YOUR AD HERE »

Helen for mayor

Su Lum

It looks as if there will be a big runoff this spring, and it won’t just be coming from the snowpack.With seven candidates running for two council seats and four for the mayor’s, the chances of anyone garnering the official majority required for a win are looking a bit slim, so be prepared for a second round of this bout.For weeks, it looked as if Torre was the only contender running against incumbent Helen Klanderud for mayor. This in itself was peculiar, in that Torre already has two more years in his council seat and, if he managed to win the mayoral election, his replacement would then be appointed.I don’t need to tell you that nothing puts the fear into us quite as much as the prospect of not being able to vote for our elected officials, and to pull this off would require something like a major miracle, as Terry Paulson found out when he tried the same thing two years ago.So this choice looked like a no-brainer.On the last day, Terry Paulson filed his petition formayor and at the last hour Bert Myrin filed his own, and that’s when the campaign got really weird. We might forgive Paulson for being coy, but for Bert Myrin, who is Terry’s campaign manager in fact if not in name, to jump into the race was downright weird.Why would he/they do that? Myrin said they plan to be each other’s campaign treasurers! The idea seems to be to try to present it as “team Helen and Torre versus team Bert and Terry,” as if this were some kind of job-share position. The question is, who would be the ventriloquist and who would be the dummy if Bert/Terry were elected?I’m voting for Helen Klanderud. I don’t agree with all of her positions and don’t expect to, but I think she is a woman of wisdom who truly respects and understands this community, and I don’t see any of the other three candidates filling her shoes.Helen is accused by her challengers of not letting the public say its piece, but I think she has exhibited considerable restraint with the “regulars,” such as the ubiquitous Toni Kronberg (who, unstifled, would go on forever) and Bert Myrin, who seems to get a kick out of baiting her. Terry Paulson was quoted as saying he’d let everyone speak and keep the meetings short – that will be quite a trick.On a recent Jerry Bovino discussion/debate about Burlingame on GrassRoots TV, J.E. DeVilbiss suggested to Bert Myrin that if he had anything to say he should run for office and say it in the debates. That having come to pass, be sure to watch the Squirm Night debates live tonight on GrassRoots TV, channel 12 – 5:30 p.m. for the council and 7 p.m. for the mayor candidates.There will be a number of other political discussions and debates that bear watching – check out the schedule at http://www.grassrootstv.org.Su Lum is a longtime local who has a lot of deciding to do. Her column appears every Wednesday in The Aspen Times.