A mere 20 people showed up March 22 for a forum featuring seven candidates for the four Cortez City Council seats that are being voted on today.

"This turnout is disgraceful," one man in the audience told me as he sat down.

And it was. But as I sat there listening to the hopefuls mouth vague, congenial comments, I began to think that the city’s voters were not entirely to blame. The forum was excruciatingly boring. After an hour and a half, people were squirming in their seats with their eagerness to get at the cookies and coffee in the back of the room. None of us could even bear to prolong the experience by listening to a brief explanation of the six proposed city-charter amendments also on the ballot.

Whose fault is it that there is not more interest in a fairly significant local election such as this one? Is it the fault of the citizens, who’d rather be viewing "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and learning what type of insect spawned the term "computer bug" than listening to seven people all say they want better telecommunications for Cortez? Or is it the fault of the candidates themselves?

I believe it’s more the latter.

Understand that I don’t mean to disparage the people who are running for this tedious, difficult and generally thankless job. They all seem to be sincere, pleasant human beings, and I have no doubt that they have the city’s best interests in mind.

What they don’t seem to have is a strong sense of purpose.

None of the candidates expressed an urgent goal he or she wanted to accomplish if elected to the council. None of them spoke of major changes to be made or policies to be pursued. Instead, they all seemed to think things were going pretty well. When questioned about specific problems such as the proliferation of billboards at the city’s entrances, they generally said something needed to be done but they weren’t sure what.

This is far from the first election when this has been true. When it comes to both city and county offices, most candidates seem to do their best to be vague and inoffensive in their campaigns. Rather than risk alienating anyone, they shy away from making specific promises about what they might actually do once in office. "Trust my judgment and I’ll react to situations as they come up," is their credo.

So only those voters who know these people personally or are able to glean some idea of the candidates’ real views from their airy statements go to the polls and cast ballots. And the larger electorate feels disenfranchised and alienated.

What’s the solution? How to make forums more interesting and candidates more specific? No single remedy will fix the situation, but a few things might help:

• Narrow down the questions before a forum begins, perhaps by asking the audience to vote beforehand on which issues they really want to hear about. Then the candidates could focus on the most significant queries rather than answering trivial ones, too.

• Have more forums with fewer candidates. There’s no way to ask follow-up questions and pin people down on their views when there’s seven or eight or a dozen hopefuls trying to speak. Feature three council candidates one night and four on another, and have assertive questioners — maybe even journalists? — who’ll ask, "What do you mean? How exactly would you accomplish that?"

• Urge people to run for office who actually have something they want to do once they’re there.