SUBS looking out for Business

Tucson will now be like the rest of the State of Arizona, hosting non-partisan elections. State Senator Jonathan Paton’s bill was signed by the Governor and will be effective in our 2011 Mayoral and Council elections.

There are actually two parts to this bill; the second part refers to Ward only elections. We have an unusual process here that nominates our partisan candidate in primaries by Ward and then the candidates run city wide in the general. Again, this bill focuses on changing our elected body to run in a non-partisan primary with the top two vote recipients running in the general election. Should one of the candidates receive over 50% plus one, that candidate would be the winner of both the primary and general election. Below are somet thoughts to ponder.

The biggest benefit of non-partisan elections is that council members are elected on their merits and, once elected, each has equal standing.

Political partisanship has hampered our City’s opportunities to do a better job of leading, managing and implementing the needs and goals of citizens. Now that we have non-partisan electons will it indeed remove the political party patriotism in the decision-making process by our City Council? Probably not at first, but time will lend itself to this outcome because more and more people are wanting to vote their personal beliefs’, not party concepts with respect to local issues.

We will still need to have an elected body willing to look at the bigger pictures and make decisions for the whole community, not based on political favoritism.

The ability to hold non-partisan elections promotes local autonomy since the outcome of local elections is less likely to be determined by the national or state political current.   Also, it demonstrates that City politics differ substantially from state or federal politics. According to a 2001 survey by the National League of Cities, 77% of the responding cities have non-partisan elections, and 23% have partisan elections.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.