I’m looking forward to seeing what our local candidates have to say

When you call up candidates running for elected office to interview them, you sometimes get some shall we say “interesting responses.”

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

I’ll never forget the one candidate, who said, “Boy that’s a good question! I’ll have to think about that one,” when I simply asked him why he was running for office. (It was several years ago and he was one of about a dozen candidates running for jailer that year. Fortunately, he didn’t win…LOL.)

Suffice it to say that sometimes we get some real doozies, who run for office.

While I don’t know or haven’t met all the candidates, I don’t think we have any local candidates this year that are really out in left field. I’ll be able to give you a little better idea about that one week from now.

In next week’s edition of the News Journal, we will be running the results of our candidate questionnaires in the Corbin City Commission and Williamsburg City Council races.

Given all the craziness this year, we have kept it simple and asked the candidates only two questions that will give you a pretty good insight into where they stand.

We asked why are they running for office, and what they think are the top three issues in their race. I look forward to seeing their responses.

Brownie points to Williamsburg City Councilwoman Laurel Jeffries West, who was the first candidate in that race not only to reply back that she got her questionnaire, but also to answer it.

Lisa Garrison also gets brownie points for being the first Corbin City Commission candidate to fill out her questionnaire.

We will also be running preview stories in next week’s paper on the two contested Whitley County Board of Education races that our reporter Dean Manning will be writing.

In the third district, incumbent Malorie Cooper is running against former Whitley County Clerk Kay Schwartz. In the fourth district, incumbent Brenda Hill is facing challenger Danny W. Terrell.

I received a phone call Monday afternoon from a nice lady asking me if we would be running candidate questionnaires on the Corbin City Commission race this year, and if so, when those would be appearing in the paper.

As it just so happened, I had just gotten done sending out reminders to the candidates (either through Facebook Messenger or text message), that I had e-mailed them questionnaires last week, and that the due date is Friday for their responses.

This isn’t to say that one would ever need to remind candidates to send back their responses to their candidate questionnaires…LOL. As I told the nice lady Monday afternoon, we usually get about 10 percent of the responses back right away from the candidates. Then maybe another 15-20 percent of the questionnaires will be returned over the next little bit.

No matter how long we give them, it is during that last 48 hours or so when the vast majority of the candidates send back their responses. Usually, there are a handful we have to call and hound on the last day reminding them to send in their answers.

Speaking of the election, the Southern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce held a virtual candidate’s forum in the Williamsburg City Council race late Monday afternoon. There is a story on the front page of this week’s News Journal with details about that forum.

WEZJ Owner David Estes moderated, and did a good job. While Estes had initially planned to ask six questions to the candidates during the hour-long forum, he was only able to get in three questions.

Next Monday at 5:30 p.m., News Journal Publisher Don Estep will be moderating a chamber forum with Corbin City Commission candidates. It will also be virtual and shown on the chamber’s Facebook page via Facebook Live.

The chamber is doing a good thing in sponsoring these forums. Hopefully the chamber will continue organizing candidate forums for future elections.