It's nothing personal, but voters like term limits

TROXLER E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published May 13, 2002

SOUTH PASADENA -- Hope springs eternal in the human heart, but especially in the hearts of city commissioners and councilors everywhere.

I am referring to the hope of many city officials in Florida that their city's voters have developed the itch to repeal term limits.

It is sweet, in a way. Many of the city elected officials I know are good people who take their jobs seriously and are fairly idealistic. They hope that voters will recognize that they mean well and change the rules.

This rarely works.

The most recent local example was in Tarpon Springs. The leaders of that city, hoping that the voters couldn't possibly mean THEM, placed a repeal of term limits on the ballot this past March. They even spent tax dollars to campaign for it.

The idea got stomped. The repeal was defeated, 72 percent to 28 percent. This is about the same ratio by which voters everywhere have imposed and kept term limits.

The only place I know of in Florida that has repealed term limits was Deerfield Beach, in 1999, and that's because the city confused its voters -- voters thought a "yes" vote would keep term limits, when the opposite was true.

This brings us to the small municipality of South Pasadena in Pinellas County. In that city's elections this past March, voters overwhelmingly refused to lengthen the term limit for city commissioners from from nine years to 12 years.

Yet now, only two months later, South Pasadena is considering asking its voters to repeal term limits altogether in another election next March. The idea will be on the City Commission's agenda Tuesday.

Commissioner Diane Sheldon, who was just elected in March, is proposing the election. Her resolution contains the usual string of "whereases." Here is my favorite part:

WHEREAS, the voters of the City rejected the proposal of extending the terms of Commission members to 12 years; and...

WHEREAS, the City Commission has determined that the voters of the City should be given an opportunity to either retain the term limit of nine years or eliminate term limits entirely...

To which one must say: Huh? The voters rejected longer terms in March, so now they "should be given an opportunity" to repeal term limits instead?

In no way am I criticizing her personally -- look, she works with disadvantaged teens and she helped provide free medical care in Nicaragua, which is more than most of us have done to improve the world. All I'm saying is, her reasoning seems funny this time.

But Sheldon told me that several voters told her after the March election that the vote should have been on repealing term limits, not extending them. "True, the way it was written, it was knocked down," she said. "But I felt it should be asked again."

I did like one of her arguments for repeal. In a small town, everybody knows whether the elected officials are doing a good job. Incumbents get beaten all the time. Term limits were meant to counteract the privilege and power that attaches to incumbency -- but we're not exactly talking Congress or even the state Legislature here.

Not only is all politics local, but in a small town, all politics is personal. (In South Pasadena, you could also say that all politics resembles a bitterly divided board of a condominium association.)

It so happens that one of the long-running political disputes in South Pasadena has been whether the current mayor, Fred Held, is in violation of term limits. He originally filled one year of a resigning mayor's term, before being re-elected twice. There are those in South Pasadena who say that these repeated efforts are designed to let the mayor stay longer, but I take no position on that issue.

Some people do not like term limits. They say they take good people out of office and deny the voters a full choice. They say voters can impose "term limits" any time they want just by voting an incumbent out of office.

All of those things might be true. Yet the voters still are perfectly entitled to have term limits if they choose to have them. After they make their feelings crystal clear, they also are entitled to be left the heck alone.

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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