Hoboken Council Election: Candidates To Debate At Public Forums

HOBOKEN, NJ — The Hoboken Quality of Life Coalition recently announced plans for its 2019 Hoboken candidates’ forums for the City Council election on Nov. 5.

Co-hosted this year with Stevens Institute of Technology and Hudson County View, the forums will give Hoboken voters a chance to hear candidates answer questions submitted by the public in a timed and moderated format.

The events are free and open to the public.

• The candidates for City Council in Wards 1, 3 and 5 will meet in a forum on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at Stevens Institute of Technology’s DeBaun Auditorium, 24 Fifth Street.
• The candidates for City Council in Wards 2, 4 and 6 will meet in a forum on Thursday, Oct. 24, at Stevens Institute of Technology’s DeBaun Auditorium, 24 Fifth Street.

Each forum begins at 7 p.m. and lasts about two hours, with a brief intermission. The second forum on Oct. 24, 2019, will be followed by a community reception at 9 pm hosted by Stevens Institute at the Babbio Center, just up the hill from DeBaun, organizers said.

This year’s candidates’ forums will follow the same format that the Hoboken QLC has established for more than a decade. Questions are submitted on index cards by members of the audience, then they are sorted by topic, and posed to each of the candidates in turn by co-moderators Bob Bowdon, a professional interviewer and longtime resident of Hoboken, and John Heinis, publisher of HudsonCountyView.com.

Each candidate will be given a minute and a half to respond, and the order of response will be randomized for each round. Brief rebuttals will be permitted as needed by the moderators.

For those who cannot attend, a video recording will be posted to the websites hudsoncountyview.com and qlchoboken.org.

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