THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 28, 1994 TAG: 9410270217
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
Now is the time for all good men in the Virginia Beach delegation to the General Assembly to come to the aid of their city: City Council, on a 6-5 vote Tuesday, passed the buck to the assembly on the issue of electing seven members of Council (and the School Board) from seven equally populated wards and three members plus the mayor at-large. Let's hope the assembly has the gumption to do what a majority on Council did not: pass this ward system into oblivion, not into law.
This plan was proposed by the Mayor's Committee for Reapportionment. It was pushed by the Council of Civic Organizations, which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of citizens but claims a quorum with maybe two dozen. It was approved in an advisory-only referendum by a small percentage of the citizenry. Its linkage between reapportionment to equal boroughs and reversion to wards was understood by an even smaller percentage of the electorate. Its implementation is as simple as cold fusion, and it offers potential for far less public good.
Who would gain from this plan? Only the special interests who don't mind if the representative from a district of some 60,000 people can win with as few as 3,500 votes. Only the special interests who benefit from formalizing and enshrining the backscratching, backstabbing and Balkanizing that historically give ward politics a bad name. Only the legal eagles who will file suits and countersuits to restart or stall a process that may never end.
Who would lose? Only the city's voters, who can now vote for all 11 members of Council but whom the ward system would deprive of their chance to choose, influence and regularly re-evaluate six of those 11 Council members.
Two members of the current Council, Mrs. Henley and Mrs. Strayhorn, gave the most curious reason for voting aye: Each opposes the ward plan but bowed nevertheless to the will of the voters. Will either mind if the assembly rejects the plan, saving Mrs. Henley's borough from being reapportioned out of existence, or Mrs. Strayhorn's from being halved? Would either rethink her position and acquiesce in, say, the will of voters to abandon Sandbridge?
The saving grace of this issue so far is the glare it gives two fundamental problems with leadership and followership: Too few citizens knowledgeably follow the city's governance, and too few of the city's governors lead the way. by CNB