Dear Angela,
.
As the lead political writer for the Sedona Times, I have been doing most of the candidate interviews. I attempted to contact every candidate running in the Verde Valley in contested primary races, due to time,
I apologize to those I didn’t get to. I would have liked to talk to every candidate, but time being of the essence, I with time short, I focused on contested races, though I managed to cover some uncontested. Different
candidates are posted on any given day, sometimes there are more Republicans
and sometimes more Democrats, sometimes alternative parties like the Green and
Libertarian.
There are a lot of Republicans running for CD1, and Ann Kirkpatrick is uncontested, so it might seem in that case that there is more Republicancoverage; when in fact because it is a profile series there were just more people
to talk to on the Republican side.
On the other hand, I couldn’t reach either of the Republican contenders for Attorney General, so I only covered the Democrats. Some of the Democrats I covered were David Lujan, Vince Rabago, Felecia Rotellini, Penny Kotterman, Cathy Eden, David Bradley, Chris Deschene, and San Wercinski. I did not cover Bill Lindsay or Bob Donahue, because they are uncontested, I will be talking to them in the next few weeks. I also went to the Democrat Election Headquarters on August 10, had a good long chat and signed the log-in sheet as well. I left cards and asked them
to send me any press releases or notice of upcoming events in the Verde Valley. I haven’t had time to do any follow up, because of the profile series. But come next week, I’ll check back in and do my best to get information on upcoming Democratic events.
I am doing everything I can to reach out to all of the political organizations of the Verde Valley, including the alternate parties. All of you can help by forwarding me information on events that you know are
coming up, and by encouraging your political organizations to put us on their press release list so we can get the news out. We can’t publish what we don’t know.
This is an open invitation to everyone in the Verde Valley, send notice of your political, volunteer, charitable, and cultural events to jonid@esdeona.net or publisher@sedonaeye.com. We’ll do our best post them in the appropriate section of the paper.
Sincerely,
Joni Dahlstrom
Staff Writer
sedonaeye.com Sedona Times Publishing Election Central c2010 |
Dear Joni:
Thanks for the detailed response. I hope you will come to one of our meetings…this fall we will be have lots of occasions to meet the candidates (albeit Democratic ones) and we will make sure you are on our data base.
I can give you one date right now – on Sunday, September 26th, we will be holding our Democrats of the Red Rocks/Democrats of the Verde Valley Annual Picnic and Fund Raiser. We will be having guest appearance of Don Bivens, the Chair of the State Party, and lots and lots of candidates (even including Lindsay Bell – yes, I thought you should get her name correct! She is Democratic Candidate for LD1).
It starts at 11.30 and will be at the Living Springs Camp in Oak Creek Canyon.
We hope you can come and cover the event! Lots of good food and great company!
The Democrats are very active here and I hope you will come and cover some of our events.