Column:
Nate Kennedy's picks for city elections
Vote Tuesday to keep up the record turnout.
Published April 2, 2009
Yes! It's time to vote again! Aren't you excited? It's coming up on Tuesday! Have you been keeping up with local politics? If not, here are my researched choices for the Columbia Public School Board and the two open seats on the Columbia City Council.
Over the last several weeks I have attended two council debates and one school board debate, and I have read the candidate profiles by The Columbia Tribune and the Columbia Missourian, which you can find online.
For the school board election, there are nine candidates. It's an overload! But after the League of Women Voters forum on March 19, I definitely knew for whom I was going to vote.
I had heard a lot of buzz about Michelle Pruitt leading up to this in the Democratic circles, and found during the forum she is very qualified to be on the board. She has a physics and math degree among others and wants to improve the curriculum and teaching in those areas. She has already been doing this, too, as she has been volunteering on the CPS Math Community Advisory Committee for two years.
In this election you get to vote for two candidates, and my second choice is the unlikely Adam Sorg. Sorg is a single parent who dropped out of high school but got his GED and an anthropology degree from MU. His occupation is a cook at Longhorn Steakhouse. He's obviously catching a lot of flak for being a divorced restaurant cook, but he knows exactly where many of the educational problems begin: outside the classroom.
His philosophy is dead on. Sorg wants the school board to work more closely with community organizations, so students have a healthy and stable home environment so they can achieve at school. This is absolutely key to a child's education. After hearing all the candidates at the forum I realized his perspective was unique, and this hard-working, single dad deserves a seat on the board.
And, in the races for the Second and Sixth Ward City Council seats, some of you might have read my endorsement of Sixth Ward incumbent Barbara Hoppe in The Maneater on March 5. That still stands. Vote for her if you live in these areas: East Campus, the residence halls that share the same block as the Dobbs group, Campus View, Deer Valley, the Bearfield area, Campus Lodge, The Reserve and Gateway Apartments.
But if you live in the northern and western parts of Columbia, I am sorry. In the race for the Second Ward seat, I have never seen two more lackluster candidates than Jason Thornhill and Allan Sharrock. Neither is better than the other.
Both did answer MU College Democrats member Nick Mustoe's open letter to the candidates, and said they would buy a Blackberry if elected and start using Twitter, and that's a plus.
I don't think I can advocate for Sharrock because from what I could tell he seems to come from a conservative ideology.
Thornhill seems like a moderate but hasn't put forth a compelling argument as to why he deserves my support. If nothing else I would vote for Thornhill because he seems less of a threat to the progressive policies recently implemented by the City Council.
Last fall MU students had record voter registration and turnout. Please keep going to the polls to maintain our status as a voting demographic to be reckoned with.
Nate Kennedy is the chairman of the Young Democrats of Missouri College Federation. He can be reached at nkennedy@themaneater.com.