Election Results – City of St. Louis
The results are in and only 6.85% of registered voters bothered to cast a ballot today. Sad, very sad. All the more reason we need to switch to non-partisan elections so that we have a single election rather than a primary and general.
Most of the ballot was simply a formality, with only a single candidate per seat.
In the 12th ward incumbent Republican Fred Heitert was re-elected with nearly 70% of the vote. This ward turned out 14.7% of their voters for this rate partisan contest. Look for this to be Heitert’s last term.
As expected, the two school board candidates backed by the teacher’s union walked away winners. The question is if the students will be winners as a result, I’m not so convinced.
And with nearly 70% of the vote, Proposition P requiring voter approval to sell or lease public land, including parks, passed big time. This, I believe, is a clear message to big business & city hall — listen to the voters or will we will power away from you. Look for lawsuits challenging the charter amendment.
You can find more information at stlelections.com
Just a question on the school board – it appaers that that race is/was supposed to be “non-partisan”. If a slate of candidates is endorsed by the union, doesn’t that constitute or border on being partisan? And yeah, less than 7% turnout is pathetic!
Voter turnout is just another indication among many that you don’t live in a democracy. How does StL rank on this measure?
You say this may be Heitert’s last term. Do you think he’s ready to retire?
Well, yes. The School Board elections are non-partisan, but don’t expect this inconvenient fact to alter a perfectly good theoretical argument.
Do we get to vote on the Animal House in the 24th ward?
How can 6.85% of the vote deliver a clear message on anything, including prop P? I would be in favor of lumping more issues per election to get people to the polls? Or a tax increase question, that usually gets people to turn out.
Unfortunately, “We get the government we deserve”.
The security word is “change” and that’s what we need. Between the union endorsements of school board candidates and the Democratic party lock, we practically have a non-partisan system already, why not just save the money and skip the second election a month later? Maybe we’d get a 20% turnout? Absolutely pathetic.
“Look for this to be Heitert’s last term.”??? What is that based on?
Quote:
“And with nearly 70% of the vote, Proposition P requiring voter approval to sell or lease public land, including parks, passed big time. This, I believe, is a clear message to big business & city hall — listen to the voters or will we will power away from you. Look for lawsuits challenging the charter amendment.”
Fortunately, our elected representatives did listen to the voters, they rejected the deal initially, held out for something better, and then got a deal done that was beneficial to both BJC and the citizens of the city…exactly the way a representative democracy is supposed to work. What would have happened if the BJC deal had been subjected to a vote? My guess is a very vocal minority (the “our parks aren’t for sale†contingent) would have squashed it, leaving no chance to leverage an underused piece of land for money for north city parks (sorry north side residents), and a hospital with no convenient place to expand. For the good of the city I hope this measure is overturned in the courts.
“Non-partisan” does not equal uncontested. Without greater participation, both with a more diverse selection of candidates and with a much higher voter turnout, the status quo will continue to perpetuate itself. As I noted in a previous post, I was one of less than a dozen observers at the LWV candidates forum on Staurday. The good news is that there were 5-6 viable candidates for the two open seats. The bad news, IMHO, is that the two elected Tuesday were not among the strongest candidates.
Why not, Jim?
For starters, one was a no show (but did send a surrogate) and the other arrived more than an hour late (blamed it on traffic). If making it to a candidates’ forum isn’t a top priority a few days before an election, why should I trust them to a) make the school board their top priority and/or b) not to operate behind a veil of secrecy, paying only token lip service to the public who elects them? I’m also very leery of any candidate who seeks out and receives the endorsement of the teacher’s union. Part of the Board’s function is approving union contracts, and it’s very difficult to serve two masters. From a fiscal standpoint, the board must be as neutral and pragmatic as possible – they represent all St. Louis taxpayers, not just dues-paying union members. Paying employees well is only one part of the equation. So is maintaining infrastructure, increasing employee productivity and stretching tax dollars as far as possible.
While it’s too late now, my wife and I were most impressed with Douglas Petty, and we were also both impressed with Jason Spray. They both showed a passion for the position and a strong understanding for the role of a board member. They were also actually reaching out to us, as voters. (I was, however, disappointed that one of the Urban Review STL regulars, Maurice St. Pierre, was MIA – he’s articulated a lot of good ideas here, in the past.) Mr. Petty also seemed to possess an ideal skill set to provide appropriate leadership in trying times.
But, for better or worse, this is likely a truly academic exercise. The state will come in and whoever’s serving on the board will have no real power to impact much of anything. Thus, I’m not losing any sleep over who won, I’m just disappointed that we didn’t have this level of understanding and commitment in the past.
BJC will build something beautiful at Hudlin Park. Slay deserves credit for bringing BJC to the table. The aldermen deserve credit for targeting BJC resources to North City. The city will benefit from more jobs, more earnings taxes, the multiplier effect of positive economic growth and increased prestige as a health care and bio-tech center.
As fas as funding crises, we have too many to count…public employee’s pensions…LRA inventory to maintain…money to build a decent animal shelter…crumbling infrastructure in city neighborhoods…general revenue for park maintenance…etc.
Thanks to the deal makers, at least now we have a big positive on the revenue side. We need more entrepreneurial leadership at city hall. Like Pres. Elect Reed has said, “the city is open for business”. Amen Brother!
Nonpartisan elections would be a great thing! At the monent, the requirements for indendent filing are excessive and prevent many candidates from filing. The only parties with ballot status in the city are the Democrats, Republicans and Greens. Many reform-minded candidates don’t want to join up with the conservative Democratic machine or the Republican Party, which has a terrible stigma in urban areas. The Green Party doesn’t even have a functioning Central Committee and hasn’t fielded an aldermanic candidate since 2003, and is plagued by a lack of seriousness and factionalism. Reform candidates are effectively excluded under this system, and the result has been a city government structurally unchanged since 1916. This is the city government system that took a growing city of over 600,000 in 1916 down to 352,000 people today.
The voter turnout signifies how much the citizens of St. Louis care about Prop P.
Moreover, Michael Allen shouldn’t blame City machine policies solely for our population decline. Federal policies played a huge role, although our local lack of leadership, along with other factional divisions like the Team Four Plan, definitely stimulated the decline.
I didn’t vote for two reasons: there was little reason to vote after the primary and I was in Paris. The second one was really the primary reason to be honest. Still, I could have trekked downtown and looked for parking on Tucker so I could vote absentee but again what’s the point? The BJC deal is done, my alderwoman ran unopposed and Reed wasn’t going to lose even if he started wearing Micheal Jackson’s Thriller outfits to “meet & greets”.
The whole system is a real mess that needs a real fix. Move the elections to November and make them non-partisan. If someone would start a ballot measure for this, I’d donate time and money to help.
Non-partisan elections are not the solution to voter apathy. Lets look at a city with Non-partisan elections and more choices in candidates to see what happens. Lets look to the west, the near west of Kansas City!
In Kansas City they have non-partisan elections and term limits of 8 years. They have all the council seats and the mayor up for election at the same time. The first election takes place on the last Tuesday in February.
February 27th election
Turn out – less than 20%
Candidates
Mayor – 12 candidates running for Mayor. 5 of them were council people that co-incidentally termed out at the same time as the Mayor. The top two vote getters were the former Auditor and the President of the council (President is a council member that is elected from and by the council body)
District 1 At Large (A.L.) – candidate is from the district but runs citywide
One candidate
District 1 In District (I.D.)- candidate is voted on only in the district
One candidate
District 2 A.L.
One candidate
District 2 I.D.
4 candidates
District 3 A.L.
2 candidates
District 3 I.D.
5 candidates
District 4 A.L.
5 candidates
District 4 I.D.
4 candidates
District 5 A.L.
3 candidates
District 5 I.D.
3 candidates
District 6 A.L.
4 candidates – winner was former state rep.
District 6 I.D.
4 candidates
They line up all elections in K.C.
So 49 candidates collectively spent millions to run for 13 seats. The voters had 8 city offices to vote and over 28 candidates on each and every ballot for in the primary. With all that activity and all the choices turn out was only a few percentage points over our cities primary where some voters had up to 2 offices with maybe 4 candidates to choose from.
If anything Kansas City’s no-partisan elections give voters choices, but that obviously is not the key to getting people to vote.
On a side note the school board elections were April 3rd and they had dismal turn out too.
Director C-1 32,159 registered voters 790 votes (2.5%)
Director C-2 18,563 registered voters 622 votes (3.4%)
Director C-4 8,426 registered voters 443 votes (5.3%)
Back to education – this is excerpted from a Denver Post article today – is/could this be part of the problem here?
“Denver’s middle schools have become impoverished, underenrolled bastions of abysmal academic performance and “neglect” in recent years, district administrators told school board members Thursday.
In the first of a handful of talks to board members, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet and his chief policy adviser, Brad Jupp, gave a grim picture of the city’s traditional sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade schools.
More than half the students in all but three of the 15 traditional buildings do not read at grade level. At nine middle schools, more than 80 percent of students live in poverty.
The so-called “middle-school problem” isn’t limited to Denver. Other districts, including Philadelphia, have phased out middle schools in favor of kindergarten-through-eighth-grade programs.
Traditional middle schools have lost hundreds of students over the past several years as more families opted for K-8 or charter schools, or went outside the Denver district. Nearly 600 fewer students attended middle schools citywide this year, compared with last year.
One-third of the schools are below 50 percent capacity. In order for them to be full, DPS would need to attract 4,500 middle-school students. This was the first meeting specifically about middle schools the board has had in at least four years.”
Turnout and choice are two separate issues. Americans have become notoriously apathetic when it comes to voting. There don’t seem to be any good solutions other than a hot issue to get a lot of folks up off their recliners. Things tried have included fewer elections, more elections, special elections, all-mail-in elections (all you gotta do is buy a stamp), early voting (no excuses or absentee ballots needed), vote centers (you don’t need to go to your preceinct polling place, you can vote anywhere in town). The bottom line is a lot of people don’t vote because they don’t see their effort having any impact. They’re tired of saturation advertising and the political cliches. They’re tired of the petty issues and the politics of personality. They’re tired of politicians who value theatrics and personal noteriety over constructive consensus. They’re tired of politicians operating in isolation, not responding to individual constituent communications, and many times, making decisions that make little sense to many members of the public. Combine that with the glacial pace it takes to accomplish almost anything politically, it’s no surprise people are more and more disengaged.
As for choice, what’s wrong with having 49 candidates runing for 13 seats?! I liked that we had 6 people running for the 2 SLPS seats, even though they’d likely have short, emasculated terms and even though the two I voted for lost. It sure beats having an uncontested primary followed by an uncontested general election combined with no term limits. No wonder incumbency is soooo powerful locally. Hmm . . . . maybe THAT’S why recall has been embraced as the best tool for change at the Board of Aldermen . . .
Jim, you’ve got it absolutely nailed. People don’t see any point in voting because they see very little or no difference between the candidates either on the campaign trail or once elected.
So far as the middle school thing, it seems to be a pretty universal problem. I wrote about it recently, inspired by the facilities changes coming for our district and a New York Times series (now available only to paid subscribers, unfortunately).
btw, gang, if you haven’t googled Jim you should, just for a sense of the resume–his comments come from a lot of public service and experience.
Interesting reasons for assuming the two winners aren’t qualified Jim, but a couple things you might want to think about. First, Petty and Spray did seek the endorsement of the teacher’s union, so your suspicion should extend to them. Second, as you mentioned, this forum, as the others this election, was very sparsely attended and thrown together last minute. The two candidates who won probably made a better decision than the ones who were there by spending their time somewhere were voters actually were. After all, they did win by a lot, not just a little.
http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/08/let-us…
In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. — Voltaire (1764)
And on that note all I can say (since 1764) seemingly – not a lot has changed.