Come Wednesday evening a group of “concerned citizens” will be conducting Wellsville's own Meet The Candidates Night. There will be no need to travel all the way over to Lisbon and having to sit listening to candidates from all over the county.
Kick-off for the Wellsville event is set for 7 PM at Village Hall located at 1200 Main St. In this year's General Election, on November 8, Village voters will be voting on a new mayor and electing four candidates for Village Council.
Running for mayor is Susan Haugh, Nancy Murray, Jack Cataldo and Joe Soldano. There are seven candidates running for four Council seats. They are Tonda Ross, John Morrow, Diane Dinch, John McMahon, Don Brown, Randy Allmon and Tony Caltaldo. Ross and Morrow are political new comers. Dinch and Brown have had previous Council experience. McMahon, Allmon and Cataldo are currently serving on Council.
We have been told that all four candidates for mayor will be there and six out of the seven candidates for Council have committed to attending. School Board of Education member Ed Bauer will act as the narrator/master-of-ceremony.
The event is open to the public and free of admission. The group of “concerned citizens” organizing the event are bi-partisan individual citizens and they do not represent any particular political party, committee, club or organization.
ole nib
8 comments:
Looking forward to hearing what the candidates have to say. Hope to see many concerned citizens there. No one has the right to complain about the next mayor or village counsel representative if they don't care enough to hear their views.
Even more important is making sure you're registered and getting to the polls on November 8.
Kudos to the group that organized tonight's event.
nib
It's obvious what needs to happen. Joe S. Has been quiet for a long time. Heard he was trying to stay away from controversial matters. Not cool, our next mayor will know you can't solve a problem if you hide from it. GO SUSIE!
I attended last night's "Meet The Candidates" event and did hear a few good ideas from the participants. I submitted two written questions which were read at the conclusion of the proceedings which I'd like to address here, hopefully for others to comment on. 1) when asked for the candidates views on a landlord/rental property inspection/fee program like East Liverpool has in place already, and which does generate a significant amount of revenue for their city, all the candidates seemed to think it was a good idea worth considering. The trouble is, this idea was brought up at a council meeting over a year ago and no action has ever been taken since to bring it into being.
I talked to the people who run the program for East Liverpool face-to-face on more than one occasion and gathered copies of their inspection forms, and all other associated materials they use to run their program. I gave them to one of our councilpersons, thereby helping all of them out by reducing the amount of time and legwork involved in finding out how to implement such a program here in Wellsville, hoping further discussions would take place on the subject.
About three-fourths of the candidates last night were councilpersons then, and evidently didn't think a potentially good source of revenue was worth pursuing then. So why are we supposed to believe anything might be done to revive the issue now? I have nothing against anyone who chooses to rent out properties as a source of income, and applaud those who do and try to maintain decent looking places that make the town look better. I do have a problem with those who only want to take rent money out for years and let the places turn into eyesores in otherwise nice looking neighborhoods.
This is just another example of failure to follow up on ideas that might bring money into town, while those who run it repeatedly bemoan the fact that the village doesn't have any revenue.
2) My second question was on using the local television stations to help turn up the heat on elected officials at county and state level to get Wellsville additional financial help. The response from the candidates was less than enthusiastic, citing a boundary/distance problem with getting the stations to show up.
When Immaculate Conception Church was being closed it sure made the local stations! Proof in point that if the story is worthwhile, you can gain support from others.
Our tax money was used to bail out the banking industry and yet our town has many rundown eyesores that went back to the banks, while no provisions were made to keep the grass cut or check up on them and properly secure them to prevent vandalism from occurring. How does it pass the common sense test to hope to resell these properties if they are destroyed? Maybe if one of the local stations aired footage of these properties and got a spokesperson from one of these banks and asked that question, maybe they'd get the message that the shape they're left in is unacceptable to those of us who have to live here. This is all part of a bigger story, as we're not the only town with this problem. Maybe the story might get picked up by a bigger viewing audience and we could get something done about it. Asking "pretty please" just doesn't seem to be cutting it.
Any thoughts out there?
I wonder if anybody from Wellsville's administration ever bothered to ask themselves, or a Baard representative for that matter, if Baard was having so much trouble coming up with the financing just to purchase the land at the bottom of town, what was their gameplan and timeline for financing the actual construction of the plant--the costliest part of the project. Seems to me, securing the land would be the easy part...
I couldnt have said it better myself. I do have some thoughts.
We need to clean house and get the members of council who havent been
pushing to clean up the properties and form the landlord assoc. after you gave them all the tools., I guess that would be all of them. We need to go to every council meeting and put council, the mayor and andy beech on the hot seat until they pursue the issue seriously and make the changes that need to be made. We need to use the TV station, the newspapers and every and any avaliable media outreach to put this front and center. Then, business will consider wellsville because we are working on it.
Anonymous, you took the words right out of my mouth. Go to council meetings, media, whatever it takes to clean up our town. Make council, mayor, Andy Beech and others accountable for their actions (or lack of). New sidewalks is a start...I was also at Nov. 1 council meeting. I am NOT impressed with Andy Beech. He seems to me like he doesn't want to do anything that might cause him extra work. We need change, but not in the pocket.
Post a Comment