Jodi’s Journal: Don’t let local election become casualty of the calendar

We took our most recent “30 Under 30” class to class at City Hall last week, and I wish I could have brought you with us.

Thanks to support from Mayor Paul TenHaken’s office, city officials have met with this group of young professionals each year for the four years we’ve chosen a class based on nominations.

For most of them, it’s their first trip to City Hall. For nearly all of them, I am guessing it’s an eye-opening look at the variety of duties, issues and investments city government regularly tackles. It probably would be for many people.

TenHaken always gives an opening message to our group, and this time it centered around civic engagement.

In previous years, we would already have held the first round of city elections, likely sending two mayoral candidates to a runoff and electing new members of the Sioux Falls City Council.

For the first time, local elections this year will be held June 2, in conjunction with statewide primary races and school board elections.

I didn’t love this idea when it surfaced, and I still don’t. My initial concern was that having all these races on the same ballot would prompt traditionally less partisan races at the local level to become more politically charged.

I haven’t seen that happen, at least so far. I moderated one forum of mayoral candidates, and over 90 minutes I didn’t pick up any hint of partisanship.

So, at least for this election cycle, I think we’ve been spared that. What I didn’t fully anticipate, though, was how much individual voters would have to work to become informed ahead of what is going to be a long ballot.

We’re lucky in Sioux Falls to have a pretty robust media landscape, at least comparatively speaking. I don’t think the issue is that we lack the reporters across our local outlets to cover both state and local races. There’s quite a bit of content available already if you do some quick searching, and I’m sure  more is planned.

But I do think it asks a lot of voters to learn about so many candidates at the same time. And you do have to work for it. Many neighborhoods also are hosting forums, which is a great opportunity to get to know the candidates. This story does a nice job linking to several upcoming neighborhood forums.

While it’s understandable that with a governor’s race on the ballot, statewide primaries are receiving significant attention, in reality the people who hold local office generally have more direct influence over your life as a citizen. They are the people making key decisions about investments in local public safety, infrastructure, economic development and quality of life projects. In Sioux Falls, they oversee a significant budget and have broad discretion over it.

I’m hopeful that, assuming there is a runoff city election, there will be heavier coverage and opportunity to learn more about the remaining candidates. But those in first round deserve an educated electorate too.

Going forward, it might be helpful if a clearinghouse of some kind existed — a place for candidates to provide responses to a broad-based set of questions as well as give them a common, free way to share their platforms and priorities. I visited with the mayoral candidates ahead of what would be their first forum and was surprised to learn how many such forums were attempting to be scheduled in a fairly short amount of time. That doesn’t seem like the most efficient approach, either, so perhaps such a central entity could attempt to streamline the schedule.

In the meantime, there’s still plenty of time left to do a little learning — even though it still amazes me how early voting is offered. A lot can happen in politics in more than six weeks. Dial in gathering information sooner than later. Decisions made soon will affect the trajectory of our city for a long time to come.

The post Jodi’s Journal: Don’t let local election become casualty of the calendar appeared first on SiouxFalls.Business.