At yesterday’s H-Town City Council meeting, The Mayor kind of announced that he might want to assemble a special committee of H-Town’s leaders to look at H-Town’s Mayor-Controller-City Council term limit policy and maybe come forward with changes. Brad Olson has a piece in today’s Chron. Check it out.
Like Commentary said in the piece, I don’t think the will is there to make changes. Back in 1991, the will was there to vote to impose term limits. A lot of folks were disgusted with what they thought was arrogance coming from our electeds at City Hall. We had a mayor that was serving her fifth term, and some council members with a dozen or more years of service. Conservative activists put in their own money into a petition drive and got the required 20,000 plus signatures to put the term limit referendum on the ballot. They then put in more of their own money and then waged an aggressive and passionate campaign and won.
I don’t see or sense passion on the side of the anti term limits folks to change things anytime soon. It doesn’t seem to be a concern or priority for folks that usually fund citywide campaign initiatives. It doesn’t seem to be on the radar of grass roots organizations, labor, or political organizations. In fact, folks have kind of gotten used to the current system.
Unfortunately, in order for an anti term limit movement to emerge here in H-Town, there needs to be some sort of event or clear sign that H-Town city government is broken, failing to deliver basic services, or engulfed in scandals because of term limits. So far, that is not the case. I would like to think that you can go out there and make the case by simply saying the bureaucrats are waiting out the council members and we can’t make needed policy alterations so we need to change things. I don’t think voters would respond to that argument. Nor would you raise their interest by trying to make the case that a council member needs more than six years to complete certain projects.
Until we can present clear evidence that term limits are hindering the city of H-Town’s ability to serve the public good, we’re stuck with them.
Commentary was reading about the problemos Austin folks are having with their new parking meter solar power driven gizmos. We got ours a couple of years ago and it took a few tries before I got a handle on them. Everything will be OK in time.
Cecil Puede said we would get 90 wins this season. That means we have to go 34-14 for the rest of the season. We finally caught a Fish last night as The Big Puma returned and Pence got him two dingers and six RBIs as we continue to hang and try to catch another in our last night in South Florida.
[…] Campos reiterates what he said in the article. I think he’s right that the pro-term limits folks are […]