Public Candidate Forum planned for Oct 21
The public candidate forum is planned for Oct. 21 for Glasgow City Council candidates
By Allyson Dix, Managing Editor/Barren County Progress
The South Broadway entrance to the First United Methodist Church, which leads into the Family Life Center, will host a Glasgow City Council candidate forum for the public to attend on October 21. The forum is led by the Concerned Citizens of Barren County Organization. Photo by Allyson Dix
With seventeen candidates vying for Glasgow City Council in less than three weeks, a local organization known as Concerned Citizens of Barren County is providing the opportunity for the candidates to participate in a public forum on October 21.
The forum is slated to begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Family Life Center at First United Methodist Church in Glasgow. Entry to the facility for the forum is located off South Broadway. Candidates have not been given any questions prior to the event.
The moderator for the evening will be Stan Palmer, who has moderated similar forums in the past in other communities. Palmer said each candidate was sent an invitational letter explaining the rules and how the forum would operate. Sixteen of the seventeen candidates have agreed to participate, excluding one candidate who had a prior commitment that he/she could not change.
The goal for the forum is to last for 90 minutes and the questions are confidential and limited to only the group who formulated them prior to the forum.
“The group spent a considerable amount of time writing questions for the candidates,” Palmer said. “We have three categories of questions that we’re going to ask randomly.”
First, each candidate will get a unique question. Then, there will be a set of seven random questions and some candidates may receive a repeated question. Lastly, a common question will be asked to all candidates.
“Our goal here is to ask the same question to all candidates so the community can hear their different perspectives on the same idea,” Palmer said.
When it comes to terms of randomness, Palmer said the system he built will allow candidates to draw from a hat of seventeen numbers which will randomly place a candidate on a list that has already notated which questions they will receive.
“We did it this way so it does not allow any favoritism towards any one candidate so to do that we built a way to lay the questions out, we’re going to have a hat with seventeen numbers,” Palmer added.
Concerned Citizens of Barren County is a rather new organization and was coordinated by Mike Miller.
The Glasgow-Barren County organization’s mission statement includes its goal is to influence local community affairs.
“We strive to hold all things to the highest moral, ethical, and conservative values,” their mission statement reads. “We place particular importance on supporting pro-life, fiscal responsibility, and second amendment freedom while opposing whole initiatives.”
The group focuses actions primarily on influencing city and county school boards, Glasgow’s city council as well as the Barren County Fiscal Court.
Their mission statement also reads, “Our statement of faith: we believe in aligning with God’s word, the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of Kentucky, and our conduct will be to represent Christ in our actions and speak truth in love.”
Miller said with the instrumental help of member Dick Sittler, the group initiated three legislative House Bills that were successful. In 2023, HB 153 was passed making Kentucky a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary City, and two other bills in 2024, HB 142 and HB 11, both bills deal with the vaping epidemic in schools and the businesses associated with the sale of vape products, respectively.
Concerned Citizens of Barren County is open to the public. The organization meets every first Thursday of each month at 6 p.m. typically at Immanuel Baptist Church.
