Considerations on City Council Candidates
By Douglas Moran
Uploaded: Oct 11, 2022
Complaints about difficulties differentiating this group of candidates have become common. Blogger Diana Diamond discussed this in her September 15 ^blog^ just after the first of the major forums for candidates. Normally, I would heed the old admonition to “Pay attention to what they do, not what they say.” However, in the current pool of 7 candidates for 3 seats, this is useful for only 2 candidates: Doria Summa and Ed Lauing.
There will be another public forum for Council candidates on Thursday, October 13 7-9 pm in the Mitchell Park Community Center’s Palo Alto room (the big one). If virtual access (eg Zoom) info becomes available, I will add it here.
The following may help you think more critically about what the candidates are saying.
A major part of my motivation/goal for writing longer blogs has been to provide readers with information and perspectives that they can use in their discussions of the portions that interest them. About 30% of this blog is the footnotes and Resources section: links — mostly to spreadsheets — and explanation about those links. However, the length of this blog still exceeded both my intent and the indications of my outline.
I will start with my general approach for this election and then step through the candidates in decreasing order of monetary contributions received, each in a headlined section. To ameliorate the length of this blog, my intention is to make my comments on candidates understandable without your having read those preceding sections, and to make it easier to look back by bolding key words and phrasing in those sections. That is, you should be able to scroll way down to the sections on the candidates and scroll/search to the background paragraphs as needed. However, the background sections are intended to be useful for this election and for your understanding of future elections. I would have used clickable links to navigate around, but the provided blogging language is intended for short, uncomplicated compositions.
