I’m sick of the pendulum. I’m sick of seeing our councils swing from one extreme to the other. And this is my plea to you, the voter, to help make it stop.
I’ve been covering local elections since 1999 and I’ve seen our community do it time and time again — decide they hate what one council stood for and swap that lot for a group from the other side of the hill — only to find in three years the new group was also too narrowly focused.
The problem is we can’t thrive with a council of people who are all for one thing. We need people with different perspectives who are able to talk and debate topics with careful consideration of all sides of a situation.
We need councillors who are young, old and in between. We need elected officials who come from money and those who are barely getting by financially. We need people with children and those with adult dependents to lend their experience to council discussions, and we need open-minded councillors who don’t assume they know what the community thinks before they’re asked.
If this election becomes about a council not being green enough or business minded enough, for example, I fear voters could be swayed by a special interest group to vote for a slate rather than individual councillors — and that’s a mistake.
A slate that stands for one particular thing may seem important during election time, but think it through to the end. Do you really want every decision weighed by how green or how conducive to business it is for the next four years?
Time is an important consideration in this year’s local election. Whoever we elect will be in power for four years, rather than three. That extra year is enough time to do a lot of damage or a lot of good.
Between now and election day on Nov. 15 we voters have the power and we shouldn’t take it for granted. We hold the fate of many candidates in our hands, but once we make our mark and the results are read, we have to take a back seat and hope our choices pan out.
Please get to know the individual candidates. Read our upcoming election pull-out section, go to the all candidates meetings, visit candidate websites, track them on Twitter, follow them on Facebook, corner them in coffee shops and ask their opinion on things. Make sure you know who you’re voting for and what’s important to them — and find out how they make decisions.
In less than 30 days, they’ll be making a ton of them for you and your community.
