Candidates answer newspaper queries
The stories on Page 5 of today’s Pine Bluff Commercial are not lengthy, but through the magic of digital elements, the stories are chock-full of information. A recent editorial encouraged voters to get to the polls. This one could be considered a thank you to the candidates themselves.
In the lead-up to the election, The Commercial reached out to the many candidates running for office. We then sent them all questionnaires, asking them questions we thought readers would be interested in knowing the answers to.
There are six candidates running for Pine Bluff mayor, nine running for City Council and two running for state representative as well as those running for city clerk and treasurer and the ones running for justice of the peace positions on the Jefferson County Quorum Court.
By and large, they all cooperated and returned their responses. That was a big ask because they are all busy actually running for office, meaning they are working the phones and waving signs and otherwise trying to get elected. We thank them for that.
The ask was even bigger for those running for mayor. In addition to the scads of questions we asked them, we also sat down with five of the six to tape segments of The Newsroom. One of the segments was about an hour and one was three hours. The others fell somewhere in the middle – meaning that you can avail yourself of around 10 hours of interviews with the candidates. Again, thank you to them for making themselves available for such lengthy segments, and thank you to the United Way for allowing us to set up shop in one of the vacant offices where we held the interviews.
So please read what’s on Page 5, but also put a whole fresh pot of coffee on because what meets the eye on that page is nowhere close to what is contained in that page.
All in all, we suggest that we have some really grand people running for office. They don’t have to do it. Other than the mayor position, there’s not much pay involved. So they do this for another reason, a higher reason. We should all be pleased that Pine Bluff has smart and confident visionaries who want to lead our community. We may disagree with them on a little or a lot, but that’s what running for office is all about — getting one’s message out and answering to the public.
Good luck to them all, and enjoy the news value of our election coverage.