GELFAND’S WORLD-In the recent run-up to the city elections, one side argued that voters would be more engaged if they were allowed to continue to vote in March of odd numbered years. This being March of an odd numbered year, we got the answer. The voters communicated their feelings resoundingly -- by not showing up. Election experts think that the final vote total may go as high as 11 percent after all the provisional ballots are processed. At the end of election night, the total was barely above 8 percent.
Those who did turn out to vote managed to make their views known, supporting the Charter amendments to change the election dates, and they did so by more than a three to one margin. The stomping delivered to the anti's appears to have been in spite of, rather than because of, the surge in last minute special interest money that went to the pro side.
There was injury added to insult, because there actually were some significant contests.
The race to replace district 4 City Councilman Tom LaBonge had (let me count them) 14 contestants. To give you an idea of how pathetic this race was, the highest vote getter had the microscopic total of 2911 votes at the end of the evening. That amounted to 15.3 percent of all the votes.
As in so many recent City Council elections, the leader, Carolyn Ramsay, is in fact the Chief of Staff to the departing councilman. Tom LaBonge was himself the chief to the previous departing councilman.
There's something of a trend here, as we have also seen this phenomenon in other City Council races. This is not to denigrate Ramsay, who appears to have an admirable record in nature preservation, but there is something a little depressing about seeing Los Angeles functioning more like a hereditary monarchy than a robust democracy.
By the way, the contest for who will face Ramsay in the runoff election is between David Ryu and Tomas O'Grady, trailing at 2776 and 2715 votes respectively before all the provisional ballots are counted. Ryu is described as a community health director. O'Grady we remember from his previous run for the same office. It's pretty sad when the top three finishers don't crack 9000 combined votes.
And that's it for the City Council races. The incumbents won, and the other open seat left by Bernard Parks' retirement was won easily by Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
The big news for this election had to do with the school board. The voters obviously weren't pleased with what has been going on in the district, as every race with even token opposition went to a runoff. That's three out of 4 races. Incumbent Bennett Kayser actually finished second to Ref Rodriguez. Down in my district, incumbent Richard Vladovic barely squeaked by perennial candidate Lydia Gutierrez (disclosure: I sat on the same neighborhood council board with Lydia for a number of years and consider her a friend).
In another school board race, incumbent Tamar Galatzan barely got to 39 percent of the vote total and will face a runoff against Scott Mark Schmerelson.
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You have to admit that the voters were sending a message. Perhaps the new school board will be a little more careful about buying iPads that the students can hack, and paying for software that costs tens of millions of dollars but doesn't work.
The Community College District also had 4 races on the ballot, and one was quite close, with the first and second finishers at 35.58 and 34.99 percent, respectively. Curiously, there will be no runoff, because the Community College District elections don't do runoffs -- the top vote getter is elected. We may have to wait for a couple of weeks to find whether that seat goes to Andra Hoffman or Francesca Vega, who are less than a thousand votes apart at the end of the election night's counting.
The passage of the Charter amendments may have one unintended consequence having to do with the city's neighborhood council system. For obscure historical reasons, the neighborhood council elections have migrated to even numbered years so as to allow the City Clerk to maintain some nominal level of participation. We can probably expect that with the municipal elections now moving to even numbered years as of 2020, there will be pressure to move the neighborhood council elections to odd numbered years.
It would make more sense to be done with the current amateurish approach to neighborhood council elections. If we can pass a Charter amendment to revise the municipal elections, we can certainly pass a Charter amendment to revise the currently ridiculous definition of neighborhood council eligibility, which remains uninterpretable even after fifteen years of trying. Changing neighborhood council voting eligibility to registered voters would take the guesswork out of neighborhood council eligibility, and it would allow the city to put neighborhood council elections on the regular city ballot. There are strong advantages to making this change, and few disadvantages.
On a political note, one neighborhood council alliance came out strongly against the Charter amendments, although the logic was a bit weak. There was even a certain amount of crowing about how we were leading the voters in defeating the two measures. I think this stunning defeat for the opposition forces should lead to a little rational reconsideration of our actual level of influence.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch and can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 19
Pub: Mar 6, 2015
