Campaign 2015 – Salisbury – Page 2

An anticlimactic November

One reason the Salisbury city elections were changed beginning this year was the abysmal turnout they usually had in the spring. Sadly, turnout will likely be lower still thanks to the lack of a mayor’s race. The deadline came and went today and Jake Day is the only candidate who filed for mayor.

Voters in District 5, on the city’s far east side, will have even less reason to show up because incumbent Council member Laura Mitchell was the only one bothering to run in her district.

On the other hand, there are old-fashioned shootouts in the other four Council districts. Two incumbents lumped together in District 3 will tangle as both Tim Spies, who won in his second try in 2011, and 2014 appointee Jack Heath will both battle for that seat along with Kevin Lindsay, who was one of 11 unsuccessful applicants to succeed Terry Cohen when she resigned last year – it was the seat Heath won appointment to. It’s a district that takes in the Camden neighborhood by Salisbury University and hops across the Wicomico River to take in areas along Pemberton Drive.

There are two others who tried for the Cohen chair that are running for election this year: Sarah Halcott in District 1 and Muir Boda in District 2. Halcott faces two foes who are familiar with each other: incumbent Shanie Shields and 2013 opponent April Jackson in this inner-city and near west side district. Boda, who is in a district with no incumbent, has three fellow challengers in Keyvan Aarabi, Marvin Ames, and Justin Gregoli. Ames ran for the District 1 County Council seat last year but lost in the Democratic primary. District 2 covers the close-in neighborhoods on the north and east sides of Salisbury (and is my home district.)

Instead of running again for mayor, Jim Ireton opted to run for City Council in District 4. He will face two others vying for the seat: Kenneth Vickers III and Roger Mazzullo. That district is perhaps the largest in geography as it takes in most of the commercial center along the northern fringes of town before veering toward downtown Salisbury.

And downtown will have a friend in Day, who has to be pinching himself and wondering how he was fortunate enough not to have an opponent in his run for mayor. It’s very possible, though, that he may just switch roles with Ireton as he would likely seek to be Council president after being put on the Council as Day did after the 2013 election. (Ireton has served on City Council before, though. He was on it for about a year before leaving – as the story goes it was to take a job out of town.)

With no incumbent in District 2, that will be an interesting race as the victor may be the only newcomer to city government. Boda has run for City Council twice before, losing to incumbent Debbie Campbell in 2009 and finishing fourth behind Mitchell, Cohen, and Spies in 2011.

Out of the 16 total candidates, there are six incumbents (one by appointment), four who have sought election at least once before and lost (including the appointee), four who tried for appointment (one apiece being also in the previous two categories), and five who are apparently political neophytes. Some have steeper learning curves than others.

Interestingly to me, the lack of a primary election means financial disclosure statements will not be due until a week before the election – so no one will know just how the money supply is for candidates until the last minute. (Had the primary remained in place, it would have been held in early September for voters in all but District 5 as the three or four candidates otherwise would have been whittled down to two in each race.) One can ask the legitimate question of who, if anyone, Jake Day will ask his donors to give to now that he is in the clear. (They can also ask about Laura Mitchell.) As two incumbents who got a free ride, their backing could make a difference.

So the first hurdle is crossed, eleven weeks before we actually vote. For a candidate, 77 days can seem like an eternity until they get to mid-October and wonder how they will get through the next few weeks with all they need to do. I look forward to hearing some new and good ideas for the city of Salisbury from this group.

A new Day in Salisbury?

It was apparent from the start that Jake Day was a guy in a hurry. Not content to learn the ropes as a member of Salisbury City Council, he ascended directly to its leadership. So I’m not really surprised that he made his expected run for mayor of Salisbury official earlier tonight at Headquarters Live.

Yet there are some things which stick out about Day’s agenda and record which I find to be of concern. It’s possible he may have addressed these in his remarks, since I was not at the event, and he may certainly feel free to comment here. But I would like to know first of all what he plans to do to keep up Salisbury’s neighborhoods and not create a city full of red-headed stepchildren to the spoiled brat of downtown. Certainly downtown development has a place in the city’s renewal but there are other avenues worth considering too.

Granted, downtown revitalization was Pillar 1, Strategy 1 of his original vision for Salisbury from two years ago but there are about 95% or more of the city’s residents who live in the rest of the city so their needs have to be kept in mind as well.

Another question I have is what will become of the “rain tax” he and most of the rest of City Council (save District 3’s Jack Heath) voted for last year. What specific projects will the money go to, and is there a point when the job will be completed, negating its need? I understand he has a multi-decade goal in mind, but there are a lot of blanks instead of answers on how to get from point A to point B.

One thing the Daily Times story alludes to is the possibility of a race between Day and current Mayor Jim Ireton; however, I don’t see that happening. The simple reason is that if Ireton wanted to secure another term he would have made his intentions known already. I know we have more than a month before the filing deadline but the word on the street is that Ireton wants to switch jobs with Day and run for a County Council seat in his District 4.

If it’s a race between Ireton and Day for mayor, certainly the city would be better off with the more even-keeled Day at the helm. Ireton’s bullying style is wearing thin.

But I want to keep my powder dry for the time being and see if a more conservative, business-minded candidate emerges. So don’t include me in the hoopla surrounding Day just yet.

The Salisbury incumbent protection plan?

I was reading in the Salisbury Independent last night and came across an item that piqued my interest. As some of you may know, the city of Salisbury has revamped its electoral system over the last few years.

Step one was moving its elections from the spring to the fall as well as synchronizing the terms of all elected officials to finish at the same time – those who were elected in the spring of 2013 only won terms of slightly over 2 1/2 years.

Last year the new leadership in City Council scrapped the old two-district system where one member was elected from a majority-minority district (District 1] while the other four came from District 2 and redrew it into five separate Council districts, with two having significant minority populations. Going to five single-member districts allowed the city of Salisbury to more closely reflect a minority population of about 2/5.

All that I could live with; in fact, I had encouraged the five-district idea for many years (even asking the opinion of candidates on the subject at a 2011 NAACP forum.) And while you run the risk of a complete turnover in government by having all seats elected at once, this reflects the system we live with in Wicomico County and in Maryland as a whole. So far we’ve not turned over anything close to the whole General Assembly and have managed to keep at least a couple incumbents on County Council.

However, aside from the likelihood of multiple incumbent participants being in the same district this cycle, the blurb I read leads me to think there will be an incumbent protection program in place this fall.

City Council, led by its President Jake Day, is floating a proposal to do away with the city’s primary election and simply place all comers on the November ballot. On the surface it makes sense given that the 2013 primary only eliminated one contender out of eight who ran for office. (Ironically, that one person was later appointed to City Council.) Certainly it’s a taxpayer-friendly proposal as well since only one election would be necessary.

But imagine, if you will, a situation where four or five are on the ballot with a somewhat unpopular incumbent. Each of those challengers will take a share of the vote, and knowing how some voters may go with the name they know it means an incumbent may win re-election with just 20 or 25 percent of the vote. At least with a primary culling the field down to two (at least in most cases, barring a tie for second as we had in 2013) we’re assured the victor has a majority of the vote. It can give voters the opportunity to amass support behind a single challenger.

Even so, there is opportunity in adversity given that City Council is expected to put this proposal into place. But it would take a meeting of the minds between all the conservative groups in town who may want to back a particular horse in a city race.

Since I happen to live in the same district as my friend Muir Boda, I’ll use him as an example. Let’s say I had a scintilla of desire to run for City Council (which I don’t) and that Muir also got in the race, along with a liberal incumbent who wasn’t doing his job. Seeing that Muir and I are both in a conservative mindset, it’s likely we would split the vote against the incumbent and allow him to win because there’s no primary to eliminate one of us and unite the opposition.

This idea goes a little bit against the grain for me, but there may be merit in having the proverbial (or literal, depending on who’s involved) smoke-filled room to decide which prospective candidate to back. Even though it’s a non-partisan race, it may be a good idea for the GOP to endorse a candidate beforehand. With the last election yielding a 5-0 Democrat majority on City Council as well as a Democrat mayor, it’s obvious our procedures heretofore weren’t very good.

Day contends that the new districts will produce a smaller number of candidates for each district, and he may be right. But if the residents of Salisbury want to take the city in a more conservative direction, we don’t want to split the vote by having several conservatives canceling each other out.