There are eight candidates running for four seats on Upper Arlington City Council. Pencilstorm asked each of the candidates five specific questions centered around issues that impacted Upper Arlington residents and questions that were being raised by fellow voters. Pencilstorm will be posting their complete and unedited answers individually throughout October and reposting all their answers together in the first week of November.
We have no answers from Bob Foulk to our questionnaire.
I reached out to Bob on two occasions asking for his participation. After the initial email request, he first called me, and then emailed the following response:
I believe I expressed well in our phone conversation that the questions posed by Pencilstorm were either inappropriate or irrelevant to the real task that will be confronted by anybody elected to our city council. You should have asked what I would do if I won the Ohio Lottery or whether I voted for Don or Hillary in 2016 as well.
If there exists a true journalistic goal of informing voters then you should be asking questions that are relevant to the hard, mostly fiscal-based decisions and priorities that will confront those elected in the next four years and beyond. There are good questions to be asked, and the League of Women Voters, Dispatch, and This Week News have asked them. You should follow their lead.
But being either inappropriate or largely irrelevant to the office sought aside from qualifications, your questions are not worthy of response. I’ll need to take the time to stop by and ask Colin about how these came about.
Sincerely,
Bob Foulk
After series began to run, I followed up and offered him another opportunity to respond. He declined again. I did the same with the other candidate who passed on forum, Omar Ganoom. Once again, we just print exactly what the candidates sent us with no editing and no comment from Pencilstorm whatsoever. - Wal Ozello
As a reminder, here are the questions we sent to all eight city council candidates:
If the election were today, would you vote for or against the school levy and why?
What qualifies you to be on Upper Arlington City Council?
If you had a magic wand and an unlimited budget, what infrastructure project you would implement?
Looking around Central Ohio, give an example of a community you think is doing it right and one that’s doing it wrong. What could Upper Arlington could learn from both?
At Pencilstorm, we all have a love of music. In that vein, what's your favorite album and why?
Pencilstorm is an independent news source and does not endorse any individual candidate. In the coming days, we'll be resposting all the responses we've received in one blog, along with rationale behind why we asked what we did.
Local UA Politics coverage provided by Wal Ozello. You can email him at Pencilstormstory@gmail.com or try to catch him at Colin's Coffee.
Check out coverage of all the candidates we've received responses from by clicking here.