Civil Dialogue group launches four candidate debates next week
Joe Kent decides he will debate after initially declining to square off with Marie GP
A series of candidate debates in races for two Cowlitz County commissioner positions, a state Senate seat and Southwest Washington congressional representative kicks off on Sept. 11 at Lower Columbia College.
The debates all start at 7 p.m. on four consecutive Wednesdays and will take place in the Wollenberg Auditorium inside the college’s Rose Center for the Arts.
The debates were organized by the Cowlitz Civil Dialogue Project and are co-sponsored by the college.
The 90-minute debates all will be televised live on KLTV, the local cable television access channel.
A major change in the schedule took place on Tuesday. The campaign of Battle Ground Republican Joe Kent accepted an invitation to debate Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on Oct. 2. Kent had previously declined, and his campaign gave no reason for first refusing and then agreeing to participate.
Had Kent not participated in the debate, the Oct. 2 event would have been a question-and-answer session with MGP, a Skamania County Democrat who shocked the political world by narrowly defeating Trump-endorsed Kent in 2022. They are opposing one another again for the 3rd District seat representing Southwest Washington in Congress.
The debate format will be as follows.
Each candidate will take turns fielding questions first. Each will get two minutes to answer and a minute each for rebuttal.
No audience questions, but the public may suggest them on the Civil Dialogue Project's website — www.cowlitzcivildialogue.com. During the debate, all questions will be asked by moderators from the Civil Dialogue Project, retired Cowlitz Superior Court Judge Stephen Warning and Melanee Green Evans Lower Columbia College Head Start. They moderated the debates for the Longview and Kelso city council positions that the Civil Dialogue Project organized at the college last fall.
No cheering or jeering will be allowed, except applause at the beginning and the end.
Candidates will stand at podiums. They will be allowed to have written notes but no electronic devices. They will not get questions ahead of time.
A 10-minute break will be called at the halfway point of each debate.
Candidates will be given 2 minutes for closing statements; there will be no opening statements.
Each candidate will get to ask one question of the opponent.
The order of the debates is as follows:
Sept. 11: Cowlitz County Commissioner District 1. Two Kalama Republicans, Steve Rader and Mike Reuter, are competing for the seat now held by Arne Mortensen, who is stepping down.
Sept. 18: Cowlitz County Commissioner District 2. Longview Democrat Amy Norquist of Longview and Republican Steve Ferrell of Kelso are seeking to replace incumbent Republican Dennis Weber, who is stepping down.
Sept 25: State State District 19. Seaview Democrat Andi Day is trying to defeat first-term incumbent Jeff Wilson, a Longview Republican.
Oct 2: 3rd Congressional District representative. Both the Kent and MGP campaigns have criticized one another for alleged unwillingness to debate in public. In fact, however, the debate at LCC this night is one of several scheduled throughout the District.
The Cowlitz Civil Dialogue Project was founded in 2022 by a group of local leaders. It membership now includes former Kelso Mayor David Futcher; businessman Brian Magnuson; our moderators, Judge Warning and Melanee Green Evans; Alan Rose, formerly with Lower Columbia CAP; retired county commissioner and state legislator George Raiter; businessman and former county commissioner John Jabusch; and myself.
The Civil Dialogue Project is a non-partisan effort dedicated to encouraging respectful discourse, collaborative problem solving, fact-based nuanced dialogue and respect for diverse perspectives. In addition to the 2023 city council debates, the group hosted a series of forums in 2022 about the causes of civil discord and how to apply the principles of civil dialogue to specific problems.
In addtition its website, the Civil DialogueProject has a Facebook page: facebook.com/cowlitzcivildialogue/.
I appreciated the opportunity to attend last nights debate between the two candidates for congressional district 3. I thought the moderators did a fairly good job of maintaining the decorum and fairness of the debate, especially where the audience was concerned. However when MGP veered off on Ad hominem attacks on Mr. Kent's character the moderators were silent. However the Audience was not so much. Prime example; MGP began her final 2 minute summary with words to the effect that Joe Kent is just a horrrible person which elicited a loud reaction from the audience. The judge was quick to reprimand the audience, but MGP's obvious "un-civil" dialogue was apparently not recognizedly the moderators.