With all of the shelter-in-place restrictions in place these past 6 months, getting our hair cut, traveling, shopping working—they’ve all been curtailed.

As bad as all of that is, it’s election season and we have important races on the ballot for Richmond City Council and the WCCUSD Board of Education.

Walking door to door to talk to voters is very difficult, there aren’t any events we can attend to hear the candidates and we don’t really have Council and Board meetings in the same way where we can view and listen to the candidates as they speak on the issues.

Even candidate forums have been turned into Zoom events with bad headshots of the candidates, freezing videos and the ever present “You have to unmute yourself”.

Today the Richmond Chamber of Commerce and the Council of Industries hosted a Zoom forum for candidates running to serve on the Richmond City Council.

The candidates are:

DISTRICT 1

Melvin Willis

Eleanor Thompson

DISTRICT 5

Gayle McLaughlin

Mike Vasilas

Ahmad Anderson

Najari Smith

DISTRICT 6

Vinay Pimplé

Claudia Jimenez

Ms. Dandie

All candidates were invited but Gayle McLaughlin had a conflicting engagement and Vinay Pimplé had a work commitment for his new employer.

Because of time constraints, not all candidates had the same questions to respond to.  The selections were conducted randomly.  As might be expected considering that the hosts were business people, the questions revolved more around business interests than social issues.  The social issues will likely be highlighted at many of the other forums.

The video can be viewed on YouTube at: 

https://youtu.be/ZkI2rCCtJso

The video and audio can be downloaded here:

Video:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pbVSBQIXyOPG5F_iUToyfGb6aWswzi4i/view?usp=sharing

Audio:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VbYQRf8LqsqyUISEjMemBMwaySfQp9N6/view?usp=sharing