOA letter reprinted here, in particular this bit:
Now I'm the first to admit that I don't always precisely quote my conversations either, but I figured it just good form to clarify this a bit: Ana claims she had really said the event was hosted by the APOA so it was up to her hosts to set the time and rules. As a candidate, she was a guest and if they wanted Friday, that's ok with her, and if they moved to Saturday, well that's fine too because it is their event.
Ana said she told Melissa it really didn't matter. That's a little different than might be implied by "everyone except Ana", and I think that's worth a footnote here to set it straight, something I don't think you'd get from the newspapers (a perk of us having oodles of free page-space :)
FWIW, Ana asked if gaining the audience of the seasonals was really so critically important, then it wouldn't it have been more apropos to have this meeting before Labour Day? If you ask me, though, these sorts of demopgraphic geography concerns are precisely the reason why all our candidates should be blogging their own campaigns in their own words up online, as it happens, open, transparent and there for all to see wherever they may be. Not a bad idea for those who win the election, either.
Reason The Date Was Not Before Oct 5
Nominations close the week before (Sept 29)and it was thought there might be some last minute nominations or once all the candidates get a look at the final list and evaluate their chances vs the time and financial output a withdrawal. Giving a week for things to settle before the meeting was the thinking and that is how it got to be Oct 5. It was just routine. More information in quoted from Owen Sound Radio News:
Sauble meeting will be fair
Written by John Divinski
The President of the Amabel Property Owners Association in South Bruce Peninsula, says they have no intention of skewing any planned all-candidates meeting for the November election.
Orma Lyttle says their meeting October 5th, will be hosted by a neutral party and because of numbers in Ward 3 only Ward 3 councillor candidates and the mayoral candidates will be presenting their platforms.
Lyttle says questions from the floor will also be allowed to be directed to specific candidates or all the candidates.
Recently two people running in the South Bruce Peninsula race questioned whether or not the meeting was skewed to favour candidates preferred by the association.
Lyttle says the association will send out a newsletter that says what candidate suits a position best, in the eyes of the association board, for information purposes.
She says this service was requested by the membership.
Lyttle says the all-candidates event is scheduled on a weeknight because they couldn't secure a facility for a weekend date.
She says the last time they tried a weekend date, to accomodate seasonal residents, it was mostly permanent residents that showed up anyway.
The Amabel property owners association has a membership of over 700.