And then there were 7?

The Cabarrus County Commissioners have to work too hard. That's why they say they need to expand the Commissioner Board from the current 5 members to 7 members. While hardly anyone disputes that expanding the board is a good idea, I'm all for it myself, there are a lot of questions about the timing of this move and about the way they want to do this.

Commissioners have been talking for years about expanding the board, yet they waited until the Primary of May 6th was over to bring this issue up again. Furthermore, they seem hell-bent on already having 2 more members after the November 4th election this year.

Proof that there has been talk for years about expanding our Board of Commissioners can be found in a Senate bill introduced in 1989 to expand the Cabarrus Board by 7 members and realize district representation.
Jim Johnson, former NC Senator and current Democratic candidate for NC Senate, introduced that one.

Our current, all republican, Board of Commissioners came up with 3 options on how to expand the Board.

• Have the current Board just appoint 2 extra members.
• Have the Executive Board of both local political parties each nominate 2 candidates. These candidates will then be added to the Party ticket. So instead of having the current 2 Democrats running against 2 Republicans, you will have 4 against 4, with the top 4 vote getters being elected.
• Organize a non-partisan race for the 2 extra board members, next to the Partisan race for the 2 members who were already up for re-election. Anyone could then file for the 2 extra seats and we could have a long list of candidates, none of them having any mention of party affiliation next to their name on the ballot.

I see big problems, and probably legal issues, with all 3 of these options.

First of all, we don't appoint people to new political positions in this Country. Last time I checked this was still a democracy and in a democracy we have something called an election to elect politicians. While the current Board of Commissioners seems to recently have abandoned this option they should be chastised for even bringing it up.

The problem with the second option (both parties nominating 2 extra candidates) is that these new candidates wouldn't have to go through a primary to get on the ticket. In the past May primary there was a big list of candidates on the Republican side duking it out for their 2 nominations. Some of those spent a lot of money to be elected. They would now be joined on the same ticket by candidates who didn't have to spend a dime to get on the ballot. If I was one of those candidates that won in the primary I would be very pissed and would probably weigh my legal options.
Also, in that second scenario the Executive Committees of the political parties would nominate candidates, leaving out the voice of the Cabarrus County voters.
Let the people speak, it's what a democracy is all about.

The third option, which they seemed to favor at the last Commissioner work meeting that I attended, has the problem that you would have 2 totally different races for the same political position. Is that even legal?
You would also have the same problem that the candidates running in the non-partisan race would not have had to go through a Primary race like the candidates we already have on the partisan tickets did.

My conclusion: The Cabarrus County Board of Commissioners should delay board expansion until 2010, so that a comprehensive plan can be developed with plenty of input from voters. There will be plenty of time then to introduce a State bill to expand the board and have the new candidates go through the regular political process of Party Primaries.

All this still doesn't explain why the current board wants to expand the board in an extremely fast and haphazard way. Please allow me to come up with a conspiracy theory.
Since it seems clear that in the current political climate a lot of voters in November will not want to vote for anyone with an R next to their name, maybe some smart republican had the brilliant idea of organizing a non-partisan race where the candidates won't have an R or D next to their name?

The Board of Commissioners is organizing a public hearing during their regular meeting about this issue, tomorrow, June 16th. I urge anyone who is opposed to the current plans to attend and speak up. The meeting is held at 6.30 pm at the Cabarrus County Governmental Center. I'll see you there.

The current Commissioners also seemed to be in favor of introducing district representation, something I strongly favor, but that's food for another blog post and that's also something impossible to realize in the few months between now and November.