4.18 cents worth
I just got back from voting. Walked to the Wiley school, saving gas; walked back. When I got there, it was three poll workers, one other voter and me. What a ridiculous waste of money this was, a statewide runoff for the Democratic nomination for labor commissioner — the one and only runoff in Wake County (as in many other counties) — at a cost to the taxpayers of between $4 million and $5 million. Next time, let’s either have instant runoff voting as part of the first primary or, if the General Assembly won’t pass it, then insist that every candidate running in a primary for anything other than governor sign a pledge they they will NOT call for a runoff no matter how close the outcome is or how few votes the front-runner got … unless there’s also a runoff for something people will turn out to vote for, like governor or U.S. Senate.
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First time around for labor commissioner, Mary Donnan won 27 percent of the votes and the other three candidates each got roughly 24 percent, which is pretty close statistically to what you’d get if four candidates nobody’d ever heard of ran for an office nobody cared about but most everybody voted nonetheless. Smith, Jones, Johnson and Thomas for dogcatcher: With 1.2 million people voting at random, all four would get approximately 300.000 votes, which is in fact what happened when Donnan, Brooks, Richardson and Anderson ran for labor commissioner in a primary where people came out first and foremost to choose between Obama and Clinton.
But good grief, 1.2 million folks DID vote, and Donnan DID come in first, and if it was only by 3 percent, so what? This time around, we’re maybe going to get a turnout of 80,000 statewide, and the winning total could be less than the margin by which Donnan defeated the runner-up Brooks … who’s nothing if not a stickler for the rules, and who decided he was entitled to a runoff and damn the cost or lack of sense. I mean, it’s not like the economy’s great and we’ve all got lots of extra cash to throw around, eh?
Which brings me to my main point: Raleigh’s budget. I wrote about it one week ago. Classic clash of pent-up capital needs in our fast-growing city versus lousy economy/revenues down/lousy time to raise taxes. A week ago, a 4-cent tax increase was on the table. Yesterday, a 4-cent tax increase was enacted. In fact, it was a 4.18-cent tax increase by the time Mayor Charles Meeker and his “Meeker Majority” was done. One “MM” member, Councilor Russ Stephenson, dissented, saying more economizing should’ve been done. So did Councilor Philip Isley, usually the lone “anti-MM” member, who said pretty much the same thing. That made the vote 5-2. Councilor Rodger Koopman was in California and absent, apparently unaware — this first time through the process — that unlike every other thing the Council votes on, where five affirmative votes or sometimes six are required for passage regardless of who’s absent, municipal budgets can be enacted by a majority vote of the members present. Koopman, who’d told one and all he planned to vote “no” on any 4-cent increase, actually greased approval of it by not showing up.
So what’d I think of the budget? the other voter at Wiley School asked me. I said I thought it might not be smart politically to jack up tax rates in a recession. My fellow democrat concurred. “Especially with the revaluation,” he added, proceeding to tell me how the county just doubled its assessment of what his house is worth. “I thought Charles had more political sense than that.”
I had this comment in mind as I walked home. Without going into the mayor’s political savvy further, I’ll say that it occurred to me en route that Meeker’s intransigent opposition to cutting the budget at all might well be the product of his wife Anne McLaurin’s position as the newest member of the Wake school board. The other day the Wake County Commissioners, spurred on by Meeker’s old rival, ex-mayor Paul Coble, slashed the school board’s budget in order to keep the county tax rate increase to “just” 2.5 cents. Was Meeker intent, perhaps, on showing Coble that even in tough economic times, elected officials must do the right thing by keeping up with critical investments in the public sphere?
Except there’s this difference: Coble’s cuts came from the school system’s operating funds, forcing such short-sighted economies as eliminating foreign-language courses in the elementary schools. How dumb, in a global economy, is that?
Meeker, though, was refusing to postpone (not eliminate) such things as construction of a new police station, which everyone says is needed, but with gas at $4 a gallon and folks in a snarly mood, is it really needed right now? Sure, if you put it off it’ll probably cost more. But if you put it off and the economy recovers, the city will have more revenues too — and a happier electorate providing them.
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By pushing his “MM” to raise taxes in ‘08, the third tax increase in four years, Meeker may have put them in jeopardy — some of them anyway — come next year’s municipal elections. Whether they are will depend, in part, on whether Coble’s conservatives can get themselves organized to run some candidates, something they failed to do in the ‘07 elections. In ‘07, Meeker was himself unopposed for a fourth two-year term after he’d thought hard about not running. Will he try next year for a fifth? But if he doesn’t, he’ll be leaving his “MM” mates holding his tax-hike bag alone.