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Qualifying to become a candidate for
Safety Harbor City Commission opens Monday, Nov. 5, about two
months earlier than usual because the next election will be about
two months earlier than usual. Blame the Florida primary, which
will be held Tuesday, Jan. 29. Although Safety Harbor and many
other Pinellas cities normally have elections in March, local
elections have been rescheduled to piggyback on the state primary.
Our local campaign season has been accelerated as a direct result
of the acceleration in the national political campaign, which
seemingly has been under way since the day after the last national
election.
Three Safety Harbor seats will be up for
election in January, mayor and two commissioners. All seats are
three year terms, but resignations during the past several years
have resulted in a series of partial terms. Most recently, in
August Commissioner James McCormick resigned because work and
family committments caused him to move out of the city limits. A
single year of his term remains. Just last March, Mayor Andy
Steingold was elected to fill a one-year term created by the
resignation of the previous mayor. He now will have the opportunity
to run for a full three-year term, ten months after his last
campaign. The third seat will be for a full term, also following a
one-year term created by a resignation.
A serious concern about the shift in the
local election cycle is that qualifying will not close until
Monday, Nov. 19, days before Thanksgiving and at the onset of the
holiday season. Candidate signs will compete with Christmas
decorations or not appear until just before January's election,
when airwaves and roadsides are likely to be crowded with
advertising for national political party rivals. Of course, that
assumes there even will be competition for the local seats. Two of
the current sitting commissioners, Joseph Ayoub and Nadine
Nickeson, were elected without opposition. Ayoub is serving in
public office for the first time and Nickeson took a seat unopposed
after having been defeated a year earlier. A third seat, that
vacated by McCormick, has been filled by the appointment of former
commissioner Keith Zayac, who previously did not seek reelection
because of family commitments and conflicts created by his work as
a consulting engineer for companies appearing before the
commission.
So the curious situation currently in
Safety Harbor is that only two of five positions are held by
persons who actually were selected for those seats by voters.
Politicians sometimes are called wishy-washy for changing their
minds, but that is a good thing when they change their positions
because they have listened to their constituents. There is no
better opportunity for listening to constituents than when
conducting a campaign. Local politics is becoming more expensive as
candidates follow the national models of image advertising, phone
bank polling and cyberpolitics. The best-informed and most
responsive local candidates are those who have invested shoe
leather and sweat in one-on-one campaigns that take them into
neighborhoods, into local clubhouses and in front of civic groups
of all kinds. The city would be fortunate to see three such
campaigns by January.
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Front Page 
Op-Ed 
