The candidates for the Crookston City Council Ward 3 seat are incumbent Clayton Briggs and his opponents Blake Royal. We asked each candidate to introduce themselves and why they are running.
Q: Would you please tell us about yourself?
Clayton Briggs: I was born and raised in Crookston. A lifelong member of Crookston. I’m married for 46 years. Two kids, both live in Crookston, and four grandchildren. I restore old cars as a hobby and like riding my trike with the wife.
Blake Royal: I’m Blake Royal. I was born and raised in town here. Also, my wife Natalie was born and raised. We have two children, a six-year-old son, and a two-year-old daughter. We started out living here and decided to move to Grand Forks. We were both working there. When it came time to have kids we thought Grand Forks was too big and decided we wanted to move back to small-town Crookston. Got here and saw the way the council was acting. I told my wife I don’t know if I can watch this much longer, I might have to run. And with her blessing, I decided to run for Ward 3.
Q: Why are you running?
Briggs: I want to see different things we’ve started as far as the park. The campground starting. See-through the rest of the UMC putting that plant out there on the south end of town. And continue with the downtown stuff, see if we can get things going there.
Royal: I’m running after watching some of the conflict and things going on. I thought we can do better. I don’t think anyone on the council was out to an agenda or anything, I just think we need to work better together. Watching the way council worked with CHEDA, CVB, the Chamber – we could all have the same mission statement if written properly but we’d argue over who is going to be in charge. We need to move Crookston forward together and I think we need to put away some of our personalities. And just do what’s right for Crookston and move forward.
Q: Anything you would like to add?
Briggs: I appreciate the last six years I’ve been on the council and I would ask for their support for another four years.
Royal: We have to champion Crookston. We have a beautiful hockey arena we need to use. We need to get more things in there. We need to get more activities for the kids to get young families to town. Keep them in town. If we don’t, we’re just going to be an older town dying out. We need to promote ourselves better than we do now. I think I touched on it in the debate tonight that our city website and Facebook page is woefully inadequate. We can’t have 16 posts in a year and to be honest, half of them were just duplicates. So, we need to do better. I’m looking forward to the new city administrator, that she’ll take charge, help the council move in the right direction, and promote this city.
