The Courier-Herald is proud to invite the Plateau community to a candidate forum on Oct. 6 between Kim-Khanh Van and Reagan Dunn, candidates for the King County Council, at the Enumclaw Expo Center Fieldhouse.
Attendance is free, and seats will be available first-come, first-serve. The fieldhouse is located at 1456 Roosevelt Avenue.
Courier-Herald editor Ray Miller-Still will emcee the evening, and moderating the forum will be Federal Way Mirror Editorial Director Andy Hobbs.
The event will also be available through a livestream on the Courier-Herald’s Facebook page. We may include questions from Facebook users during our questions from the audience period.
King County Council seats are divided up geographically. District 9 covers a cross-section of urban, suburban and rural voters, spanning Enumclaw in the southwest to the southern tip of Bellevue in the north.
Kim-Khanh Van is a Renton City Councilmember, attorney, and first-generation Vietnamese immigrant and former refugee.
Reagan Dunn, the incumbent, has experience as a federal prosecutor in Seattle, Miami, and our nation’s capitol as well as being an aide in former president George W. Bush’s Justice Department.
After introducing themselves, the candidates will answer questions prepared by the Courier-Herald covering the most important issues of the race, including but not limited to housing affordability, race and equity, crime and public safety, managing the COVID pandemic, and transportation concerns.
The forum will have a back-and-forth, conversational style, with each candidate having the opportunity to expand on their vision while responding to their opponent’s.
Near the end, questions from the audience will be selected for the candidates as well, taken from both the in-person and online audience.
In the unfortunate event that the in-person event must be cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions, the livestream will be how all viewers tune in and submit questions, and the candidates will discuss the issues over Zoom.
Assuming the event continues in-person, there will be time after the forum for candidates to talk one-on-one with the public. We encourage those attending to spread out or, weather-permitting, take those conversations outside. Every bit of COVID mitigation helps.
The forum falls about a week before October 15, when the the 18-day November election voting period begins. The Courier-Herald will publish an article about the forum before ballots go out, ensuring voters are armed with as much information as possible before ballots arrive in their mailboxes. (Military and overseas ballots are mailed in September.)
Election day is November 2.
Schedule of events:
6:00 p.m.: Doors open at the Fieldhouse.
6:30 p.m.: The forum begins.
8:00 p.m. (or earlier): The forum ends, and the candidates will have time to talk one-on-one with the public.
8:30 p.m.: The event is concluded.
