If the exchange that happened this week between Spokane Mayor Dennis Hession and two City Council members typifies the political campaign that will lead up to Nov. 6, it’s going to be a long, tiring six months.

On the surface, the issue was fire and paramedic protection for Latah Valley. Council members Al French, a candidate for mayor, and Brad Stark held a press conference in that neighborhood, urging a new $2 million fire station there. They and firefighters union President Greg Borg said response time to calls from there is slower than the citywide average. Stark said the construction could be covered out of a budget surplus that was “built on the back of our taxpayers and by the lack of public safety in critical areas that are in need.”

Hession called the event “the most blatant display of political maneuvering I have ever seen.”

Public safety is a legitimate issue, although Latah Valley’s concerns are but part of a much broader set of challenges. But constructive conversation won’t emerge from a battle between photo-op press conferences and sizzling City Hall press releases. The questions are too complex.

A $260,000 study recommends that the city trim 10 to 29 firefighters from the payroll only two years after budget cuts forced layoffs of 52 firefighters.

French and Stark’s strategy is certain to resonate with Latah Valley residents. But it’s a mathematical reality that some areas will have better than average service and some will have worse than average service. That’s what “average” is all about.

A better question is whether response times in Latah Valley are satisfactory. Hession says a new station isn’t justified until the population in the area reaches 10,000 (it’s 6,000 now) and the number of service calls reaches 200 or more a year (they now number just over 100). But arbitrary benchmarks are meaningless if firefighters and paramedics can’t get to an emergency quickly enough to save a life or a structure.

As Hession and Fire Chief Bobby Williams say, building a new station is one thing, staffing and equipping it are much costlier. Before adding new stations, Williams would prefer to restore cuts he was forced to make in 2005.

These and other complicated questions deserve thoughtful responses if the candidates want to help voters evaluate different approaches. Instead, the candidates demonstrated this week what syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker writes elsewhere on this page about the deterioration of political discourse: “People don’t disagree; they brawl.”

Candidates who truly want to serve their constituents can show it by applying their talents less to tactics and more to enlightenment.