ANDERSON, Calif. — The League of Women Voters (LWV) hosted another candidate forum Thursday night, this one in the Anderson City Hall and Community Center.
It’s the third of several candidate forums being held by the LWV before November’s election.
It consisted of four candidates vying for 3 seats on the Anderson City Council, Darin Hale, Bonnie Simmons, and incumbents Susie Baugh and Stan Neutze.
The night began with all of them stating why they’re running for city council.
“As an incumbent I love what I’ve been doing and I want to continue that, our parks have a lot more work to do, we want to keep our police department in good standing and as Stan said we have an aging water system that needs to have a lot of work done,” Baugh said.
“I think it’s healthy for cities to have new ideas and just a new voice so that’s why I want to run. I love Anderson and I want to be a part of it and a part of the future that is in our community,” Simmons said.
“There’s some things that we still need to continue to do one of them is maintaining Anderson as one of the three safest cities in California, so we want to keep crime out of Anderson that’s one of my key goals is continuing to do that, we have a brand-new city manager I want to be here to help him through his first couple of years,” Neutze said.
“It really comes down to I absolutely love Anderson, I love the community that it’s grown to become, on the topic of again on the water infrastructure I think I’m the perfect man for the job because of my background and when I first got out of the construction industry I went right into code enforcement and building inspection and I assisted APD here and we cleaned up Anderson Creek we cleaned up the transient encampments and we started the program of boarding up drug houses in the community,” Hale said.
One of the questions asked by the audience was their top 3 capital improvement projects they want to do and fixing the water infrastructure was one the candidates were all aligned on.
“Aging water lines are one of them and also we need a new water tank up in Anderson Heights and I think we need to improve our sewer infrastructure,” Neutze said.
“Water is number one there is no question about it, sewer lines I think we can probably manage sporadically in places and then it would be streets,” Hale said.
“We are having tremendous numbers of leaks right now, those two things especially are very important and energizing our sewer and our water treatment plant,” Baugh said.
“Our infrastructure needs some attention, I’d love to just look into how we can make our roads a little more bike friendly and commute friendly, and I would also like to take a look at our housing and our small business growth and what is prohibiting that,” Simmons said.
There will also be a candidate forum for a few 2- and 4-year term seats on the Shasta County Office of Education Board next Wednesday September 25 at the Riverfront Theater at 6 p.m. the LWV will also be hosting a proposition pros and cons event at the First United Methodist Church on October 7 at 6 p.m.