RALEIGH — Tuesday, Oct. 7 is an election day in North Carolina — and in California, in case you haven’t heard.
Now, it is not Election Day, emphasis on the capital letters. Not every community will feature local elections. Some, including Charlotte, have partisan elections for municipal offices. Their primary elections were in late September, with the general elections scheduled on the same day as possible run-off elections for nonpartisan races — the first Tuesday in November. Winston-Salem, also a partisan-election city, has four-year terms for its municipal officials. And there are several other cities, such as Gastonia, that have nonpartisan elections but won’t hold them until November.
Still, Oct. 7 will be a momentous day in North Carolina politics. A number of key city-council and school-board contests will be settled, or at least whittled down to two-person run-offs. And perhaps more so than usual this year, major voter referenda are capturing the public’s attention, often more than the candidates are.
Two ballot questions deserve special attention. In Greensboro, citizens opposed to a new downtown baseball stadium — one that would be indirectly subsidized by local governments and host the city’s minor-league team — successfully petitioned to have a referendum on the citywide ballot to ban stadiums from the downtown district. The practical effect would be to stop the one now being built, or at least so say supporters of the referendum (that is, opponents of the stadium).
It’s worth watching this issue for a couple of reasons. First, while an impressive coalition of neighborhood groups and fiscal conservatives have banded together to try to stop the stadium, they apparently have few resources with which to communicate to voters. Moreover, they don’t have the support of key conservative Republican officeholders who one might have expected to oppose the stadium deal, too, such as former county commission chairman Steve Arnold. Still, can their grassroots effort succeed? Is the convoluted nature of the deal — a private foundation will build an office building for the county, and then receive the subsidized stadium in return — a barrier to organizing opposition?
Over in Wake County, a $450 million school bond has drawn last-minute opposition from the Wake County Taxpayers Association, who helped to defeat a larger $650 million school bond in 1999. In the latter case, the bond was overwhelmingly defeated because a large tax hike was explicitly attached to its passage. This time around, though, the school system and county deny that the bond would lead to an increase in the property-tax rate. The taxpayers group says that the operating costs for the new schools would outstrip expected revenues from the current tax rate, even if the debt-service costs do not. They also contend that the Wake construction program is bloated and unresponsive to public demand for money-saving options such as year-round and charter schools.
As is the case for the Greensboro baseball battle, the opponents of the Wake bond have little money. Will their attempt to rally opposition in the space of a single week work to their advantage — taking Wake education and civic leaders by surprise — or will it be too little, too late?
Frankly, I find these two ballot questions more interesting than most of the candidate match-ups this year. There does appear to be a competitive race shaping up in Wilmington, where incumbent Harper Peterson has drawn a strong challenger in Spence Broadhurst, who boasts a bigger campaign warchest and support from the local business community. A similar matchup is found in Cary, where incumbent Glen Lang seems likely to be outspent by two strong challengers, Julie Aberg Robison and Ernie McAlister — the latter, like Broadhurst in Wilmington, supported by developers and others who believe that the city’s policies have begun to strangle growth.
In Raleigh, a fascinating race could have evolved between incumbent Mayor Charles Meeker and longtime councilmember John Odom, who criticizes Meeker’s support for a choo-choo train system in the Triangle, among other lost causes. But Odom’s campaign has only shifted into high gear in the past couple of weeks, is not well-financed, and lacks a coherent message.
In the low-turnout environment we are likely to see Tuesday, almost anything is possible. The only thing I can predict with certainty is that I’m going to be watching the Greensboro baseball vote and the Wake County school bond more closely than anything else.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.