This was a special meeting of the Gastonia City Council held on June 17, 2024, to conduct open interviews for five candidates seeking to fill the vacant Ward 1 seat, left by Councilman Kellogg, until the next municipal election. The meeting was unprecedented, as such interviews had occurred only once before in recent city history. Council members took turns asking questions over a total of 30 minutes per candidate, with each council member allotted five minutes. No decisions were made during the meeting; the council agreed to deliberate and begin voting the following day.
2024. This meeting is concerning open interviews for candidates who were selected by the council to be interviewed to represent Ward 1 in the city of Gastonia to fill the seat of Councilman Kellogg until the next election. Since we're in unprecedented territory here, this has only happened one time before in the history of Gastonia. In recent memory. In recently, so what we're gonna do is there's a green bucket. If the intern could step forward over to Suzanne's position, we're going to pull council people's names from there, and each council person will have five minutes to ask questions. And that will be a total of 30 minutes of questions to the candidates. So if you want to go ahead and pull those names, please. So you're gonna be able to put this on your resume. This is twice now. Pull a name. Jennifer. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Now another, since this is a official business, this is an open meeting. In transparency and fairness to all of the candidates, I would like to make a request, but since this is an open forum and um I cannot in the council cannot dissuade you from doing it, but in transparency and fairness, if you are a candidate, I was gonna ask that you all know the order that you're supposed to be interviewed in. If you could step out, uh that way it doesn't give anybody any more leverage uh or knowledge of the questions to anybody else. You don't have to, but I would like to ask that in the uh furtherance of transparency and fairness to all the candidates. So you don't have to. Robert King, uh, you are gonna be first up. So if the other candidates would like to step out, that would be greatly appreciated, but it doesn't have to be Mr. King, if you would like to take the seat. This is kind of the definition of being in front of the world, isn't it? Yeah. Just let us know when you're ready to start, and Dr. Curly will be the first question questioning person. Good afternoon. I'm ready when you are, David. Hi, Robert. Good afternoon. Um about as inexperienced as at doing this as each of you candidates would be inexperienced at being interviewed in this fashion. So uh we'll we'll start our apologies right there. But anyway, um I I've got a couple of questions prepared. Uh the first one is as you were aware, Gasedonia City Council is a non-partisan election. During your 2021 campaign for the Ward 1 seat, you positioned yourself as the Republican candidate of choice, placing yourself in a partisan alignment for the seat. As the Ward One councilman, how would you prevent partisan politics from shaping or influencing your decision making? Do you want to go one question at a time starting with that one? Sure. Okay. Um yes, I did actually um position myself as a conservative candidate, and I am a registered Republican. I don't think I don't think that there is basically what I'm I'm trying to do is help everybody understand from what basis my life runs. I would want to serve every person in the city of Gastonia in my role. Just as I know that even though we're talking about nonpartisan, I think each person's internal ideals form the basis of how they respond to different subjects. So that would be my goal. It would be from this is where I this is where I stand, this is what I believe, and then the discussion would go from there as to each person's opinion. And I think uh collaboration of this council would be um would be part of that. I think everybody has that basis of their own understanding of who they are. Okay. Um my second question is citizens have come to council meetings promoting your candidacy based upon the fact that you won the majority of votes in ward one in 2021.