Thursday, October 11, 2012

Wahkiakum Candidates speak at Grays River Grange



Candidates for Wahkiakum County elected offices presented their positions in a candidate’s forum Tuesday night sponsored by the Grays River Grange.  An audience of 60 people listened as the candidates for State senator and representative offices,  county commission, treasurer and PUD commission talked about their campaigns and answered questions from the floor.

Jobs and the economy dominated the candidates remarks.
  Democrat Greg Prestegaard, (“PRESS-te-gard”) running for county commission position 1 spoke to the need to for job creation in the county, but stopped short of calling for a rollback of governmental regulations:

Prestegaard2.wav  “Everybody’s talking about the need to reduce regulations, well we’ll all like to reduce regulations, but we do have to have some regulations for businesses to thrive.  You have to have boundaries to operate within.”  (:13)

Independent candidate Mike Backman, (“BACK-man”) also running for position one, said internet based jobs are the best hope for the sparsely populated county:

Backman2.wav  “I feel that the best type of jobs to target will be internet based jobs because we just got the fiber-optics.  We now have up-to-date internet. I walked from door to door campaigning and was pleasantly surprised by how many people here already work on the internet.” (:15)

Both candidates are running for the open position left by Lisa Marsyla (“mar-SAH-la”), who is running for district 1 PUD Commissioner. Ballots for the November general election will be mailed out next Friday, October 19th.  

The complete forum is available to download from our website: coast radio dot org.  Click the “on demand” box on the home page. 

No comments:

Post a Comment