It's almost here League City! Your Facebook can turn back into food pictures and duck-faced selfies. You might even re-friend some of those people you had to cut loose in the last few months. But before we get to that wonderful post-election time-period, for those of you who haven't taken advantage of early voting, you have to make it through Election Day... running the gauntlet of candidates and surrogates outside of the polling locations (Don't worry - it sounds like they're going to be well-regulated to abandon hope of harassing you once you get 100ft from the door.) But you shouldn't need to worry about all of that - you'll do your homework BEFORE you get to the polling location.
Sadly, many have done all their research on the Presidential election, but have totally neglected local elections. Yet it's the local elections that require the most research. Unless a President declares a war, there's very little they can do that will have as substantial and direct consequence on your day-to-day life as the people on City Council will have. Furthermore, city council elections don't have the easy-button of party affiliation listing (they're "non-partisan"). So you actually have to do your research.
Some Facebook groups (League City Politics is a Full Contact Sport) would LOVE to do your "research" for you. They'll tell you all about how great their slate of Green Team candidates is, about their community service, and about how long they've lived in League City. What they won't tell you is any actual plan the Green Team has for League City. Because their plan is the impossible - they want to freeze time (seemingly sometime around the late 1980s). They want to pretend League City is "rural". They want to eliminate professional, educated, city staff who have served this city well. This group silences and shouts down anyone who disagrees with them through childish name-calling, arbitrary enforcement of "rules" for their group, and innuendo lobbed at anyone who speaks negatively about them. This group will claim that the Green Team has exclusive ownership of the moral high road, and throw out hyperbolic accusations of "serious" election rule violations. They'll do a lot of things. But the key thing they will NOT do, is offer you any sort of unbiased, educated, rational information regarding the election.
Now, I'll offer you my take and recommendations, but I highly suggest you take a while and research my rationale and claims. I'll suggest a starting point (and it is JUST a starting point) that you read through the rest of the posts I've made. I like to focus on issues (with some humor thrown in, when you're this long-winded it helps to keep people awake), and I like to provide references to support my opinions (instead of pretending to be an authority on all aspects of local governance). Then do some more research on your own, you all know how to use Google (or duckduckgo, whatever suits your fancy).
In this election for City Council, while all candidates are technically independent, you're facing a choice between two slates (and one wild-card who you likely haven't heard of because he's done much less advertising). Slate A - Debbie Drury, Todd Kinsey, and Brenton Spry. Slate B - The "Green Team", Greg Gripon, Larry Millican, and Rudy Salcedo. If you've watched any City Council meetings in the last couple of months, you've seen some of these "Green Team" folks and most of their supporters as they've lined up for 3 minutes of shame every meeting to plead for such causes as:
1 - Spending $10mil on a new animal shelter (because improving/expanding the existing one wasn't good enough for them)
2 - Acquiring an "office" for the mayor (even though we have a council-manager form of government which renders the mayor a ceremonial figurehead who is in reality just an extra and useless member of the city council, and even though the mayor had full access to the shared office for all of council), creating an unnecessary expense for the city to change the signs, and enabling the mayor to overstep his role and try to interfere with the duties which we pay the City Manager to perform (the City Manager who has a Master's Degree and is qualified to run a city versus the Mayor who has no formal training whatsoever).
3 - Complaining about the city council "disrespecting" the Mayor (despite the fact that he campaigned on a promise to fight them, creating the atmosphere of distrust and combativeness)
4 - Changing the city logo back to the old oak tree silhouette instead of the new bright sailboats (because a logo means that much to them, and it'd be worth the expense to get the drab old logo back).
5 - And finally, we get to a real issue - opposition to the city's plan to revitalize the downtown area of League City (because they don't understand the difference between investment and spending).
The Green Team will talk a lot about valuing "involvement" in the city (citing how many council meetings their favorite candidates have attended, or charity groups they're involved in). But this doesn't qualify one to make decisions regarding the operations and planning for a city of this size. What SHOULD qualify someone is how will they vote on issues that matter to you. So let's boil down the positions of the two slates.
The A Team (Drury/Kinsey/Spry) will continue the path set forth by existing council members (Becker, Bentley, Hansing, Kinsey, Long, and Gross). They will seek the advice of our trained and skilled City Manager, and measure that advice with their truly conservative views that are representative of the majority of League City residents. They will continue to seek the balance in revenue to fund infrastructure improvements while decreasing debt and working to get our taxes lowered in a responsible manner. This balance will be achieved by attracting businesses to League City, thereby driving up the retail sales tax revenue and hotel occupancy tax revenue, which will be largely funded by those from outside of our community, and enable improvements to be funded without relying on the revenue of homeowners' property taxes. They will continue the plan to implement improvements such as downtown revitalization in a manner that will maximize the federal funding of projects through grants (thereby restoring money paid out by League City residents to the Federal government back to League City).
The B Team, or so-called "Green Team" (because Gripon is an environmentalist whose primary focus seems to be on the liberal buzz-word of "sustainability" and because Pat Hallisey is Irish) of Gripon, Millican, and Salcedo, will attempt to fight growth and development. They will try to preserve "green space" and oak trees, and yet they have promised to focus on traffic improvement and increasing our water supply. If we resist growth and development, yet invest in infrastructure improvements as the B Team has promised, the only two methods to fund this are by increasing revenue (which in this case would HAVE to come from your wallet in the form of increased homeowners' property taxes) or by increasing debt. I would love to go in more depth as to what the Green Team would do, but this is literally the only thing I've heard them promise to do, besides "cleaning house" and attempting to eliminate the City Manager and City Attorney (both of which would be costly ventures and likely get our city involved in unnecessary legal battles). The B Team will have family members, old friends, and some of League City's police officers out campaigning for them on Tuesday. But keep in mind, while they may have convinced the police union which represents some of the police officers to support them, they have no different plan to support the police department than the A Team. Remember, public employee unions are about the only group that can choose who their boss is, what benefits package they are provided, and their pay scales, by influencing an election. Police unions have historically been rather short-sighted, often backing Democrats who court the union with promises of increased pay and benefits yet then fail to "back the blue" as they continue supporting anti-authority voices. Furthermore, as described in this reference regarding municipal employee unions: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~holgers/papers/sw_1_13.pdf, "Political economy reasons may prevent the city from operating efficiently since local politicians have incentives to accommodate public sector unions." While the general consensus of the League City population is decidedly supportive of our police officers, please keep in mind that the unions are often short-sighted in what they view as advantageous to the officers they represent. Do not let the police that are out to support the candidates endorsed by their union's political action committee sway your convictions. Keep in mind that higher pay and benefits may benefit the police in the short-term, but they will bankrupt the city or increase your taxes in the long-run, which will inevitably be met by decreases in compensation and worse conditions for the police officers.
Brian Brown has run a very clean (and very limited) campaign, and has been used and abused by the Green Team to try and split votes. He doesn't really have much of a shot of getting elected, and would be outnumbered by one of the two slates on every vote. As such, it's not really worth considering what positions he will support - his vote on Council would be completely inconsequential.
Don't fall for lies and tricks at the polls (such as the B Team's inflated, and void of context, claims regarding past water rate increases). Don't let anyone convince you that the A-Team is not going to support the police - the fact is ALL of the candidates this time around will fully support our police department. Given this summary, I highly recommend, if you haven't made up your mind yet, that you vote for the team with a rational path for the future of League City - Drury, Kinsey, and Spry.
The choice really is simply - do you want to embrace and shepherd in sensible growth that will decrease the tax burden on homeowners while increasing the investment in infrastructure improvements, or do you want to support a delusional quest for nostalgia that will attempt to fight growth to save a few oak trees and increase your taxes? If you want to pursue lower taxes while increasing the quality of life - vote for Drury, Kinsey, and Spry. If you want to save a few oak trees and try to fight the natural course of suburban growth at the cost of increased taxes on your property or decreased quality of life, vote Gripon, Millican, and Salcedo.
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