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Upcoming Election Day sparks conversation with council regarding elections, terms
By Marthe Stinton, mstinton@starlocalnews.com
As Election Day approaches and presidential candidates make their final push to gain support from voters, The Colony City Council entertains the idea of moving city elections to November.
The change was sparked via Senate Bill 100. The bill states that "the governing body of a political subdivision, other than a county, that holds its general election for officers on a date other than the November uniform election may, not later than Dec. 31, 2012, change the date on which it holds its general election for officers to the November uniform election date."
The bill also said the city can adjust the terms of office to conform to the new election date. Home-rule cities like The Colony can adopt a resolution to implement the change. The bill states that the change within the resolution supersedes a city charter provision that requires a different general election date or that requires council terms to be staggered.
"If you look at our city's voting in the November election versus the May election, there are two to three times as many people that vote during the November elections," he said. "If we can translate that to getting people to know more about their council members - because they will start showing up on the November ballots - then we will have achieved our goal of upping the percentage of people in town that vote."
McCourry said the state mentioned moving all elections to November as a cost-cutting attempt but he didn't know what those savings would be because school districts will still have hold elections in May.
"Unless the state had just gone in and said 'From this point forward all elections will be in November, period,' then yes, you could say that would be a cost-saving [effort] because the only official election date would be the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November but they didn't do that," he said.
McCourry said the state noticed struggles counties were having trying to keep up with electronic voting machines. With councils having elections in May, the possibility of runoff elections would mean that the machines would still be needed for another 90 days.
This meant that the counties would have to recalibrate the machines for the November election but would have little time to do so, McCourry said.
"The biggest thing that we have to look at now is making sure the ballot gets put in the right order," he said. "The biggest con that we heard was that the federal or state guys would swallow up the local elections on the ballot. But in talking with Denton County Election officials, they said they could draft the ballot anyway they wanted and that all of the local council elections or charter issues - or anything that we put to vote - will be the very first [item] on the ballot, then it would be the national."
McCourry said because the next election is in 2014, the city secretary would have an entire year to reset the city's timelines regarding when officials file and when they have to turn in their financial reports. The council will put the issue to vote, McCourry said, sometime in November.
For a closer look at Senate Bill 100, visit capitol.state.tx.us and search SB 100 in the search bar.
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