As a non-Raleigh resident, I only have citywide questions. But I hope these are useful in that they’re wonky enough to weed out the unprepared candidates while they differentiate the good ones.
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How will you work to gain the trust of your constituents and involve them in decision-making? Now that boards and commissions convened by the Office of Community Engagement, will replace the CAC system, do you support this approach? - Test candidates’ sincerity about engaging the public, understanding of new systems, and their philosophies on how they should work with their constituents to make meaningful decisions.
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Should Raleigh work together with neighboring cities like Cary, Durham, and Chapel Hill more closely to tackle regional issues like housing and transportation? How will you do that? - Assess candidates’ views on regionalism (or identify their outdated biases towards viewing the Triangle’s cities as individual parts), and gauge whether they understand that the Triangle’s economic and basic needs-related challenges are actually interconnected and complex.
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Do you support Raleigh’s efforts in BRT and commuter rail? What are your thoughts on their studies’ details on housing affordability and business cases? What would you do differently? - Discern if candidates truly care about mass transit in Raleigh and whether they’ve paid attention to their equity analyses. Candidates and readers alike may not recognize that GoRaleigh, GoTriangle etc. have worked hard to address obvious questions about impacts on gentrification, displacement, racial disparity, and housing market impacts; I think it’s important to really test the candidates’ knowledge on that and to test whether they can truly defend their platforms in the face of published data.
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What is Raleigh doing that other cities could learn from? What specific things are other cities doing that Raleigh could do? - Discern if candidates just like to preach about hand-wavy idealism, or whether they have specific ideas, policies, projects etc. that truly inspire them. For example, I personally hope they’d think about UDO amendments to allow for building under rail bridges (more retail or restaurant space!) like they do in places like Tokyo and London.