Local Election Results -- March 11
Local elections were held in Maricopa County on Tuesday, with mixed results.
The Mesa mayoral race will advance to a runoff between Scott Smith and Rex Griswold. I voted for Griswold, but had no strong preference for him over Smith. I'm just glad Claudia Walters was defeated.
For the District 3 Mesa City Council race, Dennis Kavanaugh defeated Mark Yarbrough, unfortunately. Kavanaugh is a proponent of speed humps, light rail, and "public art" in addition to being an underhanded politician -- when Mesa went to a district-based city council instead of the at-large system that serves most of the valley, he tried to argue that his term from an at-large election should not count against term limits and sought reelection illegally. A court stopped him that time, but he was able to run this time after sitting out the last term.
The new zoning next to the airport was approved, as it should have been, and the budget override was approved, as it not so much should have been. It's not so much that I'm against letting the city set its own budget as I was outraged by the deceptive campaign waged by proponents of the override. I took the novel approach of actually reading the state constitution and found that many of their assertions were not true. They said that federal or state funds, along with the money from voter-approved initiatives would not allowed to be spent if the measure failed -- not so, as all three are explicit exceptions mentioned in the state constitution. In short, Mesa wanted to spend $1 billion, the budget formula would have limited them to $500 million, but there were also $400 million in exceptions, so the end result would have been approximately a 10% reduction in the city budget, which I don't think would have been a bad thing.
I was worried when I saw the results of the Tempe City Council race -- not only did Mark Mitchell (son of former mayor and current U.S. congressman Harry Mitchell) win re-election, but the county recorder's website lead me to believe that Hut Hutson had lost re-election to the at-large city council by a mere 37 votes, finishing in fourth place with 5864 votes in the race for three seats on the council. However, Mitchell was the only candidate who received enough votes to avoid a runoff, a Hutson will be one of four candidates in the runoff for the two remaining seats. Here's hoping he does better.
There were also a bunch of other races that I paid little attention to, as I have little need to pay attention to the composition of Buckeye's city council and other such matters.
The Mesa mayoral race will advance to a runoff between Scott Smith and Rex Griswold. I voted for Griswold, but had no strong preference for him over Smith. I'm just glad Claudia Walters was defeated.
For the District 3 Mesa City Council race, Dennis Kavanaugh defeated Mark Yarbrough, unfortunately. Kavanaugh is a proponent of speed humps, light rail, and "public art" in addition to being an underhanded politician -- when Mesa went to a district-based city council instead of the at-large system that serves most of the valley, he tried to argue that his term from an at-large election should not count against term limits and sought reelection illegally. A court stopped him that time, but he was able to run this time after sitting out the last term.
The new zoning next to the airport was approved, as it should have been, and the budget override was approved, as it not so much should have been. It's not so much that I'm against letting the city set its own budget as I was outraged by the deceptive campaign waged by proponents of the override. I took the novel approach of actually reading the state constitution and found that many of their assertions were not true. They said that federal or state funds, along with the money from voter-approved initiatives would not allowed to be spent if the measure failed -- not so, as all three are explicit exceptions mentioned in the state constitution. In short, Mesa wanted to spend $1 billion, the budget formula would have limited them to $500 million, but there were also $400 million in exceptions, so the end result would have been approximately a 10% reduction in the city budget, which I don't think would have been a bad thing.
I was worried when I saw the results of the Tempe City Council race -- not only did Mark Mitchell (son of former mayor and current U.S. congressman Harry Mitchell) win re-election, but the county recorder's website lead me to believe that Hut Hutson had lost re-election to the at-large city council by a mere 37 votes, finishing in fourth place with 5864 votes in the race for three seats on the council. However, Mitchell was the only candidate who received enough votes to avoid a runoff, a Hutson will be one of four candidates in the runoff for the two remaining seats. Here's hoping he does better.
There were also a bunch of other races that I paid little attention to, as I have little need to pay attention to the composition of Buckeye's city council and other such matters.
posted by DC | 1:13 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home