B-Town Blog Candidate Forums will be Tuesday, Sept. 26 & Tuesday, Oct. 3!

The B-Town Blog is proud to announce that we will be holding two Candidate Forums for the 2017 Burien City Council election – please save these dates!: 1. Tuesday, Sept. 26: 6:30 p.m. with 7 p.m. forum start at El Dorado West Retirement Community, 1010 SW 134th Street – for Positions 1 and 3:

• Joel Manning vs. Pedro Olguin
• Jimmy Matta vs. Debi Wagner

2. Tuesday, Oct. 3: 6:30 p.m. with 7 p.m. forum start at Merrill Gardens Senior Living, 15020 5th Ave SW – for Positions 5 and 7:

• Darla Green vs. Nancy Tosta
• Patty Janssen vs. Krystal Marx

Since we first starting holding forums in 2010, our goal has been to provide an independent, civil and safe event to allow residents to meet and hear from candidates, as well as for candidates to have a place to share their thoughts/opinions on relevant local issues with residents. This will be our fifth election year of providing these forums as a goodwill service to the community, and we have striven to ensure that they have all been fair, successful and helpful to voters (watch videos of some of our previous candidate forums here). FORMAT/RULES This year our Moderator will be David Ruby, a Civics teacher at Highline High School. He will ask relevant local issue questions, which we will write and choose. Each candidate will be seated in a chair on a panel in front of the room, with a clearly marked name card, with candidates for each position seated next to each other, with our Moderator in the center.

• Four candidates will be on at the same time at each forum, with the format allowing for:
  • Opening statements (2-minutes each).
  • Relevant questions asked of all four candidates from the Moderator (with timed responses from each candidate).
  • Candidate responses (most likely 3-minutes as we’ve allowed in the past) to questions that we decide on (as we’ve done for every one of our previous forums).
  • Possibly a chance to rebut another candidate’s statement/claim with a process TBD (previously we used a “Purple Card Rule” where if a candidate wanted to rebut something, they held up a Purple index card, then had 1-2 minutes to rebut). This is still under review, and a we get closer to the event we’ll release updated info.
  • Closing statements (2-minutes each).

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS! We are simplifying the format this year, so there will be no audience questions asked live at these events; however, we are asking our Readers to submit questions in advance (email electionquestions2017@gmail.com), which we will review prior to the forum. It is our intention that each forum will be broadcast live on our Facebook page, as well as video and audio recorded for later playback/posting on our website, which so far in 2017 has been averaging over 102,000 Sessions and 375,000 Pageviews per month (as per Google Analytics). Our forums have historically been very well attended, and we are certain that this year’s will be as well.

SHOUTOUT: Super awesomesauce THANKS to Katalia Alexander for helping to organize these, as well as to all the Candidates and our host locations!

Thanks in advance for your cooperation, and good luck to all!

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