It's election day here in San Antonio. Not for the federal elections; that's a couple of weeks away. Today was local elections. Six things on the ballot: five bond measures, and one city charter amendment. All five had at least some information available via the local newspaper, which ran a week of stories about them. And the city charter thing was actually fairly straightforward...currently, if there's a vacancy on the city council then the rest of the council appoints someone. If the measure passes, it will switch to a special election. I voted for it -- more elections!
The tricky part was that one of the local community college district districts, and three of our local school district districts, had contested elections today, and it's rather difficult to find out which district you live in. I suspected we were in one without anything, since we received no mailers or robocalls, and it turned out that was the case. Fortunately. If not, I would have been guessing.
A city council candidate for next spring's ballot was campaigning at my polling place. Seemed like a nice guy -- and he's the general manager for our local fantastic jazz radio station, which is out of Trinity U. (looking for something to listen to? You could do a lot worse). So, here's some publicity for Ron Nirenberg, willing to work the polls a year before the election. Since city council is nonpartisan, I had to try to figure out his actual politics, which wasn't all that easy...I really hate nonpartisan elections.
Last year, we only had one election day here, and voted on only two things. So for the two-year cycle, I'm up to two days, eight votes. In 2010, I voted five different days on 115 different candidates or ballot measures. More to come, in only a couple of weeks.
I hope you were in favor of at least most of the bond initiatives. The city did a very creditable job with the 2007 initiatives, and I thought there were lots of great projects on it. Sadly, I am just outside the city limits, and trying to educate myself enough to participate meaningfully in Selma's politics is nearly impossible.
ReplyDeleteWeird that you had trouble figuring out which school district you're in. Seems like Bexar County does a pretty bang-up job of that, between http://www.bexar.org/cfdocs/electionspublic/Where2Vote.cfm and http://map.bexar.org/community/default.aspx.
ReplyDelete