The torrential rain this week marked our sudden jolt into autumn, but it also marks the beginning of a different kind of season: Elections.

Residents heard from many of the candidates for office at a Sept. 21 candidate forum, hosted by the Vashon Maury Island Community Council and facilitated by Amy Drayer, the director of the Vashon Island Chamber of Commerce.

Islanders peppered county council candidates Sofia Aragon and Teresa Mosqueda with questions about housing affordability, climate change and the island’s representation in broader regional politics —aka, its seat at the table for Puget Sound issues.

These are topics worth keeping an eye on. On housing, one questioner asked if the candidates were willing to take regulatory aim at short-term rental companies, such as Airbnb and Vrbo, which let homeowners turn their properties into domestic hotels. Both candidates expressed at least openness to the idea.

Those services have emerged as flashpoints in a debate over housing affordability; critics say they’re cash cows that take away rooms that could be used for middle-income workers who can’t afford to live on the island, while owners say they’re a legitimate source of secondary income for mom-and-pop or fixed income landlords. A quick scan of Airbnb shows many dozens, if not hundreds of such properties on the island alone.

However you feel about those services, we can’t expect many workers to make it out here without giving them a place to live. A Sept. 21 Seattle Times article reported that vacation hot spot White Salmon, which draws tens of thousands of visitors annually, is struggling to actually hire restaurant workers to feed those tourists.

And on Aug. 27, Seattle Times writer Heidi Groover detailed in a lengthy article how Vashon’s workforce is also being priced off the island.

The math is simple. If the rent is too high, and businesses can’t or won’t pay enough to offset it, workers will find greener pastures.

That bleeding of the people who build, fix, run, and clean things makes a community less vibrant, less interconnected, and less resilient. It’s a fate we can avoid through careful, deliberate action.

You can share your thoughts or learn more about the housing situation locally at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 3, at a free housing forum at Vashon Center for the Arts, hosted by Vashon HouseHold. We’ll be there and we encourage you to attend too.

Islanders should also be paying close attention to Vashon’s school board race, which began earlier this year with a crowded field of nine candidates seeking to fill four vacant seats on the board.

An August primary contest and the withdrawal of candidate Holly Gilman has winnowed the field to six candidates, with only two out of the four races on the ballot now contested.

Angela Marshall, a district parent who works as deputy director of King County’s Labor Relations Office, faces off against retired teacher Martha Woodward in one of these races.

In the other contested race, Juniper Rogneby, a district parent running on a platform of equity for all students, faces Jake Jacobovitch, who has served on numerous island boards, including the school board, in the past.

The candidates are all to be commended for their willingness to take on the very hard work of overseeing the island’s largest and most important taxing district.

In the candidate’s forum last week, it was impossible not to notice an undercurrent of zeal to restore the role of oversight to the board.

The new board will have work to do in terms of repairing community trust in the district, after two teacher investigations that roiled the community starting last year.

But the district also faces real financial pressures, given locked-in pay raises across almost all of its staffing groups in recent years, high inflation, and deep flaws in the state’s model for funding basic education. Program cuts — one solution to balance the budget — have already been too deep.

With poor ferry service threatening the district’s much-needed pipeline of commuter students, as well as the end of pandemic-era federal funding, the new board will need to keep a close and expert eye on the district’s bottom line.

Our children’s education depends on that.