Why did I decide to run for this seat in the first place?

How did I end up deciding to file paperwork as a write-in candidate for District 2 County Supervisor?

I've been interested in politics my entire adult life, and from time to time I've become personally involved, but like most people I'm busy, or think that I am, and it's easy to find other priorities from day to day. Also, like most people, I tend to follow National politics more closely than I do local politics (for reasons that I'll address in another post) even though there's a much better chance of directly impacting events on a County level, as well as being directly impacted by the actions of County Government.

As most residents of District 2 know, we've been poorly served over the last eight years, for several reasons, and that lack of an effective voice has functionally left almost all policy-making decisions in the hands of the Supervisors from Districts 1 and 3. I don't wish to re-hash the past eight years in any detail when it comes to the personalities of the three Supervisors and the interactions (or lack thereof) that occurred as a result, but suffice it to say that there were times when Paul Newman should have been heard by his colleagues, and times when what they heard should have been acted on; by in essence marginalizing and shunning Paul the collective voices of District 2 were silenced, and the District suffered accordingly.

Be that as it may, when Paul Newman elected not to defend his seat in the primaries that offered District 2 a fresh chance to elect a candidate who might effectively speak to and for the concerns of the people of the District, and who might advance a different agenda than the one that has colored the last eight years. My personal philosophy of Government is that if people elect to establish Government at all, as opposed to an anarchistic idea without Government, that Government ought to properly function from the bottom up, with elected officials who are attentive to the voice of the people who they represent, and responsive to that voice when it comes to setting policy direction.

The problem that I saw, and that many people in District 2 see, is that County Government has not been particularly responsive to our voices; in fact from time to time the Board of Supervisors has acted in ways that were directly opposed to the voices of the electorate, with perhaps the most dramatic example being the events surrounding the proposed development of Smith Ranch that eventually led to Proposition 400 overturning the entire proposal. I'll discuss some other particular instances in a separate post so that I don't get sidetracked, but the short form is that prior to the Primary elections it seemed that District 2 might finally get an effective representative, and a corresponding equal voice on the Board of Supervisors.

But then the Primaries were held, and after I looked carefully at the results and thought about the implications I decided to enter the race in order to provide the electorate of District 2 with an opportunity to choose another path, rather than the one that they'd been placed on without too much collective input from them.

Harvey Allen, running unopposed, garnered the Republican nomination, while Ann English defeated Charles Flanagan for the Democratic nomination. And, as most of you know, Ann thereby became the presumptive winner of the general election, and the next District 2 Supervisor, for the simple reason that voter registration in District 2 is so strongly tilted toward the Democrats that a Republican would need a virtual miracle to win.

But the thing that troubled me enough to try to do something about it was this; Ann English and Charles Flanagan roughly tied in most precincts, with the exception of the Douglas-area precincts, where the vote ended up roughly 1.5 to 1 for English over Flanagan, and that provided the winning margin. And here is the kicker; the Democratic turnout of eligible voters in Douglas that determined the winner of the Primary, and as a result almost certainly the winner of the general election if nothing unusual happened, such as another candidate entering the race, was 9%.

9%. Voter participation is always a problem, particularly in primary elections, but in this instance a vanishingly small percentage of the total population of District II cast the die and determined the identity of the next District 2 County Supervisor on the behalf of all of us, and that isn't participatory democracy as I understand it.

I've often joked that the election for County Supervisor in District 2 is really the Battle of the Yard Signs, but the fact of the matter is that name recognition plays an almost exclusive role in that election, which might not be the best way to choose someone who will be responsible for representing our interests for the next four years. Most voters don't have any clear idea of any positions that a candidate might have on any given issue, and sometimes when the winner takes office and begins to act it's a nasty surprise to the electorate who installed them.

And so I filed the necessary paperwork and put most of the rest of my life on hold for the next 50 or so days to try to give the people of District 2 something to vote for instead of a yard sign; in another post I'll discuss some of the upcoming issues and questions that will face the Board of Supervisors in the next four years, but suffice it to say that the decisions that are made are going to impact us in a real fashion, and it's in our collective interest to elect a Supervisor who will accurately and forcefully communicate our viewpoints, and who won't abandon those viewpoints in favor of a different philosophy of Government that doesn't fit the District or the people who live in it.

As the Russians (who are familiar with the consequences of not being politically involved) say:

"If you're not AT the table, you're ON the table."

John-Henry