City and town council meetings in Saratoga and Los Gatos this year have been marked by ongoing heated debates about the future of housing, a hot-button issue pitting the state’s mandates for new homes against the challenges of greater density, including traffic and public safety concerns.
Agendas rife with contentious issues in an election year might be expected to draw a packed slate of candidates for local councils, but both communities had the opposite problem: uncontested seats in multiple races.
Their solution: cancel the elections.
In all, six seats on Saratoga, Los Gatos and neighboring Monte Sereno city and town councils will be filled by appointment, the races stricken from the November ballot. The canceled elections will save taxpayers $100,000, $95,000 and $10,000, respectively.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area, the councils of Atherton, Oakley, Pleasant Hill and Moraga also voted to appoint city council candidates in lieu of an election, due to a lack of opposition candidates — a decision that has saved thousands of taxpayer dollars.
But other cities faced with the same situation have rejected the option to cancel the election, either because they had other measures that already required them to send out ballots, or their city council was in recess at the time a decision needed to be made.
Larry Gerston, a professor emeritus in San Jose State University’s Department of Political Science, said that the decision to cancel an election because only one candidate has filed is often a risk versus reward proposition — with the risks often being more obscure, like the possibility of disenfranchising write-in candidates.
“The risk is small, but the reward for the cities and counties can be substantial when they’ve got really tight budgets,” Gerston said.
Gerston said some people are dissuaded by term limits, feeling they can’t make much of an impact in a limited time, and that running requires too much time, effort and money.
“I don’t really see it getting any better in the near term,” Gerston said. “That really gets to this whole sense of skepticism and defeatism that a lot of people have, and I don’t think that’s good for democracy.”
Los Gatos Councilmember Maria Ristow, however, said she was not expecting a lack of turnout in the town’s elections.
“I was frankly surprised that nobody ran because the housing element has been so contentious,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of community engagement, and I actually had heard from a number of people that had thought about running — and I encouraged them to do so.”
Jill Hunter, a former council member and mayor of Saratoga, said that controversy over the housing element could be exactly what’s deterring people from running for office — because they may not want to be subject to the criticism that comes with making decisions on housing.
“When I ran for office, I ran because I wanted to beautify the community, and I wanted to have trees become more important, and [have] people plant trees and so forth,” Hunter said. “That was a nice thing — the housing element is …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
