Down River – Jan. 8, 2015
And They’re Off:
Kathy Griffin’s broadsides and Anderson Cooper’s giggles are but a dimming CNN New Year’s Eve memory now, 2015 definitely upon us and with this first Record print edition of the New Year comes the first of municipal candidacy announcements, likely many more candidacy announcements to follow.
Page A1 of the print Record is but a sampler of what is to follow and that same page contains the Record’s relatively simple, uncomplicated ground rules to get your announcement into print in Clinton County’s favorite (and only) weekly newspaper.
We decided it would be best and most fair to print the candidacy announcements basically unfettered and as submitted, with only an occasionally needed grammatical or typo correction. These announcements, pretty much verbatim, give the readers some sense as to how the candidates are presenting themselves, what they choose to emphasize, what they choose to say about themselves.
What a spring and fall it should be, if you’re into the political/elective system at the grassroots level, the one level where it actually seems to still work. And we see Clinton County with its population around the 40,000 mark as not too big (Philadelphia County), not too small (Cameron County) but just right.
The county commissioner race will be at the top of the ballot, followed closely by the county’s most lucrative elective office, district attorney. And where we have three incumbents for the former, we have none for the latter.
There was a day the county commissioners were tops in remuneration but then the state took over the ground rules for the court system and judges and the district attorney came to the financial fore.
Whereas the commissioners elected this year and taking office next year will receive $54,911, whoever wins the DA brass ring will be getting in the neighborhood of $173,000 or so in 2016.
One might think that salary for DA would lead to a candidates’ dash from among the ranks of the Clinton County Bar Association, but as of this writing we’re only hearing the names of the two Democrats announcing on The Record’s page one of this issue (Wait, this just in; could it be the name of a veteran former GOP assistant prosecutor? Stay tuned).
Likewise beyond the anticipated re-election bid from the three sitting county commissioners, not much is being heard relative to prospective challengers for Republicans Pete Smeltz and Jeff Snyder and Democrat Joel Long. That changed a bit on Tuesday of this week when commissioner meeting regular without portfolio Richard Morris announced he’d give it a go as a Democrat this spring.
But it’s early in the year and candidates have from Feb. 17 to Mar. 10 to file nominating petitions, that window a prelude to the May 19 election.
Political Way-Back Machine:
While we keep an eye on candidacy announcements to see if there might be a May free-for-all for various row office and Garden Building positions, it has a way to go to match the spring 2007 donnybrook.
Primary contests in 2007 saw a sitting district attorney and two sitting commissioners tossed aside.
That year saw the start of the ascension of Michael Salisbury from attorney to judge. Salisbury was among a field of three GOP primary candidates for district attorney which included six-term incumbent Ted McKnight and former assistant DA Fred Lingle (hmmmm).
When the primary ballots were counted, Salisbury had 1,425 votes, Lingle with 1,193 and McKnight with 850. Salisbury also was the top vote-getter for the Democratic nomination as the Democrats had no one on the ballot and Salisbury went on to win an unopposed second term in 2011, a couple years later voted in unopposed as judge.
(As a footnote, you may recall the pre-primary period in 2007 was a contentious one between the then-sitting commissioners and then-DA McKnight, this relative to remuneration for McKnight’s assistant district attorneys at that time. Reading the minutes of commissioner meetings from that period are insightful; it gives one a better understanding of why there was the wholesale turnover among county elected officials. Remember the 36 percent real estate tax hike that board of commissioners had imposed for that year? The 2007 voters did.)
Commissioners tossed aside came one from each party. Remember the Democratic primary from 2007? Adam Coleman and Joel Long had been unsuccessful in 2003 but came back four years later to thrash incumbent Rich Kyle: Coleman with 2,078 votes, Long with 2,058 and Kyle third and out of the money with 1,308.
Same thing happened to Bud Yost on the Republican side: Tom Bossert was the top vote-getter in the primary with 1,814, Dan Harger next with 1,425, then Yost with 1,306 and Miles Salinas with 1,088. That November saw Long on top with 4,203 votes, followed by Bossert’s 3,830 and Coleman’s 3,666; Harger the odd man out with 3,146.
Four years later, of course, history tells us Bossert stepped down, Long won a second term and it was Coleman who did not get re-elected. Smeltz and Snyder stepped in and up and finished one-two in November of 2011, Long third and Coleman the odd man out (this column is not long enough this week to get into all the machinations that helped shape that election outcome).
What will 2015 hold? Let’s all get registered and help make that decision. That’s what good citizens are supposed to do.
