Mayor's Candidate Forum

By Peter Albert, DTNA President

I don't want to risk losing your attention with a rambling State of the Neighborhood Address, so I'll focus on what's important: Please make a note in your calendar for the Mayor's Candidate Forum on September 9, 2003 at 6:30 pm. This event will replace our regularly scheduled meeting, and will be co-hosted by the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, Castro Area Planning and Action, the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association and Mt. Olympus Neighbors Association.

The candidates who we have invited are Alioto, Ammiano, Denny, Gonzalez, Leal, Newsom, Ribera and Reid. No one has declined, and all have shown interest and availability.

The Forum will be in the Auditorium of the Davies Campus of California Pacific Medical Center at Duboce and Castro. We are working with the campus to make parking available, but do keep in mind the excellent public transportation options and, for most of us in the DTNA, the immediate walkability of this choice.

We want to give each candidate a chance to speak on issues that matter to us in the five neighbor- hoods. We will give each one a preview of the top issues we've heard about over the year. For Duboce Triangle, the topics include traffic calming/safe streets, our working relationship with the planning department, homelessness, and the Halloween Party. Since we are hosting eight candi- dates in only a couple of hours, we have to keep the slate of topics to a very few and rely on diligent moderation. We are also asking the audience to join us in observing ground rules of respect and consis- tency in treatment of all candidates in consideration of others in the audience, so electioneering and par- tisan displays in the auditorium itself should be silent and limited to pins, T-shirts or buttons - nothing that drowns out other speakers or blocks sightlines for other members of the audience.

We expect a good-sized crowd, and we hope that the event will help us all make good choices in November.