Journalism Matters: Great participation in voting guide — that’s a relief

I was warned that state and federal legislative candidates would be unlikely to participate in a joint Park Record/KPCW voting guide scheduled for publication Oct. 19. Happily, all but one who would represent us did, a Salt Lake City resident running for a state House district seat that barely touches the Wasatch Back. Big thanks to everyone else, including his rival.

We’re planning to send voting guides to each residential PO box in Summit and Wasatch County with key questions and answers from all the participating candidates seeking your vote for the most important elected offices in our area. That is, local, local, local — like location in the real estate biz — along with our local districts for the Legislature and Congress. Congress includes the U.S. Senate candidates with their longstanding ties to the Wasatch Back, even if we’re an inconsequential drip of yin in the yang that is an overwhelmingly Republican state.

Our partners at KPCW had similar good luck herding those cats we know as candidates for local offices — the Summit County Council, the Wasatch County Council, and the various school boards in our two counties. Only two in outer school districts didn’t reply after repeated requests.

I’d personally like to know that my representatives are responsive to everyone, reachable by the contact information they’ve made available. But elections are settled solely by the ballots cast in the end, and I can imagine a tart reply that the Park City news media haven’t exactly drawn their coverage net particularly tight along the Coalville-to-Francis nexus. Vows to change that notwithstanding.

Owing to space and our interest in crystalizing clear positions, we asked the candidates to limit their answers to no more than 30 words to each question. Candidates have lots of environments and venues in which they can expound, our thinking goes. Here they’ll need more discipline. This is not an easy assignment. I mean, we’re talking about half a tweet here, which also is plenty to get a key point across.

The large majority of the answers fit at least the spirit of brevity. A good third of the candidates fully embraced the challenge and noted their word counts with each answer — 30, 29, 24 and so on. Only a few swung more toward novels than tweets, overlooking that part of the memo concerning “30 words or less.”

But hey, they participated, and we did our very best to stay true to their core answers while shaving their answers to the essential 30 words, as we said we would. I say “we,” but I did the sculpting, aiming true for the heart of their message. Any errors here are mine.  

I think the candidates did a great job of showing what they stand for with an economy of words taking on the big issues we have to solve locally and as a nation. The replies were blissfully free of negative campaigning, putting down rivals or any of that junk. You’ll see when you read the guide. The focus for each candidate was what they believe and would do in office. I found their replies, even the lengthy ones, refreshing that way.

There were some patterns in the answers.

For instance, responses from Park City School Board candidates reflected concerns about communication and leadership at the top, while other districts’ board candidates exuded confidence in their overall direction.

Republican state legislators view themselves as responsive and close to their constituents, while Democrats see the body as far out of touch, particularly with respect to book bans and who gets to use which bathrooms. I thought I saw more common acknowledgement of what is only too plain about climate trends.  

And as always everywhere, Republicans tend to be more concerned about spending. Democrats tend to focus on fairness and breadth of voices.

Of high interest to me is how conservative-leaning Wasatch County’s council and liberal Summit County’s council deal with growth, housing affordability, and congestion. Consider Kimball Junction and Main Street Heber City, sprawling developments in progress in both counties, and now Wasatch towns on the cusp of becoming de facto ski towns with Deer Valley’s East Village and associated ski terrain coming on line. I’m fascinated with how each will turn out under contrasting approaches to the same challenges.

The voting guide can only hint at all that, of course. But then, all the candidate forums, websites, white papers, news stories and profiles together add up to the same — hints.

But hints have a way of adding up. So it’s well worth gleaning clues from the voting guide, which I think you’ll find surprisingly efficient and up to the task, as well as meeting the candidates, reading up, evaluating track records where that’s available.

The great participation in this guide alone sends a great message about the candidates making themselves available to voters, all the voters. This is huge in a too-careful era for public leaders with a budding propensity for ducking behind PR teams that really isn’t healthy. Some of the Park City School Board answers underscore the point, I think.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.