Maplewood voters had no council seats to vote on in Tuesday’s municipal election, but they did vote on term limits for council members and the mayor, passing both.
Charter amendment C was approved, limiting council members to three 3-year terms. The terms will be staggered, allowing a council member to run for mayor without being in danger of losing his or her seat in the same election.
Charter amendment M will term limit the mayor, also to three 3-year terms.
Charter amendment P, which would have made a firm deadline for signatures on a petition, failed. Charter amendment T would have eliminated the position of treasurer in the city — removing it from the charter. Maplewood hasn’t had a treasurer for several years.
See also: MRH Prop Y wins big
I wonder if people really thought through the implications of the term limits. If none of the really involved citizenry is eligible to run for a position because of term limits, who is going to step forward? I think it’s a mistake to put a limit on the council member terms, but I guess we’ll find out in a certain number of years.
It would have been helpful to know that Maplewood has not had a treasurer for several years. I would have voted differently with that knowledge. I voted no on charter amendment P because the wording was hard to understand even after reading it twice.
Both M and C received nearly the same amount of votes (about 1,570) which leads me to think that if you voted on M you likely also voted on C. However, surprisingly there was a 15% disparity on yes voters with more people favoring limiting Council member term limits than Mayoral term limits. I say surprisingly because these were designed to pass or fail together so I would not expect that large of voting discrepancy. Not sure how things would have functioned if one passed and the other didn’t. Also, if having more institutional knowledge was important to voters then I would think C would have received less support (meaning more people would not want to limit the number of terms for council members). After all, this is contrary to how we as a country where people are comfortable with limiting the re-election of the president but we allow Congress members to continually run. So it makes me wonder- Did these voters have a frustration with the way Congress functions and have it impact their local vote? Or could this be interpreted as a statement of support for the current Mayor? Or disapproval of our current council members? Was it simply the wording on the ballot?