Covington candidates for mayor and city council will give their thoughts on the most important issues facing the city from 6 to 8 p.m., Oct. 25 at the Covington Branch Library at a forum hosted by The Covington News and Covington-Newton County Chamber of Commerce.
Residents are invited to send questions ahead of time to The News by email at news@covnews.com or to post questions on The News’ Facebook wall. The chamber is also soliciting questions from its members businesses.
Attendees will also be able to submit written questions during the forum. All questions will be asked by event moderators chamber President Hunter Hall and The News’ Publisher Charles Hill Morris, Jr.
“We look forward to having the community come out and hear the candidates speak in their own voices on the important issues facing this city,” Morris said.
“Specifically, from the chamber members’ perspective we will be curious to learn the candidates’ positions on issues that will eventually influence the business community, tourism and our future economic development activity,” Hall said.
Three Covington seats will be up for election Nov. 8. The mayor’s race is between Ronnie Johnston and Bobby Sigman; incumbent Kim Carter is not seeking reelection.
The council Post 3, East Ward seat will be a race between Lamar Brown and incumbent Keith Dalton, while the race for Post 2, East Ward seat will be between Ronald Martin and incumbent Mike Whatley.
To learn more about the candidates before the forum, visit covnews.com to read the stories about their backgrounds and preliminary thoughts on the issues.
The News has also posted the full video interviews it conducted with the two mayoral candidates who will be on the ballot. Each interview is about 45 minutes in length; the interviews are broken up into nine to 10 clips apiece for ease of loading and viewing.
According to The News’ unscientific, online poll, of those who would vote for Covington mayor, 49.7 percent (273 votes) of respondents would vote for Ronnie Johnston if they were voting today.
Write-in candidate Rev. Tim Walden landed in second place with 30.2 percent of the vote (166 votes), while Bobby Sigman was third with 20 percent (110 votes).
