Robert Woody, guest, Master of Ceremonies Jeff McAdams

Local party chairman Stafford Jones had yet another successful event out at the Canterberry Equestrian Center. This year’s headliner was Conservative radio talk show host and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham.  She is heard locally on The Star FM 99.5 from 9am til noon every weekday.

This annual event, known officially as the Ronald Reagan Black Tie and Blue Jeans BBQ, is the Alachua County Republican Executive Committee’s annual fundraiser that is used to help support local candidates and other party functions. It’s what has helped them outraise the Democrats in recent years, but it has become more important to Republican candidates as a must-attend event. This year drew US Senate candidates Charlie Crist, who is presently Governor of Florida, and his Primary opponent, rising star Marco Rubio.

Governor Crist posing with guests

The Governor was given a chance to speak at this event, just ahead of Laura Ingraham. It was a good stump speech, designed to appeal to the recently energized conservatives. He invoked the name of Reagan and trotted out all his conservative street creds and got a good reception from the crowd. But earlier in the program his US Senate Primary opponent, Marco Rubio,  gave the invocation which included a brief appeal to conservative values and a short prayer. He got a standing ovation that was several notches higher on the applause meeter than what Crist was to receive.

Marco Rubio posing with guests

Laura Ingraham wrapped it up with short speech on the need to continue to fight the Democrat agenda. She was armed with plenty of humorous barbs, as well as a litany of dangers that we currently face from Congress. She did not fail to include some “Tough Love” items for Republicans in Congress who have rolled over for the liberals in the past, hitting John McCain especially hard.

Laura Ingraham hammered away at Nancy Pelosi

Before the program began, there were some local candidates meeting potential supporters. Among those that I saw were Keith Perry And Remzey Samarrai, both running for the State House, District 22. Jodi Wood, who is still unopposed in his race for the School Board, was there and had a booth. I also saw Speaker of the Florida House Larry Cretul, former Gainesville City Commissioner Ed Braddy, State Senator Steve Oelrich, and perennial challenger Ward Scott. Altogether, I was told there were about 700 people present, although it could have been more.

• Part 1 (9:46) Congestion, sustainability, growth & productivity, New Urbanism
• Part 2 (12:23) Land-use & transportation connection, complex travel patterns, federal transit subsidies, auto-mobility & jobs
• Part 3 (14:33) Road diets, solutions & strategies, people preferences, technology advances, ideology of urban form
• Part 4 (11:21) Who serves who?, callers comment

Talk of the Town in on weekday afternoons at 12 o’clock and is an hour long. I highly recommend this program for people who want more analysis of our local government’s actions.

From time to time people ask me if I plan on running for local office again. I have been encouraged to do so, and I hear that my name does come up once in awhile. This is both flattering and a little bit gratifying. I had a lot of fun running for the County Commission back in 2002, and I learned a lot by doing it. It’s nice to know that I have some residual fan base out there. It makes up for the people who have canceled appointments with me because of things I have blogged about.

Next year, on March 16 to be exact, Gainesville is having an election for Mayor, and I have to admit that I was tempted. I am deeply dissatisfied with our city government. The candidates who have signed up thus far leave me nonplussed on a good day. I feel like I am suffering from taxation without representation, and I want to do something about it. However, there is one thing that I learned from 2002 that is even more applicable than it was then: running for public office is costly, and I am not talking about campaign costs. I am self-employed, and in 2002, even though I still worked full time while campaigning for 10 months, I completely lost focus on my business and I had a huge shortfall that year. Last year, when the bottom fell out of the housing market and the stock market was in the tank, was the first time ever, in 28 years, that my business actually lost money. I am still digging myself out of that hole, so this is a bad time for me to be a candidate.

Back in 2004, in order to stay involved in local politics and supply some service to the people who run in local races, I started a website that would make it convenient for voters to find the candidates all in one place. I also contacted candidates and told them I would give them all the space they wanted on that site for free. I took pictures, went to forums, and reported on what happened on that site. It was time consuming, but cheap to do. And it didn’t hurt my business, because doing this was nothing like being a candidate.

Over the past several years there have been two big disappointments. One is that candidates don’t really use Alachua Voter Guide in any meaningful way. They just think this is my blog, and they hope I will write favorably about them. The fact is, I DON’T WANT TO WRITE ABOUT THEM AT ALL! I have offered them all a username and password and begged them to blog here themselves. I only write what I do because they don’t write at all. The second disappointment is that voters just don’t care about local candidates and what their local officials are up to. On election day, local races are an afterthought. People come out in pretty good numbers to vote for or against someone they either love or hate at the top of the ballot, and most everything else is voting in the dark. Our city commission races, which seldom have the big races as a drawing card, usually get only a 12-15% voter turnout. It’s only different when the vote coincides with a presidential preference primary. Then it zooms up to 30%. This past primary was different because of the hyped Obama candidacy.  That gave us a staggering 46% turnout. All of which is still pathetic.

Although I will not be a candidate in the near future, I will still be pouring my free time into Alachua Voter Guide. But frustration with our local government AND voter apathy has made me realize I have to amp up  my own writing. I believe that I must care a lot more than the candidates do about outreach, because they seem to be content with fighting over the same pool of voters who make up that 12% of the electorate who care enough to pay attention. More people must pay attention.

I believe that we have a democratic process for two reasons. One is to choose people who will represent our interest. The other is to get rid of them when they fail to do so. If there is no accountability, we may as well appoint them as commissars for life and just be good little drones and do whatever they tell us. I am afraid that too many of us already have that role down cold.

Stay tuned. It’s nest-whacking time…

Selwach is the owner of Best Jewelry and Loan Pawn Brokers, and he has run for city commission seats twice before. This year he ran against Jeanna Mastordicasa and lost. Two years ago he faced Lowe in the District 4 race and lost that one. Selwach is campaigning to decriminalize marijuana in the city limits and to fine Koppers $1,000 per day to clean up their toxic waste.

Craig Lowe championed the Transgendered Bathroom ordinance, and is promising to keep the city on its path of renewable energy development and expanding equal rights protections.

In the District 4 seat, being vacated by Lowe due to term limits, former County Commissioner Penny Wheat will now be facing homeless advocate Pat Fitzpatrick, who was also defeated by Craig Lowe two years ago for this same seat. His strategy is to register 1,000 homeless people and then to get them to stay around long enough to vote. In past District 4 races, that would be enough to do it.

First, our Mayor, Pegeen Hanrahan, is kept from running for re-election by term limits. Current District 4 city commissioner Craig Lowe, has filed to run for mayor. He is term-limited out of his seat, but he is allowed to run for what is, for all practical purposes, another city commission seat. So, term limits apparently have a loophole. The question I have is this: will Hanrahan run for Jack Donovan’s District 3 seat when he is term limited out in 2011? I believe she lives in that district. She was the District 3 commissioner when she was first elected back in 1999.

Next, Penny Wheat is back. She has filed to run for Lowe’s soon to be vacated District 4 seat. Wheat has been out of political office since she declined to run for re-election to the 3rd District seat of the Alachua County Commission. Although she has been out of office, I have seen her lurking at city candidate forums since then. She will be very hard to beat, although these city election are notoriously avoided by the electorate.

Stay tuned to this site for more local political news.

The other big issue I have heard is the issue of uniforms for our students.  This subject has a wide variety of opinions.  It is my belief that we need to enact tighter standards of dress which must be enforceable at the teacher level.

I encourage any interests and ideas to be sent to the email address that I have established to receive all ideas leading to the improvement of the Alachua County School system.

schoolredline@hotmail.com

The candidate at his booth at the Alachua 4th of july Celebration

By periodically perusing the Supervisor of Elections’ website, I discover when a new candidate has filed to run for office. I thought it might be a bit early to look, but that’s how I discovered Jodi Wood. He is running for School Board District 3, which is currently held by two term incumbent Wes Eubanks, who has not filed yet. It is a non-partisan race, and it will be run during next year’s primary. The Supervisor of Elections has not announced that date yet, but it will be either August 31, 2010, or September 7 of the same year.

Jodi Wood has been a real go getter for his own education, having graduated from high school at 14 and gotten a BA by 19, followed up with a Masters Degree and PhD in Business. He has several small children, one of whom is starting school, and this is what motivates him to serve. He is deeply concerned about the financial management of local schools and what he hears are the inevitable cuts in programs. He has ideas and he is eagerly soliciting ideas for cost savings that don’t involve cutting actual programs at his website. He says he has been getting ideas sent to him already, and is encouraged that programs can be saved through better management.

I asked him if he had any criticism of the incumbent, and he said he didn’t, and that he had never met him. He wants to run a positive campaign about saving the schools and their programs.

If Wes Eubanks, or anyone else, wants to meet Jodi, he will be having a meet and greet at West Side park on July 18 from 11:30am to 1pm. I will not be able to make it because I will be on vacation in Miami. But this is a good chance to get a potential school board member’s ear and let him know what you think.

Interested constituents getting some face time with the candidate.

A 27% turnout is not a mandate, but it doesn’t have to be. Our elections do not require that we have a quorum to be official. If, on elections day, only 10 people bothered to vote, 6 of them would basically do all the deciding for us.

It is mark of profound apathy that it took so much outside money and outside manpower to rally 15% of the registered voters to come out and defeat Charter Amendment One and the 12% of voters who came out to support it. The conservative Citizens for Good Public Policy must be wondering what they could have done to draw out a few thousand more sympathizers, but there is actually a more important question than this. The questons is, how did we become a community that has no conservative representatives in our city government?

For years my fellow conservatives have told me, “Gainesville is such a liberal town! There is no hope for a conservative candidate here!” Yet, those rascally liberals keep winning so many elections with so many voters being left on the table. We routinely have turnouts in the 10-13% range. Are we really doing the best we can do?  Should  we just give up permanently? Does this enlightened University town only have room for one point of view?

Critiquing our performance

In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to get Charter One on the ballot. It was also a mistake for the city commission to blow off the concerns of the citizens who opposed the gender identity provisions in regard to restrooms, but it was a sustainable mistake. What was underestimated was the amount of resources that would be released to oppose a ballot initiative that would roll back the city’s ambitous civil rights laws to the state’s more modest ones. If Citizens for Good Public Policy had instead gathered a similar effort to support a candidate to defeat Jeanna Mastordicasa, they would have faced much smaller resistance and may have pulled it off.

This also would have required that conservatives do something they never do: think ahead. Their successful effort would have to be followed up by getting a new Mayor and District 4 commissioner after Pegeen Hanrahan and Craig Lowe are removed by term limits. Three new commissioners, with the amenable Sherwin Henry, would have made the majority needed to cherry-pick the changes they wanted to begin with while leaving the rest of the civil rights laws in place.

Of course, all of this falls apart if each opportunity brings a new crop of last minute conservative candidates tumbling out and getting each others’ way. If you are thinking about running for one of these seats, you should adopt the motto of, “If you don’t get in early, get out of the way.” City elections are non-partisan, so there is no party primary to give people a chance to choose which conservative they will have to vote for in the big one. And when you have a lot of candidates, it usually means a runoff. And runoffs go to the liberals who faithfully participate in elections, and everything that leads up to them.

In summary, conservatives need to change their ways, not their values. They need to show up on election days, but they also need to stay engaged year round. And that means that Citizens for Good Public Policy should NOT disband, but expand its mission.

The final result was 8,375 FOR the Amendment and 11,717 against according to the Supervisor of Elections Unofficial Final Results, posted at 8:50 PM. If you want the financial breakdown, according to the latest financial reports available, Equality is Gainesville’s Business spent about $130,000 to bring in the final vote total AGAINST the amendment, and CitizensFor Good Public Policy spent about $63,000. That makes for about $11.25 per vote to defeat it, and $7.50 per vote in the failed attempt to pass it.

The lesser known Amendment 2, which prevents future city commissions from selling lands acquired for conservation, recreation, or cultural purposes without a referendum being put before the voters, got 15,226 FOR (41.68) and 3,643 AGAINST (58.32%.

In the city commission races, in the At-large 1 contest it was a first round knock out for the incumbent. Jeanna Mastrodicasa was re-elected with 10,281, or 58.13%. Her closest challenger was newcomer Robert Krames with 4,435 (25.08%), followed by Tom Cunilio with 1,108 (6.27%), Richard Selwach with 1,094 (6.19%), and James Schlachta with 767 (4.34%).

The single District 1 race was also a big win for the incumbent, Sherwin Henry, with 1,940 (68.21), and his opponent, Marcia Wimberly with 904 (31.79).

So, there will be no runoff election next month, but there will be more analysis later.