Dear Editor,
A recent post by Mr. Windhorst on Facebook needs some corrections. The Candidate Forum at NMSU on Feb. 15 was not a “Democrat Mayoral Forum,” as he called it. In case Mr. Windhorst does not know this, our elections are NON-PARTISAN, as is NMSU a NON - PARTISAN institution. That means the candidates run on their own merit, with no political affiliation identified. As one of the organizers of the forum, I want to say that I had no idea to what political party any of the candidates belonged. As a non-partisan institution, devoted to educating the citizens of this region, NMSU has traditionally offered its auditorium for this Forum, as a service to the entire community and a way for people to become better informed about all the candidates and their individual positions on issues.
It was true and unfortunate that not all the candidates got to answer all the questions asked, but there was a specific reason for this. After the very long “Republican Forum”, which lost half of its audience by the end, we received feedback from several people in the community: keep it short and have a strict timekeeper to enforce limits. And given the large number of candidates we expected to show up (two did not), we knew this would be a challenge and it was. As our solution, we chose to target questions to the candidates that would have had the most experience and/or knowledge about a particular issue, whenever possible; and then to give broader questions to whomever had not had the opportunity to answer the last question. Mr. Windhorst, in his Facebook post, found “the uneven treatment (of the candidates) offensive.” As I explained above, the “targeted” treatment was not meant to be uneven or offensive to anyone.
Joan Boyden