The ghost of City Councilman Gary Silbiger must have been roaming the Radisson Hotel Thursday night when all nine candidates for the City Council assembled for a forum sponsored by the Fox Hills Neighborhood Assn.
Odd and narrow-specialty questions — on subjects that only and vociferously have been championed by Mr. Silbiger — dominated the gentle interrogation of the office-seekers.
They answered formfully in most cases. Hardly any differences were detected among them in the final forum until March 13.
Through the first month of candidate forums, nearly all questions were gentle, soft, undemanding, and not directed at a specific contender.
Four of the seven questions posed by the moderator Lezlie Brazil, president of the association, seemed to fall into that category.
Two of the most simplistic were straight out of Mr. Silbiger’s playbook:
• Would you support a Youth Council?
• Would you support a Dr. Martin Luther King program each year?
“These were stupid have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife? type questions,” snapped one participant afterward. “They were designed to elicit one obvious answer. Do you really think anybody was going to say ‘no’ to the King program? ”
As background, it should be reported that Mr. Silbiger, alone, has repeatedly flogged these two issues throughout his six years on the City Council.
They may be noteworthy because each one has isolated Mr. Silbiger from his critical colleagues on the dais.
While the City Council vote on a youth council to compete with the city-sponsored one typically has brought a 4 to 1 response, most candidates indicated, vigorously, they would support a new youth council.
A notable exception was Andy Weissman. Like the members of the City Council, he wondered why the question was raised.
Since there already are at least two teen groups — one by the Culver-Palms YMCA, one by the Parks and Recreation Dept. — what need is there for another group?
As the lone candidate to challenge the need for still another teen council, Mr. Weissman also wanted to know what was meant by “Do you support?” If elected, he said he was not sure he would be supportive until he had studied the subject and determined whether there was, in fact, a need.
The City Council’s years’ long Monday night debates over the state of the King program have been far more complicated than the one of mere support posed on Thursday night.
Two other questions could have been designed to benefit candidate Christopher Armenta, whom Mr. Silbiger supports in the April 8 election.
City Hall officials said that it is not uncommon during election cycles for specially tailored questions to be aimed at certain candidates with the intention of embarrassing or inflating them.
Last autumn at a School Board candidates forum, an audience member wanted to know how many Board meetings each had attended within the past year.
Did the questioner know that the highest-profile candidate in the field, Steve Gourley, would be the only one to say “none”?
In Mr. Gourley’s case, he skillfully turned the question around and crafted an answer that came out favorably for him, one reason he was elected to the Board.
Thursday night the City Council candidates panel was asked:
• Approximately how many budget discussion sessions of the City Council have you ever attended before the Council finalizes the annual budget?
Could this have been a setup for Mr. Armenta?
Except for Mr. Armenta, the answers were varied.
They ranged from “I have no idea how many I have sat through during 30 years of community involvement” (Andy Weissman), to “more than half” (Loni Anderson), to none (Randy Scott Leslie, Mehaul O’Leary).
By contrast, Mr. Armenta’s record was 100 percent. “That’s an easy one for me,” he said. “As your elected City Clerk, I am there recording the actions of the Council members for the public.”
In the fourth illustration of a curious question, Ms. Brazil, the moderator, said she had a question from the audience only for Mr. Armenta, affording him a solo moment in the spotlight:
• How will you bring transparency to city government?
Mr. Armenta replied that when he was elected City Clerk in ’02, there was a community debate over how to strongly improve the public notification process, another favorite talking point of Mr. Silbiger.
Mr. Armenta promised that once elected he would work to refine the notification system.
