County Commission election forum

I am still waiting to hear from the two candidates for a commitment to a candidate forum this July. I had asked for a commitment by this past weekend or certainly by the end of this week (frankly, this is for my sake because of my work schedule). Mr. Fields said he couldn't commit by the end of this week. I have not received a reply from Mr. Cantrell other than his initial "I'll get back to you" reply. If anyone out there knows either of these gentlemen and supports the idea of a forum, I would ask you to encourage them to contact me. I have the sponsorship of Signal Mountain Middle/High School since we are using their auditorium. I also have a commitment from the Community News to give this forum coverage (I haven't contacted other outlets such as TV or Chattanoogan.com, yet. I was waiting for more specific dates). I am still hopeful this forum will occur. I feel strongly that the voters deserve more information to decide about these two gentlemen, especially as neither has served in public office before and therefore neither has a record. I encourage everyone to look at their campaign websites and ask them to be more specific about their specific stands on issues:

http://electjimfields.com/

http://davidcantrell.org/

I do want to thank Mr. Cantrell for responding to my curiousity about his independent candidacy (http://chattanoogan.com/articles/article_175379.asp ).Frankly, I thought his response was pretty good. One of the pleasures of running for town council was the fact that it was a non-partisan race and this liberated me from being attached to any irrelevant national "party" issues. As Richard Casavant used to tell me "potholes don't have parties"... ie, local issues rarely fall down into partisan positions, so I certainly understand where Mr. Cantrell is coming from even though it does make it a harder race to run.

One other issue... I am going to start moderating responses to this blog. I do not intend to prevent anyone from responding to the issues I have covered. All the responses I have received to my blog issues have been appropriate and highly appreciated by me. However, somehow I am getting some occasional Chinese and Russian spam and even porn, which I do not want getting through, so plan to delete that. If you ever send a response and don't see it on here within a day, please email me (paulmhmd@comcast.net) and I'll be sure it gets there, but hopefully I can screen out the inappropriate and irrelevant nonsense. Ain't the internet a wonderful thing???

Thanks for the interest.
Paul M. Hendricks