The 2016 municipal election in Yorkton might be one of the toughest on record for voters and candidates alike.
There are 24 candidates for council, four for mayor. And, unlike some previous recent elections, it seems like a lot of the candidates are pretty serious people. A lot of hopefuls look like they could be very good additions to local government. And many of the incumbents are proven performers.
Unlike a lot of big city publications, The News Review is not in the business of endorsing candidates for public office. In this election, even if we were inclined to do so, how would we? Like for the general public, the sheer volume of candidates makes it difficult to evaluate them all, especially when, unlike the general public, we are supposed to dig deeper while maintaining some level of objective balance.
That leaves us to consider, with just six days to go before the vote, the potential occupants of the top political job in Yorkton come Oct. 27. Although it is tempting to think of the mayor as just one councillor among seven, that is simply not realistic.
Mayor is a full-time job in Yorkton. The previous mayor, James Wilson, had to take leave from his day job. Bob Maloney, the incumbent, retired from a career in journalism to serve. And the pay is not bad. The mayor gets paid 75 per cent of a provincial MLA’s salary, which currently amounts to $68,850.
Councillor remuneration is 30 per cent of the mayor’s, or $20,655, almost as good as a full-time minimum wage job and pretty darn decent for a part-time second job for most of our councillors.
The point is, while we are grateful council members and potential council members are civic-minded, all officials of the local government are also reasonably remunerated, but the mayor is a particularly important role.
This year, voters have the choice of two former mayors and two first-timers.
The sheer abundance of choice in this election might lead people to believe there is massive discontent in the city, but that is not a mood that appears to have permeated to the general electorate, where disinterest is on par with most past local elections.
There is no way to argue that the current City Hall contingent isn’t getting a bit long-in-the-tooth. All the current councillors have multiple terms under their belts. The two previous mayors have a combined three decades in power. The two challengers have zero political experience on the municipal scene.
Depending on your perspective, either too much experience or too little experience may be the favourable quality.
Now, it may be partly just the nature of local politics, partly the capacity of local media to adequately cover the race and partly typical voter apathy, but none of the candidates—save Wyatt, who thinks politicians are overpaid, the bureaucracy is overstaffed, we need a new public works building and generally more can be done with less—have really laid out much in the way of specifics.
Maloney is running on a ‘stay the course’ platform. He thinks he and the current Council have done a good job and he should be given the opportunity to continue.
Tokarchuk and Probe are even more critical than Wyatt, suggesting previous councils have been unaccountable and done a poor job in prioritizing and managing the public purse. They are very short on actual examples of that, however, and defer questions on what they would do differently with the age-old political outsider tap-dance of needing to be privy to the financial records before getting into specifics.
For the record, financial records are public documents that anyone, and especially people who are running for political office, might want to become acquainted with before election day, rather than after.
Local voters have an unenviable decision to make October 26, one we are all going to have to live with until at least 2020.
