The first forum for candidates to three open positions on the Issaquah City Council was held Sept. 30 and, though four of the five present were locked in heated competition for their desired seats, undecided voters would be hard-pressed to find a purely ideological reason to support one potential councilor over another.

Support saving Issaquah’s green spaces? So do they. Are housing costs burdening a portion of Issaquah’s citizens? No disagreement here. Is traffic a chronic headache? You bet.

Indeed, the audience in Issaquah’s city council chambers found themselves watching a group of candidates that, as Chris Matthews wrote in one chapter of his seminal political handbook “Hardball,” was unanimously willing to concede on principle to win on the finer details.

The League of Women Voters and the Cable TV Commission hosted the Wednesday night candidate forum, broadcast live on ICTV 21. In attendance were Chrisopher Reh and Paul Winterstein, competing for Position No. 6; Tim Flood and Bill Ramos for Position No. 4; and Jennifer Sutton running unopposed for Position No. 2.

Through questions running the gamut of the environment, human services, housing costs and Issaquah’s community character, the candidates in attendance displayed a unity of mindset that frayed only for specifics — the largest being the direction of the city’s development in the years after the Central Issaquah Plan’s passage — and the broader argument between the merits of experience and the merits of new blood.

The strongest voice for the latter argument Christopher Reh, the only challenger facing an incumbent in November. “Is Issaquah more livable than it was three years ago?” Reh asked. “My answer is no.”

Reh opened with an immediate attack on the city’s development policies, arguing that most development was occurring in neighborhoods outside the city core even three years after passage of the Central Issaquah Plan, and that the 2015 revisions to the transportation concurrency plan had missed an opportunity to force developers to pay their fair share of costs for roads. The challenger said that, while it wasn’t true that Issaquah had been “wrecked,” the city could become so if a change didn’t occur soon.

“Fundamentally, the Central Issaquah Plan is sound,” Reh would say later in the night. “The problem isn’t the plan itself, it’s our complete inability to execute that plan … we are very generous on handing out variances to developers.”

Reh and Flood found themselves in alignment on development and transportation. Flood repeated Reh’s point about neighborhood development outside the city core and a major cornerstone of Flood’s campaign has been his “Address the Mess” proposal — an “alternative transportation plan” that emphasized road improvements to outlying neighborhoods alongside core roads like Front Street and State Route 900.

But Winterstein and Ramos, a longtime city commissioner and transportation consultant, charged that promises of change were premature.

“No one can tell you if you implement this plan, it will have this outcome,” Winterstein said.

Winterstein said development linkage fees had risen over where they were four years ago and that the idea the Central Issaquah Plan didn’t serve residents’ wishes was unfounded, given that its development took place over five years with input from hundreds of Issaquahns.

In response to a question about housing costs and the potential for affordable housing in the city, Winterstein and Ramos cited the city’s success in partnering to build YWCA Family Village, as well as its membership in A Regional Coalition for Housing. Sutton, recalling a friend who decided against moving to Issaquah due to housing costs, expressed support for working with rental developers to designate a percentage of units as affordable in exchange for tax and fee incentives — Flood, Ramos and Reh each proposed a similar idea, with Winterstein alluding to council plans to look at incentives in the future.

As the conversation turned to business development, Winterstein argued that growth of living wage jobs that endowed purchasing power for housing inside the city would have the side effect of lessening impacts to the traffic network.

“We have quite a few jobs here, most of them in service and retail,” he said. “The housing stock to people in those jobs, it really isn’t available to them.”

In the same line of questioning, Ramos turned the conversation back to affordable housing as he lamented that his children wouldn’t be able to afford housing in the city they had grown up.

“There are renters who have a good job at Costco who are thinking about moving to Renton to buy a house for 7-to-10 years in the hopes they can move back,” Ramos said. “That isn’t a good plan. … I’d like to make that balance a little bit better.”

An environmental forum for candidates was hosted Tuesday by the Issaquah Environmental Council, Issaquah Alps Trail Club, Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park and Save Lake Sammamish.

A third candidates forum will be held at Providence Point Town Hall 6:30 p.m. Oct. 20.