COEUR d'ALENE - Two candidates, and one political divide.

Coeur d'Alene City Council Seat 3 candidates Dan Gookin and George Sayler squared off Friday during a Kootenai County Pachyderm meeting. Just as they had Wednesday during the Coeur Group's candidate forum, the two big-name contenders for the open seat outlined where they stood on issues. And just like Wednesday, each took different sides on hot-button city issues Friday.

Sayler, the former state representative, has said he would second a motion for a public vote on the McEuen Field project if he were on the City Council. That doesn't mean he would vote to put in on the ballot, it means he would consider it.

"I do want to hear the argument," he said of the discussion point coming to council. "And I'm not saying I wouldn't listen."

Council President Ron Edinger has made a motion several times that the issue come up for a council vote. Never has it received a second, which would allow the council to vote up or down on whether to put the proposed multi-million downtown park redesign project on a ballot. Before the council votes, members often discusses why they are going to vote a certain way.

Only two out of 10 candidates in all three seat races oppose the advisory vote outright, with the remaining seven saying they support the idea in some fashion. A Thursday article about the forum lumped Sayler in the supporters category, but he said Friday only that he supports the idea that the council should discuss it, not that he would favor putting it on the ballot.

He said he didn't know which way he would vote if he was on the council, and believes council members are elected to make tough decisions.

Gookin, meanwhile, has always been a supporter of an advisory vote for the proposed multi-million downtown park redesign and that didn't change Friday. Of all the city's flagship partnership projects in the last few years, the library, the Centennial Trail, the Kroc Center, the education corridor and now McEuen Field, only one was put to a vote: The library.

"The projects themselves are wonderful," he said. "It's the process that needs to be changed."

Gookin repeated his stance that he would break down the wall between inside City Hall and outside. He called city employee raises in the current economic situation "rude" and "disrespectful" to taxpayers, and said he would exercise more oversight over the city's urban renewal board and city staff during reports as a councilman.

"For people on the inside, things are going great," he said. "I want to push on that wall because I don't think that's fair.

While Gookin said urban renewal increases property taxes around the county, Sayler, who supports the city's unions, believes urban renewal is tax neutral. That's one of the bigger philosophical divides between proponents and opponents of urban renewal, which allocates tax increment financing to spur economic development, and one that separates the two candidates.