We won’t know who won for a couple of weeks, but the first big step in electing the new County Council was taken this week. All of us could have participated in this pre-election. We just had to drag ourselves off the couch and get to the local school where the caucuses were being held. Then we had to get ourselves elected as delegate to the County Convention and give up two Saturdays for conventions. Competing against this great process was the “Frontline” series on PBS called “Bush’s War,” which marked the 5th anniversary of our glorious victory in Iraq with an excellent documentary on how we got into the mess in the first place. I think I made the right call, and ended up watching “The Colbert Report,” before going out to the hot tub.
The state Legislature set up the various optional structures for county government, including the five-member council that Summit County voters adopted. Separating the local legislative/policy function from the day-to-day administrative grind seemed like a good move. But the legislature decided that “good government” was too dangerous. They couldn’t abide that, so they made sure it was tainted with petty partisanship. People running for council are required to join a party and go through its nominating processes.
Apparently there are Democratic snowdrifts and Republican snowdrifts, and if you have been a member of the legislature, or some party chieftain, you have a secret gift that lets you see the difference. For the rest of us, we really just want local government to plow the streets, pick up the garbage, and protect us from having our neighbor build a high-rise hog farm on the lot next door.
But we are saddled with the partisan system.
It’s a real disappointment, because it gives a few partisan zealots, tiny-but-loud groups with some axe to grind, or special-interest groups huge influence in the selection of candidates. If you wonder why the state legislature is so far to the right of even normal Republicans, it’s this process. It keeps the wingnuts in power. By the time normal people get to vote in the real election, people you’ve probably never heard of many of them crazy droolers you avoid at the market have already rigged the outcome.
Here’s how it works. The Looney Tunes party elders start beating the bushes to find people willing to run for office. Same with the Hanna-Barbera party. By the time the filing window closes, Looney Tunes will have convinced Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn to run. The Hanna-Barbera party will have twisted the arms of Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Deputy Dawg, George Jetson, and Ranger Smith to file (and persuaded Scooby-Doo not to).
Dudley Do-right, Boris and Natasha all wanted to run, but they aren’t affiliated with either of the big parties. There are a few small parties on the ballot, but filing under one of the small party banners is like announcing that you cannot be left unsupervised with anything sharper than a crayon. So Boris and Natasha have the option of trying to figure out how to get on the ballot without a party affiliation (which can be done, but only with divine intervention), or they join up and file under one of the parties. Whether the party wants them or not. We had a fair amount of this happening in the county election.
Just to make it more confusing, each of the five available council seats is a separate race. So Yogi can’t just file for council, he has to file for council seat A. Well, if Huckleberry Hound also filed for seat A, we can’t vote for both. Deputy Dawg, who is an idiot, was unopposed for seat B, so we’re stuck with him, but have to discard either Yogi or Huckleberry, even though both of them should be on the council. This happens on both party legers, though the Republicans are always better organized and generally avoid having multiple people filing by dragging anybody who threatens to gum-up the works out in the alley and beating them up. This is the party of family values it’s just the Soprano family.
So on Tuesday night, at the neighborhood caucuses, delegates were elected to the parties’ county conventions. Those are held in April. Unlike the national political conventions that feature lots of liquor and prostitutes, the county conventions are dreadful affairs with red punch and day-old baked goods. There is lots of skullduggery and intrigue as candidates try to win over delegates. Yosemite Sam will stop at nothing to win their votes, and Roadrunner has Wile E. Coyote working on his behalf in the background. You don’t get to participate in this election, but it will have more influence in choosing the county council than your vote in November. After all, you can’t vote for somebody who isn’t on the ballot.
Both parties have different rules, but basically, if a candidate gets a certain percentage of the delegates at the county convention, he or she advances to the November election without a primary. If they can’t get the necessary majority, Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn will have to face off in a primary. The party officials always hope they can avoid that, but it’s possible that we could end up with 4 of the five seats narrowed down to one candidate from each party, but have to pay for a primary election for one of the seats in one party or the other. This will cost the taxpayers many thousands of dollars that could have been better spent patching the potholes in the street in front of my house.
In the end, we will survive. But the system would work so much better if any interested person could file for office. Then it would be up to the voters to decide who had cooties. A primary would narrow it to 10 people, and a final election in November in which the top five vote-getters are elected. And then the local party chiefs could retire and spend their time worrying about those black UN helicopters.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.