
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 18, 1994                   TAG: 9408100006
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

UNPERSUASIVE

CONGRATULATIONS to Roanoke City Council for last week withstanding pressure to convert to a ward system for the election of all its members except the mayor and vice mayor.

As a matter of procedure, so fundamental a change shouldn't (and perhaps couldn't, legally) be made unheralded, and by a council that has just sworn in new members.

As for the substance of the issue, the current at-large system of electing council is serving the city well.

This isn't to say it always has and always will. In a different environment or at a different time, conversion to a ward system might well be reasonable.

Nor is this to say that the current at-large method is entirely without drawbacks. One, for example, is the greater expense typically (though not inevitably) associated with running for office citywide rather than from a ward.

On balance, though, the strengths of the system, as it currently plays out in Roanoke, outweigh the weaknesses.

At-large elections are a force for racial harmony, a deterrent to single-issue politics and an incentive for politicians to consider the good of the city as a whole in deliberating policy.

Put a "not" with each of those points, and you have a few of a ward system's typical defects. Wards, moreover, may not bring the benefits proponents imagine. They might reduce minority representation on council, for instance, or diminish the influence of neighborhoods whose residents have felt on the outs.

The ward issue is persistent, to be sure; less clear is whether it has captured the allegiance of any but a small group of municipal-politics activists. In a few cases, advocacy of a switch may be intertwined not only with resentments against a City Hall increasingly dominated by professionals, but also with speculative political calculations regarding how a ward system might make election easier for this or that particular aspirant to office.

That could change, of course, if the question is put to a referendum. Greater attention to the issue might expand support for the proposal among a wider swath of the Roanoke public.

But for such backing to be more than support of change merely for change's sake, ward-system advocates must - if they can - come up with better arguments for making the shift.

by CNB