Sharpen up your pencils, Prince George. On this day next year, you'll be heading to the polls to elect a mayor and eight city councillors.
If letters to the editors and online posts were a true barometer of public sentiment, this election would see Mayor Shari Green and all of her eight council colleagues kicked to the curb in favor of a new slate of earnest rookies who will stop raising taxes, fill all the potholes and improve services, as well as sack all the city's senior managers, close down Tourism Prince George and Initiatives Prince George and never leave town to do business in places like Victoria or Ottawa or China.
Most of these people insist that they reflect popular opinion but that rarely, if ever, is that the case come election day.
During the provincial election, Christy Clark made the obvious, but often forgotten point, that politicians are compared with perfection while in office but are compared with the individuals they're running against during elections. Did she and the B.C. Liberals win their majority because everyone loves her and her colleagues? Of course not, but voters made it clear that they like Clark and her team better than Adrian Dix and his NDP gang to lead for the next four years.
That's another point that often gets lost. The fiercest local critics of mayor and council talk about punishing them by voting them all out of office next year. It sounds great in theory but that's not what happens when voters pick up their pencil in the ballot box. The past becomes irrelevant and the only question left is who are the right people to form government in the future.
The prospects for Green to win a second term as mayor, if she chooses to run, won't be based on what voters think of her and the job she's done now but how they feel about her next to the other mayoral candidates next year at the time.
Same goes for the rest of council.
Have Mayor Green and the other eight councillors done a good job in the last two years? The simple answer is not bad but not great, either.
To their chagrin, transforming municipal government isn't as simple as contracting out a core services review, replacing a business-as-usual city manager in Derek Bates for a change-agent in the form of Beth James and then gassing 30-odd city workers and City Hall staff. Mayor and council have worked hard to make local government leaner and more efficient but they have not reached the goals several of them campaigned on during the 2010 election.
They did the right thing on the Haldi Road women's recovery centre but the way they did it was terrible. They should never have allowed it to become such a lightning-rod issue in the first place. They wisely listened to public sentiment and backed away from paid parking downtown and the River Road dike project. They wasted both time and money on a core services review. They refused to let the consultant put all city services, including the essential ones, on the table and then all but turned their back on the final report when James arrived with her own ideas.
The incumbents will be able to point to a new RCMP detachment, extensive renovations at the Kin Centres, a new downtown hotel, the completion of Boundary Road, further retail development of the Highway 16 corridor and Westgate, as well as residential projects across the city, as progress under their watch. If they force unionized city staff to accept a much less generous contract than the previous 16 per cent wage hike over five years, that will also be considered a major win by many voters.
At times, they have worked well together (choosing James as the new city manager) but their political and, at times, personal clashes (the Brian Skakun trial and censure threat) have distracted them from the jobs at hand.
A year is both an instant and an eternity in municipal politics. So much will happen between now and then but campaign signs will be dotting the streets before we know it.
It's way too soon to rule out the mayor and councillors from winning another term but it's never too soon to talk about whether they deserve another vote of confidence.
