RALEIGH – The local election cycle in North Carolina this year offers plenty of significance – but don’t expect significant lines at the polling places.

While 2004 was a relatively strong year for political participation, in our state and nationally, my sense is that voter interest may be lower-than-usual in 2005. In recent odd-year cycles, high-profile mayoral races in Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Durham, and elsewhere helped to drive sustained media coverage, hundreds of thousands of campaign donations, and waves of activists and volunteers out into neighborhoods armed with signs, banners, and righteous indignation.

As I have already observed, however, you won’t find such colorful races in most of North Carolina major cities this year. However, you will find some interesting themes in the competitive campaigns that do exist, themes that speak to basic questions about what local governments should do and how they should do it.

In Fayetteville, for example, the central campaign issue in the race between incumbent Mayor Marshall Pitts and challenger Tony Chavronne, a former executive at The Fayetteville Observer, is the heated controversy over annexation. Pitts, the two-term mayor of North Carolina’s sixth-largest city, is defending Fayetteville’s massive annexation binge. Chavronne is criticizing it, communicating his message with copious financial backing. As of late September, he had reportedly outspent Pitts eight-to-one – unusual to say the least for a first-time candidate challenging a seemingly popular (at one time, at least) incumbent. The final numbers will tighten up a little in the homestretch, but that much.

In both Wilmington and Asheville, issues of rapid growth, traffic congestion, and city involvement in economic development have dominated the mayoral races there. Wilmington’s campaign is a rematch from 2003, when then-incumbent Harper Peterson was upended by political newcomer Spence Broadhurst. Now it is Peterson trying to make a comeback by defeating the incumbent Broadhurst. For those trying to affix clear ideological labels on the combatants, you’ll find this race slippery: Broadhurst takes credit for the first cut in years in the property-tax rate, but supports a tax-funded convention center (he stresses that the tax is only on “outsiders,” it being a hotel tax, but tell that to the owners and employees of local hotels that will compete with the new convention center/hotel complex for meeting business). Peterson, on the other hand, now says he opposes the convention center but used to support it – and appears to call for tighter city regulations on development.

It’s also worth noting that spirited school-board races in Mecklenburg and Wake counties will test the ability of local opponents of forced busing and costly new school-construction plans to flex their political muscles. In Mecklenburg, the goal for conservatives will be to fend off attempts to re-introduce involuntary busing through the back-door of “economic” diversity, as Wake (in)famously did years ago when race-based busing seemed destined for legal oblivion. With both systems bursting at the seams, adding many thousands of new students every year, the question of how best to accommodate new students without breaking the bank remains a challenging and controversial one.

It may be only a quarter, or a fifth, or even fewer of the voters showing up across the state to cast their ballots in these races – and thus making their voices heard on these electoral themes. But that’s the way the system works. Just 10 percent turnout will still decide 100 percent of the power to tax, regulate, annex, assign, or infuriate for the next two to four years.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.