With Election Day approaching next Tuesday, the city of Truesdale and Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce hosted a candidate forum Monday, Oct. 26, to give those running for office an opportunity to make their case and voters a chance to meet them.
While all candidates in contested races in Warren County were invited to “Meet the Candidates Night,” according to Truesdale Mayor Jerry Cannon, not all of them attended the event, held at the Marylou Center.
Those who did speak at the event included both Missouri House District 42 candidates, Republican incumbent Jeff Myers and Democratic challenger Amy Pritchard.
Pritchard, a teacher in the Wright City school district, said if elected she will make funding Missouri’s education formula a priority.
“Missouri is currently 49th in student spending, and if Jeff City has their way with Senate Bill 3, we may well drop to last,” she said.
She also said she believes health care is a right rather than a privilege, opposes gerrymandering, and will work to reform the income tax structure so the wealthiest pay their fair share.
Large-scale facilities like data centers that use significant amounts of resources should be put to a vote of the community where developers are seeking to build them, Pritchard said.
Myers, the only Republican candidate to attend the Truesdale event, who was first elected to the Missouri General Assembly in 2022, said that like Pritchard and the vast majority of children growing up in Missouri, he attended Missouri public schools.
“So when we start talking about public schools and we start talking about the funding part of it, year after year after year that I’ve been there, there’s been more money added to the public school budget from the Missouri budget for those four years that I’ve been there,” he said.
Funding for transportation has also increased since he’s been in office, Myers said, but balancing the state’s budget is a challenge, and lawmakers need to make difficult decisions about where to make cuts or reallocate money to pay for the state’s highest priorities.
“Raising taxes is a possibility,” Myers said. “However, I just don’t think there’s going to be much appetite across the state of Missouri to do that.”
Vicky Wors, a Democrat who is challenging incumbent Republican Sen. Ben Brown for his Missouri Senate District 26 seat, said her experience includes negotiating numerous labor agreements and operating a consulting firm that assists small businesses.
“I know how to bring people together, how to get people to understand we need to get together to move forward, and Missouri is not moving forward,” she said. “Missouri has got everything, it’s got resources, it’s got intelligence, and it is stuck in the mud.”
Wors said she decided to run as a Democrat because she got tired of only seeing Republican candidates on her ballot, but added that she would take a bipartisan approach if elected.
“I would reach across the aisle to make things happen for Missouri,” she said.
Like other candidates at the Truesdale forum, Wors criticized data centers, saying the facilities are “going amuck,” and that their developers should be required to complete geological surveys before building them. Data center developers should talk to people in the communities where they’re being built, who have a right to know what’s going on, she said.
Although Sen. Brown had planned to attend, he had a scheduling conflict so he sent a video instead, which was shown at the candidate forum.
Brown said in the video that he has been a small business owner since he was in his late twenties and he never planned on a political career.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic I saw firsthand how government overreach hurt families, employees and local businesses,” he said. “When restrictions forced my restaurant to close, churches to be shuttered and students to be forced out of schools, I fought back, defending small businesses, religious liberty and parental rights.”
That experience led Brown to run for the Missouri Senate in 2022, he said, and he has been proud to serve the people of District 26 since 2023.
“Among my top priorities are securing Missouri’s elections, reducing government waste, lowering taxes, and making Missouri more affordable for families, while also attracting new businesses and good-paying jobs,” he said.
Fred Wellman, running for Congress as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives District 2 race, discussed his military background, including 20 years in the U.S. Army and four combat tours. He said he got frustrated last year when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was approved.
“In our district, because of that bill, 21,000 of our neighbors have lost their health care,” Wellman said, adding that nationwide, more than 1 million children have lost their food benefits. “And meanwhile, the rich have gotten richer,” he said.
“My three priorities are simple. I call them the three Cs. It’s costs — the high costs — it’s the outrageous corruption, and it’s the chaos we see,” Wellman said.
Bethany Mann, running as a Democrat in the U.S. House District 3 race, said she grew up in Foristell and her career started in agriculture helping farmers and producers test their crops.
“I am running because I believe that every single person here deserves freedom,” she said. “We deserve the freedom to collectively organize our labor and bargain for higher wages, safer job sites, and an economy that works for all of us. And if those corporations can’t pay their fair share of taxes, well they should pull themselves up by the bootstraps for once.”
Mann added that she believes Missourians should have the freedom to send their children to adequately funded public schools, make choices about their own bodies, and drink clean water and breathe clean air. Like other candidates, she also criticized the data centers that have recently been under development locally, statewide, and across the country.
“Nobody asked for these data centers except for the billionaires who are profiting and own stock in it,” she said.
Incumbent Republican members of Congress Ann Wagner, representing District 2, and Bob Onder, representing District 3, but did not attend the Truesdale candidate forum.
