Thursday evening Marysville held their candidate forum for the City’s upcoming election where residents will decide on the open mayor seat and 3 open council seats November 5th. Current Mayor Dan Damman opened the forum, turning things over to Scott Shigley, who moderated the evening. In the running for the council seats are Paul Wessel who has served on council for 8 years, Shawn Winston, a resident who has been in Marysville for 35 years and is running for the first time. Kathy Hayman, a current council member who has served for the last four years and also hails from Marysville, along with Mike Deising, who was born and raised in Marysville and Jean Cramer who moved to the Marysville area 10 years ago from Rochester. The lone candidate running for the open mayor seat is Wayne Pyden who says he’s lived in Marysville for 40+ years and now wants to give back. Topics included roads in Marysville and if candidates believed there were issues within the city limits, unfunded liabilities and legacy costs, the planned DTE site, current city developments amongst other topics. Typically these forums are routine and candidates stick to the script, so to say, but things took a turn when a question was posed related to attracting diversity to the community. The moderator said, “if you look at the population growth in the Great Lakes Region, in terms of migration, 1.5 million people were foreign-born and 1.5 million were natural-born which indicates there is a high level of folks moving to the region, but they’re not moving here (Marysville), so as a philosophical question, should Marysville be more aggressive about making that happen?” At this time it was Cramer’s turn to answer first, to which she answered, “my suggestion, recommendation: keep Marysville a white community as much as possible…in other words…no foreign-born citizens.”All sitting on the forum and in the audience gasped and the remarks left many audience members and candidates in shock, vehemently condemning her remarks as many of them took it personally. Each of the other 5 candidates who followed with remarks strongly condemned Cramer’s remarks, saying that Marysville is a welcoming community and that it should continue to welcome and attract all people.
