Overland Canidates Debate 03/14/07

Thanks to The League of Women Voters and the Overland Lions Club the residents of Overland, Missouri had an opportunity to attend a debate between candidates for the City Council. The Overland Examiner requested permission to tape this event so that we could make it available to all interested residents who might not have been able to attend.

What follows are a series of video clips for the event. Limits on file sizes and time lengths at YouTube required me to break the video up into shorter clips. I tried to break it up into logical segments for easy viewing. My approach was to separate each candidates opening and closing statements, and treat each debate question individually.

Though you can watch the videos in the small windows that appear in this article, we recommend you click the link below each one to see them at full size at YouTube.com.

There can always be technical issues with projects like this. We had two problems with this one. The first was my fault; I made a bad lens choice at the start of the event. You will see my hand, and have a hard time hearing the second question asked by the moderator which was “Will you work on obtaining a City Administrator?”. I decided to make the lens change to allow for a closer zoom on the candidates. Unfortunately there wasn’t a good point to make this change. Any insights from palm readers and the like can be sent to me via email here.

The second problem we had was the way the camera handles its video files. The camera starts a new file every 30 minutes or so. Since the debate was nearly an hour and a half long the camera saved it as 3 files. This resulted in two points where the camera saved one file and started another in the middle of a speaker’s comments. The first time this happened was when Mary Beth Conlon was talking about housing code. I merged the two portions into one file for ease of viewing. As a result you will see a small jump in the video. Nothing was lost or changed. The Second time was when Tim Jones was talking about state audits. This break happened right at the end of his statement as he was saying the word “Overland” which caused that word to be marginally distorted after the two parts were merged. Other than that distortion, nothing was lost or changed. We had no other technical issues at this event.

The clips were marginally edited. When we could, we took out dead time (such as well the microphone gets passed from one end of the table to the other if the moderator was not speaking). Otherwise, the footage is unedited. We will gladly work with any interested parties to make the raw footage (approximately 5 gigs in all) available (with some use limitations as described below).

These video clips are Copyright 2007 John Moyle of The Overland Examiner with Some Rights Reserved. We are making these video clips freely available to everyone. We welcome and encourage everyone who can, to host these videos on their own sites with some limitations. Those limitations are that any clip used be copied in its entirety and not be edited in any way. We further require that you state on the site hosting them that the clip(s) is being reproduced there "with the permission of John Moyle of The Overland Examiner" and include a link back to this article. Finally we specifically forbid the use of any of these clips for Commercial purposes without written consent from John Moyle. If you have questions or concerns about these limitations please feel free to email me here.

Please, enjoy these videos, and remember to vote on April 3rd. The polls will open at 6AM and remain so until 7PM. If you have any questions or concerns about voting, please visit this article where we've compiled a number of links to resources for voters. We also have a list of the Candidates including contact information here. If you have any questions or concerns for us at The Overland Examiner please feel free to email me by clicking here.

Tech Note: if you view these videos on this site after watching several you might start finding videos that will play, but without sound. If that happens refresh the page and you should be fine.

Opening of the Debate:

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Opening Statements:

Eedie Cuminale................Councilman Knode
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Mary Beth Conlon...............Councilman Sellers
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Michael Oakes....................Peggy Keller
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Tim Jones........................Sherry Karr
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Debate Questions:

1> "How would you attempt to establish a working relationship with the St. Louis County and State of Missouri Economic Development Councils as well as the East-West Gateway Development Coordinating Committee?"

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2> "Will you work on obtaining a City Administrator?"

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3> "What do you see as plans to enforce the housing code?"

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4> "What is your opinion of occupancy permits?"

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5> "How do you feel about Immigration Ordinances?"

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6> "Can you somehow work into the budget trash pickup and a swimming pool?"

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7> "Are you for or against a State Audit of the City of Overland?"

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8> "What do you think should be done with the buildings at Wild Acres?"

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Closing Statements:

Sherry Karr........................Tim Jones
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Peggy Keller....................Michael Oakes
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Mary Beth Conlon...............Councilman Sellers
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Councilman Knode................Eedie Cuminale
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Closing of the Debate:

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I hope that you found the above videos useful. If you have any questions or concerns about these videos or The Overland Examiner in general, please feel free to email me by clicking here as comments are not enabled on this post.