Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.

Sports Council sponsors candidate forum

Date: 4/14/2009

The Longmeadow Youth Sports Council is pleased to announce that they will sponsor a Candidate's Forum at the Glennbrook Middle School Auditorium on May 6 from 7 to 9:30 p.m.

LCTV will broadcast the event live on LCTV channel 12 and will replay on multiple dates prior to the June election. The purpose of the forum is to invite the Select Board candidates to a Q&A discussion on the challenging issues our town is faced with and how they, as candidates for the Select Board, would address these issues.

Currently, there are six candidates running for two three-year term as well as two candidates vying for one one-year term. The questions that the candidates will be asked will come from town citizens who have sent questions to the Sport Council Web site, http://longyouthsportscouncil.org. We are inviting all citizens of Longmeadow to send in their questions by May 3 to this Web site. We will select as many questions as time permits during the forum to be answered by the candidates.

The moderator for our Candidates Forum will be former Channel 22 news anchor and current Professor of Communication at Western New England College, Brenda Garton. Garton and her husband John Sjoberg and their two sons are residents of Longmeadow. Garton has had the opportunity to serve as a moderator for various debates in the area in the past and the Sports Council feels that she is uniquely qualified to serve as moderator for this event.

Invitations to the candidates will be mailed out this week.

The Longmeadow Youth Sports Council is a non-profit civic organization representing all town sponsored youth sports programs. The board of directors is comprised of leaders of all youth sports programs. Our mission is to advocate for these sports programs to make certain that there are suitable fields, venues and facilities for these programs to thrive. Over the past 10 years, this group, in coordination with booster clubs, has raised and donated over $100,000 of funding for such things as lights at the high school field, an irrigation system for the open space area at the high school, three fully renovated baseball fields at Turner Park and a fully renovated high school baseball diamond at Russell Field. These needs were not being financed by the town budget and we felt that it was imperative to somehow find alternative means of funding so these projects could be completed.

Contacts for the Longmeadow Youth Sports Council are Jim Brennan at jbrennan@brennancompanies.com and John Dowd at jedowd@dowd.com.