Saline MI
10-21-2024 5:41pm

EDITORIAL: Here's Why 4-Year Council Terms Don't Serve the City of Saline

There are two questions before City of Saline voters this November. Both are charter amendments.

Proposal A, along with some language modernization, extends the terms of the mayor and city council from two to four years.

Proposal B formalizes a process that's already in place - it allows the Local Officers Compensation Commission to recommend compensation for the mayor and council. Approval would lie with the council.

B is an easy Yes. Nothing changes - except badly outdated city charter language.

I will be voting No on Proposal A.

Thus far, I've heard a single valid reason for going to four-year terms - saving money. And not that much.

Other reasons are fanciful, at best. Somehow, the city will benefit from having terms that line up with the township, board and county. Councillor Nicole Rice says sometimes they work on projects together.  The kinds of projects that have boards and committees working together have room for private citizens to participate. It also needs to be said that perhaps voters didn't like the project, didn't see it as valuable, or didn't see the incumbent as important to the project.

Another reason I've heard is that more people will vote, since it's a Presidential election or Gubernatorial election. Is that really a good thing? People who don't vote in off-year elections aren't really that engaged, are they? If they were, it wouldn't take Trump-vs=Harris contest to get them to vote. 

Personally, back in the day, I liked covering the February village elections. Maybe only 500 people voted, but those 500 people were generally engaged citizens who followed local matters. I'll take the composite opinion of 500 engaged citizens over  2500 "I'm here anyways so I might as well vote for Mayor" votes. During the last on-year, the third-place finisher in the council race got 2262 votes. In the last off-year, the third-place finisher received 1083 votes.

And that's one of the ways this benefits incumbents. "On-year" election voters are more likely to be name-recognition voters.

Even with two-year terms, incumbents have a massive advantage.

A Saline City Council incumbent hasn't lost since 2007. That's a long time. Since 1999, only two incumbents have lost. Since 1984, only one incumbent mayor has lost. Once, in 20 elections.

Here's a look at votes since 1984 - which is about how far back the city votes go on the county's website. Those records were incomplete and supplemented by old Saline Reporter stories.

Green shows an incumbent re-elected. Brown shows an incumbent who lost.

If we go to four years, what we'll do is cut in half the opportunities for someone to throw their hat into the ring. That's not a good trade-off in my book.

We'll increase the name recognition of incumbents by doubling their terms.

And we'll make name recognition an even bigger factor because we'll have a greater share of the voters being people who really don't follow city council.

The truth is, since 2010, it's been more likely to have a council person resign and be replaced by a council vote than it has been to lose as an incumbent. That's if they bother to resign. More recently, Dawn Krause moved out of the city and stopped showing up for council. If we double council terms, we double the likelihood of council-appointed councillors, which gives council-selected candidates the name-recognition advantage.

If Saline citizens become more engaged and elections become more contested, I'd like to see Saline voters have the opportunity to make changes within the calendar year. Or stay with what they've got, if that's what they prefer.

Lastly, Saline City Council still has a non-partisan appearance. Fully aligning with the partisan elections will increase the likelihood that our local elections are more partisan. And that sort of toxicity is the last thing we need.

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