Council hopefuls square off

Six candidates for the Orland City Council faced off Tuesday in a candidates’ forum hosted by the Orland Area Chamber of Commerce.

Incumbents Mayor Vern Montague, Vice Mayor Bruce Roundy and Councilman Mike Yalow joined challengers Sharon Nord, Wade Elliott and James Paschall in answering pre-submitted questions on growth, financial and management issues.

The two-hour event brought a nearly full house of onlookers with some wearing buttons for their candidate inside the Carnegie Center.

Retired Glenn County Superior Court Judge Angus Saint-Evens served as moderator – pulling questions from a cylinder and giving the candidates two to three minutes to answer them. They also gave brief background introductions and a six-minute recap at the end.

The new candidates include a former City Council member, Paschall; a real estate person, Nord; and Elliott who is an officer on the chamber of commerce board, However, Saint-Evens told the audience to his knowledge, Elliott did not participate in any  planning for the forum.

Forum organizer Marian Smutny also said the chamber was not endorsing any candidates when interviewed by the Press-Register last week, and she said it invited everyone to attend.

The Orland City Council has three seats up in the Nov. 4 election, so there is a possibility it might have some new faces in January – depending on how the voting goes.

Incumbents stressed their experience and desire to continue moving Orland along its present path while the challengers criticized the present leadership for eliminating the city’s planning commission and not running the city more like a business.

Yalow, Roundy and Montague each emphasized there is “a learning curve” when becoming a council member since local government is complex and requires a lot of study and meetings.

“Government is not a business per se,” Yalow said. “Government does not run like private enterprise.”

And Roundy said the council must follow codes and regulations issued not only by the state and federal governments but the city’s own ordinances, and members cannot get around them.

Both Yalow and Roundy are active in the California League of Cities Sacramento Valley Division and have been to Sacramento numerous times to lobby for small cities, they said.

However, the challengers said their business experience and leadership skills would provide a different perspective to the council.

The incumbents have been on the council from two to eight years and cited new commercial growth in Orland, the building of the new recreation center in Lely Park and the realignment of Highway 32 as major accomplishments during their terms.

Challengers like Paschall said he did not believe the current city council had squandered money, but he found the city’s staff was much bigger today than it was during his first term in the 1980s, and there could be room for cutting the budget.

Nord criticized the council for disbanding the planning commission since she believes it is “a liaison and buffer between the city council and the people,” she said. Its purpose is to catch mistakes before planning issues went to the council, and without it, that check and balance system is gone.

And Elliott said he thinks government’s role is to provide “protection and enforce the rule of law,” otherwise, it becomes an obstacle in the way of entrepreneurs. Therefore, he would promote government serving the public rather than serving itself, he said.

Generally, all of the candidates said they were pro-growth but wished to see it come in an orderly and controlled fashion, and most favored keeping city services like the library, swimming pool and public works. But there are no hard and fast solutions for maintaining them in these tough economic times.

The incumbents also warned the state’s financial crisis will have a severe impact on the city next year, and some services will probably have to be cut – so whoever is on the council is going to have a difficult job.

A second city council candidates’ forum is scheduled for Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. in the Carnegie Center. There, the candidates will answer additional pre-submitted questions from the ones they took Tuesday. Separate forums for the Orland Unified School District Board candidates are planned for Oct. 14 and 28 at the same location.

After Tuesday’s forum ended, most of the audience left and did not wait to mingle and speak individually with the candidates.

The chamber received some complaints about the pre-submitted question format, but officials said they wanted to keep the forums short and on track which is why no live questions were taken from the audience.