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Some Naples City Council candidates took the city’s vision to task Thursday night, saying the city’s visioning statement wasn’t representative of the community as a whole.

“I don’t have much faith in the visioning plan,” mayoral candidate Henry Kennedy said. “It was based on 700 people (responses), not 2,200 people. I would have gone door-to-door to get the answers.”

The discussion over the visioning statement came during Thursday night’s Naples Citizens for Quality Government candidates’ forum. The forum, which was moderated by Naples Daily News Editorial Page Editor Jeff Lytle, gave residents a chance to question the six City Council and two mayoral candidates about their stance on critical issues facing the city.

The vision statement outlines the future for Naples in the next 20 years. Vision 2020 was approved in 2007 by a 4-3 council vote, and has been used as a catalyst for improvement projects throughout the city.

The plan came up when candidates were asked whether they felt the vision statement and the city’s comprehensive plan should be approved by voters.

Council candidate Margaret “Dee” Sulick said she believed that of the 700 people polled during the visioning process, about 30 percent of them were non-city residents.

Those residents’ opinions, she said, were weighed as heavily as the ones who live within city limits. For Sulick, that means the process was skewed.

Council candidate Teresa Heitmann, who attended all of the meetings, said that if people think the process, or the end product, is flawed then they need to take a look at where the information came from.

“This will be a tool (for you) to get involved, and for us to move forward with what we see as the vision of the city,” Heitmann said. “(But) if this is not a tool that we want to use, then we need to look at what we had to go by.”

Candidate Dorothy Hirsch was the only candidate to say the plan should have gone to the voters.

That vision statement wasn’t the only issue candidates discussed. Much like the prior forums, the question of whether Naples is a tourist or residential community was once again raised.

Sulick, who has said she would only take campaign money from city residents, said she felt the city needed to pay more attention to the neighborhoods and year-round residents in Naples.

“I feel very very strongly that this is a residential community,” she said. “There needs to be balance and no one has been listening to you for a very long time.”

Incumbents John Sorey, Johnny Nocera and Bill Barnett disagreed, however. All three said the current council takes into consideration its constituents’ wishes, while trying to balance the needs of the seasonal community.

“We don’t make it into a Key West or a (Bourbon Street),” Barnett said. “But we have a lot of (residents) who come downtown and love it. It is not an entertainment district.”

Candidate Gloria Kovacs, a member of the Downtown Naples Association, said the association works hard each year to sponsor a minimum number of events downtown, in hopes of reducing the impact those events have on the surrounding neighborhoods.

Naples City Council elections are scheduled for Jan. 29.