Good job Houston

We hope we’re not premature in saying so, but we noticed promising signs that the city of Houston seems to be maturing.

Thursday night, all four candidates for city council met for a forum at the Mid-Valley Senior Center.

We’re not going to say it was commendable that none of them said mean, personal things about one another, which has happened during past forums we’ve attended. But we expect civility from our politicians. So we try not to get too excited when our elected leaders leave out the ugliness — just like we don’t get excited when the clerk gets our order right at McDonald’s.

No, what impressed us was how articulate and well-informed the candidates were.

We can well recall forums in past years at which candidates declined to answer important questions about the city due to sheer ignorance of what was going on there.

None of the candidates Thursday seemed ill-prepared. Indeed, they all seemed very well-prepared and very well-informed.

They managed to identify all of the major problems and challenges facing the city, from the rail spur being constructed now from the railroad in Houston to Port MacKenzie to the traffic on the Parks Highway and a lack of development.

And every single one of them expressed what seemed to be genuine love and concern for their community and a desire to see it flourish.

We noted no attempts to demagogue or fear monger. Nobody even made mention of the failed recall attempt against the sitting mayor, the controversial policies of former mayor Roger Purcell, or an ongoing lawsuit filed by a former employee in the city police department.

Challengers repeatedly expressed a desire and willingness to work with the current council and the city’s mayor and commended them for the work they’ve done so far. Incumbents held up as achievements their efforts to work with other government agencies rather than pick fights with them.

All of this was a marked contrast to the Houston politics we’ve come to dread. We’d been wondering for a long time if the city was redeemable due to a poisonous atmosphere created from a set of politics that had been way too personal for far too long.

The forum gave us hope that we might be wrong about the potential for reform in Houston. The atmosphere Thursday night was surprising and more than a little refreshing.

Our more cynical readers will point out that this kind of singing of Kumbaya around the campfire is common at election time and the real proof will come when campaign season passes and its actually time to sit down and work out solutions to the day’s big issues.

That fact is not lost on us. And we will be watching to see how it all shakes out.

All we really wanted to say was how impressed we were.

We’d be thrilled to see this kind of cooperative spirit thrive in Houston and spread throughout the Mat-Su Borough, Alaska and beyond.

Good job Houston!