“While your campaign undoubtedly contributes to citizen engagement, at this time it appears to us that it has not reached sufficient critical mass to include you on the panel that evening.”

– Robert Todd, chairman of Middle Market Entrepreneurs, which is organizing a mayoral forum March 1 for business leaders, wrote in a letter to the three mayoral candidates who will were not invited to be on stage “due to time constraints.”

The forum will feature only six candidates: Steve Bach, Brian Bahr, Tom Gallagher, Buddy Gilmore, Dave Munger and Richard Skorman.

The candidates who were left out are Mitch Christiansen, Kenneth Duncan and Phil McDonald.

“Don’t you find it strange that I have not been included in this forum?” Christiansen wrote in an e-mail to Paul Kleinschmidt, director of Taxpayers for Budget Reform, LLC. “I was told that I was not a viable candidate.”

Despite the snub, the candidates who were not invited to sit on stage were offered, among other things, two complimentary tickets to the event, table space and the opportunity to suggest questions to ask the other candidates.