Mark your calendars, Mooresville. We’re gonna have a debate!

The Scoop is partnering with YOU, the Mooresville community, to get to know our town board candidates and their platforms a bit better. We will hold a candidate forum on Thursday, Sept. 21, beginning at 6 p.m. in the Joe V. Knox Auditorium in the Charles Mack Citizens Center. 

Let’s go ahead and address one thing head-on: this won’t be a standard forum of softball questions being lobbed. In fact, we’re leaving the questions up to you because we know our readers are the most educated out there when it comes to local-government issues. 

Got a question for the candidates? Let us have ‘em! Once they’re all in, we’ll have a group of people get together to go through each and every question, eliminate duplicates then decide the questions that we will have the time to ask. 

Your questions can be submitted to me at jaimegatton@gmail.com until noon on Aug. 27. (Note the different spelling of Jaime.)

And don’t worry: even if your question isn’t selected, my plan is to have a one-on-one with each candidate — possibly in a friend’s recording studio — to ask the questions that we may not get around to in the forum.

Be sure to note if your question is for a particular grouping of candidates or for all of them. Here’s the breakdown of our 2023 town board candidates: 

Mayor — Chris Carney & Bobby Compton

Ward 2 — Will Aven & Thurman Houston (incumbent)

At-Large Commissioner — Jeff Karp, Eddie Karriker, Sean Kinahan, Frank Owens, Angela Stutts & Thomas Tohn

And while Commissioner Eddie Dingler is running unopposed for the Ward 1 seat, if you have a question for him, go ahead and send it my way, too. 

The Scoop will be moderating the forum, and we’re excited that our friend Mike Fuhrman with Iredell Free News will be joining us, too! We hope that members of our audience will feel comfortable asking the questions, which we will have previously determined.  We will factor some additional time in for introductions, conclusions and follow-up questions if it’s determined at any time that a candidate’s answer warrants it. 

One final thing for now: 

Though we had recently emailed the Citizens Center, asking to reserve the Sept. 21 date, our email must have fallen through the cracks, so a longtime friend of the Scoop’s, Johnny Meadows, reserved the space for us. While Johnny has not asked for us to reimburse him, he put down a large chunk of dollars — $500 of which will be returned after the forum as long as nobody damages the room (no rotten tomatoes, please!) — and we also will need to rent sound equipment for the event. The total cost to put the forum on will easily exceed $500.  

If you can pitch in for the cause, you can find me around town, or send a Venmo donation to @mooresvillescoop. If I set up other ways to contribute, I’ll pass them along. 

We are thrilled to be able to host this forum with you, and we are looking forward to hearing more from our candidates.

Have a great week!

Jaime