Partisan candidates forum sparks concern in Chester New local GOP committee is hoping to grow dormant party

By Cynthia Prairie
©2024 Telegraph Publishing LLC

A Chester candidates forum that has excluded half the candidates running for contested seats on the Chester Select Board and the board of the Green Mountain Unified School District is drawing concern that it could be injecting partisan politics into local elections that have not seen them in years.

But the Chester Republican Committee, which re-formed just last fall, says the forum is a nascent attempt to begin to grow a party that has long been dormant.  And the fact is that parties can set the terms of any event that they hold.

But in many small towns, including Chester,  conservatives and liberals have long been elected to positions on both select and school boards without regard of an R for Republican, D for Democrat, P for Progressive or I for Independent next to candidates’ names. As a matter of fact, the formal ballot does not display any party affiliation for the candidates of those positions as well as other local positions including Town Moderator, Trustees of Public Funds and Trustees of the Whiting Library.

This particular event, scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 18 at the Chester American Legion, has specifically not invited three candidates for contested seats: For Select Board, Tim Roper and incumbent Arianna Knapp; and for school board Tuckerman Wunderle. All three confirmed that they did not receive invitations to participate in the event and learned of it through a flyer in which their names do not appear.

The event is sponsored by the Chester and Grafton Republican committees.

Barre Pinske, who helped get the Chester Republican Committee “back in action” and is now its chair, said he was not involved in organizing the candidates event.

On Tuesday, Roy Spaulding of Chester, who did organize the event, said, “We as the Chester GOP thought that the candidates we chose to attend would represent conservative values that would benefit the town of Chester.”

And in an email on Monday, August Murray, the vice chair of the Windsor County GOP, wrote, “Conservative voters have long been underrepresented in Chester and surrounding areas. This event is an opportunity to build and grow the party at the local level.”

In the contested races for Chester Select Board, Arianna Knapp, Tim Roper and Lisa Rufa are all running to fill two 1-year seats. Knapp, the incumbent, was elected to the seat last year after leading the Chester Cannabis Control Commission. Roper currently sits on the Chester Planning Commission. The only information that could be found about Rufa is that she is a Chester resident.

Roper said, “It feels like we have gotten past some of the divisiveness of 2020 and this is a step backward.”

Those running for two 3-year terms as director representing Chester on the Green Mountain Unified School District board are Casey Leahy, Randy Miles and Tuckerman Wunderle. All three would be new to the school board and possibly to elective politics. Miles has been a vocal advocate at school board meetings and in Telegraph comments for keeping the name of the Green Mountain High School mascot, which was voted down in a 6-3 vote in late December.

The only other contested local seat is one 3-year term for the Trustee of Public Funds, in which incumbent Shirley Barrett is facing Jerene Slivinksy.

Despite the lack of party designation on the local ballots, the one active party committee until recently — the Chester Democratic Committee — has long played a behind-the-scenes role in finding candidates to run for local and state offices. But, according to Bill Dakin, the long time moderator for Chester Town Meeting who headed the Chester Democratic Committee for about 20 years, “The Dems have never had a town candidate forum. Candidates for town office previously have never identified as one party or the other or independent-just as citizens running for a town office.”

But he added, until now, there really hasn’t been “any Republican organized committee in Chester.”

Last year, the town sponsored a Select Board candidates forum at Town Hall in which all candidates in contested races were invited but just four of the five running for two one-year seats attended.  It was also streamed to cable subscribers by SAPA-TV and people could attend by Zoom.

Each year, The Chester Telegraph sends out questionnaires to all candidates in contested elections and publishes their answers. The Telegraph did not send out a questionnaire to the candidates for Trustee of Public Funds this year.

And although political parties can set their own rules, James Clemer, who has been the chairman of the Chester Democratic Committee for just a few months, said, “I was surprised and dismayed to see a traditional nonpartisan races take a partisan turn and it’s really disappointing.”