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Patterson’s candidates for mayor and City Council will be in the spotlight Monday at the Irrigator’s Candidates Night Forum.

But while the six hopefuls will be the ones front and center, the night itself will really belong to the residents of Patterson.

Members of the public are invited and encouraged to attend the event, which begins at 7 p.m. in the council chambers at City Hall. The doors will open at 6:30 p.m., which should give people plenty of time to get in, get seated and think up a few questions.

That last part’s important, because the questions asked of the candidates will primarily come from the public. The event’s moderator, Irrigator General Manager Carol Scoles, will provide follow-up questions when appropriate and will have questions of her own — but those will only be used as fallbacks if there’s a lull in the public questioning.

The audience will be provided paper on which to write their questions for the candidates. Questions can be addressed to all candidates, a certain few or one in particular — just be sure to note that above your written query.

The questions will then be handed to a panel of three members of the Soroptimists, a local service club, who will screen the questions before handing them off to the moderator.

In addition to turning in questions at the event, members of the public can also submit questions by e-mail. Send questions with the subject line “Candidates Night questions” to news@pattersonirrigator.com. Any questions submitted before 3 p.m. Monday will be considered for use during the event.

The candidates, who will each be given three minutes for an introduction and three minutes for a closing statement, will have two minutes to answer each question. The entire event is expected to last about 90 minutes.

Those unable to attend the forum are not out of luck. The Irrigator will have full coverage of the event in Wednesday’s paper, as well as updates Monday night on the PI Connect blog (http://piconnect.blogspot.com).

The forum will also be filmed by Barbosa Video Services and aired on West Stanislaus Television (Channel 7) at 11 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. every Sunday until the election. And for those without access to public television, DVD copies of the event will be made available for free checkout at the Irrigator office.

Hopefully, the Candidates Night Forum will provide some insight into what figure to be two very interesting races.