#BadBillWatch 2023: We can all agree partisan city, school board elections a terrible idea | Opinion
Kentucky’s legislature has trundled back to town and, by necessity, we have to bring the #BadBillWatch back to these pages.
The previews last week were depressing enough. Reverse Robin Hood income tax reductions that will help the rich and hurt the poor, major cuts to the state’s unemployment benefits for the first time since the 1970s, as though giving people less of a safety net will make them look harder for jobs that don’t exist. More waffling on sports betting and medical marijuana, and lots of talk about NOT opening the budget even as flood-ravaged Eastern Kentucky waits for housing aid.
Hot tip on HB 1: We are not Tennessee, we do not have the Smokies or Nashville or grocery taxes or a state and local sales tax of nearly 10 percent, all of which makes up for no income tax. Hot tip #2: Go back and research the Kansas experiment to see what happens when the supply-side trickle down gurus take control.
But even all that is not the worst bill proposed so far. That distinction goes to House and Senate Bill 50 (cute), two doses of dumb from Rep. Matt Lockett, R-Nicholasville, and Sen. Damon (my ideas are always better than my constituents’) Thayer of Georgetown to make all elections partisan.
This is a breathtakingly bad idea, in which what used to be the party of local control would force roughly 400 local city governments to declare their party registration when serving for office. According to the Kentucky League of Cities, only six of 415 city governments have partisan elections; Madisonville city council members recently decided to go nonpartisan because they clearly felt it would make their government better. Why should Frankfort force them to change it back?
Partisan elections would mean partisan funding which would put candidates more at the mercy of their donors. Party politics is coming pretty close to destroying national and state politics; let’s leave the one working governing system we have intact.
It’s a naked power grab by the party already in control. Thayer made it clear he thinks there’s some kind of secret Democratic infiltration of city offices. Get real. Everyone knows what party their local politicians are registered to, if they want to find out, and because the issues are so local, that’s what they care about. Look at Lexington, the second largest city in the state with nonpartisan elections. It’s frankly very functional. Yes, Lexington just elected a majority of women who appear to be highly progressive. It also re-elected a registered Republican mayor, who stomped a much more progressive Democrat.
That mayor, Linda Gorton, said that nonpartisan elections was “one of the greatest gifts” the merged government charter provided in 1974.
“It has worked very well in Lexington; it really allows local legislators to talk with each other about any issue, it doesn’t matter what party they are, they don’t have to go to a caucus, they can just talk,” Gorton said. “If you list all the things we do, there’s nothing that’s partisan about picking up the trash, keeping the parks up and running, paving the roads.”
During elections, people have many ways to get to know their candidates based on issues rather than party affiliation.
“People here like non partisan local officials because they respect we work on issues for the issue’s sake and the city’s sake,” she said.
Madisonville Mayor Kevin Cotton, a registered Republican, agreed that changing was not contentious because “the reality is for we don’t make a lot of partisan decisions, like they do at the state and federal levels.”
Thayer, on the other hand, thinks hearing where candidates stand on the issues is not enough — voters need the party branding front and center so that city councils won’t buy Democratic swingsets or make the trash collection somehow “woke.”
“Part of the problem with the way we elect city council people in Kentucky is it’s nonpartisan,” Thayer told reporter Austin Horn. “I still believe that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the city positions. I think there’s a lot of tax raisers there, and I don’t want to be responsible for allowing city councils across the state to increase the tax burden on Kentuckians.”
As bad as it is for city governments, it would be even worse for school boards. Can you imagine if a Republican school board member suddenly felt compelled to show voters she is a good Trumpy Republican by banning books? Most school boards have enough trouble figuring out how they will deal with state underfunding to worry about what their party affiliation means for every stance. They don’t need even more division.
Luckily, there appear to be some constitutional questions about whether partisan school board elections would fly; Kentucky School Boards Association attorney Eric Kennedy cited a 1989 Kentucky Supreme Court opinion that states that “the fundamental mandate of the Constitution and Statutes of Kentucky is that there shall be equality and that all public schools shall be nonpartisan and nonsectarian.”
KLC Executive Director J.D. Chaney said he expects his board of directors will vote unanimously against the bill because it goes against their own mandate of local control and decision making.
“We think local decisions are best made at local level,” he said. “Party labels have never mattered with successful governance.”
Elected officials in Kentucky’s cities are very responsive to voters because voters respond quickly to what they do, Chaney pointed out.
“Most people are working on a vision to improve quality of life,” Chaney said. “Most of them don’t get paid. They don’t do it for fame, wealth, power and privilege, they’re true public servants.”
Outside of Thayer, legislative leaders have kept quiet or lukewarm about the bill, according to Horn’s story. They should kill it instead. This is consistently the problem with Kentucky’s GOP supermajority — instead of dealing with the very real problems we face, they want to fix something that’s not broken to score political points. Maybe they should try working as hard as elected, nonpartisan city officials to get things done instead.
