Elaine King of the Madison County Republican Women was notified by a joint email from six Rexburg City Council candidates that they would not be attending a forum scheduled the next day. The e-mail was sent on Friday, Oct. 22, 2021, at 11:30 a.m. The response from MCRW follows.

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Elaine:

It is with regret that we inform you that we will not be participating in Saturday evening's Rexburg City Council candidate forum.

We appreciate the invitation but we are concerned that the forum has taken on the appearance of partiality toward specific candidates.  We would expect such forums to be established on the premise of fairness to all.

We apologize for the late notice of our withdrawal, but it was only recently that we discovered that we all share the same concern and determined a united response best.

Kind regards,

Greg Blacker

Robert Chambers

Crystal Hill

Colin Erickson

Mikel Walker

Brad Wolfe

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October 22, 2021

Dear Candidates,

The Madison County Republican Women have put in untold hours coming up with questions and making a Jeopardy board game to make this a fun forum.

By sending out the questions to you ahead of time, we thought it would be a kind way to help you prepare. We went to the Internet to find questions recommended to ask city council candidates and received some from Rexburg citizens and business owners.

Which questions were you concerned about? Which questions are you unhappy with? Which questions seem unfair? In any case, we thought serious candidates would welcome an opportunity to share their views.

We are confused, concerned, and disappointed. Also, we have put this in the paper and on our Madison County Republican Facebook page, sent emails to the residents of Rexburg, and announced the event on the radio today.

We have held forums for many years and just wanted to make this one a little bit different and more fun. We have asked similar questions at forums in the past.

Our 1st Vice President, Linda Lovejoy is a Rexburg citizen, along with a few other Rexburg citizens associated with our Madison County Republican Women's Club, and asked us a couple of months ago to hold this forum on their behalf.

We are always delighted to help inform and educate voters in any way we can.

We believe your last-minute response is unfair, unkind, and unbecoming of a responsible candidate for public office. We hope you might reconsider and join us tomorrow. In any event, we are going ahead with the forum.

Sincerely,

The Executive Committee

Madison County Republican Women

Elaine King

Linda Lovejoy

Heidi Wasden

Maria Nate