Chapel Hill Mayor

Welcome to the open thread for the Chapel Hill Mayor candidate forum happening on October 4, 2015. Comments on this post will open at that time.

There are three candidates running for one seat:

• Pam Hemminger
• Gary Kahn
• Mark Kleinschmidt

You can observe the forum at http://orangepolitics.org/elections-2015/forums/chmayor.

We hope you'll use this open thread to post your thoughts and reactions. Also, if you want to propose additional discussion topics, you can reach the editors during the forum via Twitter, Facebook, or the contact page. The forum moderator will have final say in question selection.

CHALT, the special-interest political action committee formed earlier this year, hosted the first Chapel Hill candidate forum last night at the Seymour Center.

Questions asked at the forum centered on development issues. Questions were often long and leading, including questions with factual errors and missing context. It seemed that questions were designed to promote a specific viewpoint rather than to give candidates a chance to share their views and vision for our town. Candidate pushback about the biased questions even led to the moderator, Theresa Raphael Grimm, to comment that she was only the messenger and had not written the questions – a CHALT committee had, she told the audience.

A Storify of the tweets from the forum is below, in case you missed it.