Last night, I got a frantic call from friends: their dog Percy had a run-in with another dog, slipped his collar, and bolted into the night. They were obviously worried. So I hopped in my car and headed down the hill into Greenmont to help them look. Other friends joined us as we searched.

We went up and down the alleys and the streets of the neighborhood. Greenmont is one of the more interesting neighborhoods left in Morgantown because of its age and because of the way that age shows a different side of town, one where homes were built to accommodate backyard gardens, one where alleys cut between houses, one where those houses were built in odd and interesting ways (wraparound porches, second floor balconies, old stone walls, etc). It’s a neighborhood that feels largely untouched by time. 

As I drove around, I asked the people I saw if they’d seen Percy, and almost every single person said that they hadn’t seen him, but that they’d keep an eye out. This included people relaxing on porches, people coming home from the bars, people at Genes, people out for a stroll, people getting home from work. One woman took my phone number in case she found him. Another wanted to know what to do if he found the dog. Others wished us luck and promised that Percy would be found. 

Eventually, he was. He was on Demain and ran happily into his owner’s arms. He was bleeding a bit but otherwise unharmed. As you can imagine, Percy’s owners were overjoyed at him getting home safely and all of the panic that had hung over the night turned into the nice realization that no matter how frustrating this town can be at times, it’s an awfully nice place to live. 

(Photo Illustration credit: Walt Sarkees)

I have to say, last night’s City Council results are pretty exciting. That said, there is a big difference between running a campaign and actually governing so there’s no need to get ahead of ourselves. If the Morgantown Together PAC’s big victory last night leads to the following two outcomes, I think the city will be well-served and I’ll be a very happy camper:

1. Open and transparent city government. That the old council chose to do much of their business in closed door Executive Sessions was easily the most outrageous thing about the last council. Secrecy has no place in a free and open government, especially at the local level.

This offends my sensibilities to such a point that I get pretty outraged.  There may be reasons to do government business behind closed doors (the oft-repeated answer is “personnel”, though there were more Executive Sessions than City Council employees) but there really aren’t many on the local level.  We are CLEARLY not talking about national security issues behind closed doors and any politician who tells their constituents that “they don’t need to know” should be thrown out post haste, since they clearly do not understand who their bosses are.

2. A new level of organization and professionalism in City Council campaigns. Their sweeping victory last night is the clear end-result of a well run campaign, one their opponents chose simply to impugn than to learn from. I imagine the defeated Councillors will not make the same mistake next time around.

This was, clearly, the defining issue of the election.  Both sides offered the same unfocused platitudes which are commonplace in political campaigns.  Politicians, by definition, are unwilling to commit to specifics (because those can come back to bite them!) and all run on a platform of “doing what’s best for the people who elect them”.  What is interesting is that the defining issue of this election was that Mayor Manilla threw an absolute hissy-fit at the idea of running against an organized campaign.  He could’ve countered with his own ideas, he could’ve countered with his own organization, he could’ve countered by simply stating repeatedly and forcefully why he was a better and more qualified candidate than Bill Kawecki.  He chose to do none of those things.  He simply stomped his feet, pointed at the opposition and screamed “That’s not good!”.  It proved to be a losing strategy and one that probably won’t be repeated, nor should it be.

The reality is that Morgantown is a large enough city to deserve competent, quality, professional leadership.  Now it’s impossible to predict how the Morgantown Together group will govern but they’ve certainly raised the bar for how a successful local campaign is run.  If the City Council campaigns in 2015 follow the precedent set this year, the whole town will benefit greatly.

Voter turnout is almost certain to be lost in the celebratory mood following last night’s electoral outcome. It shouldn’t be. Voter participation dropped by more than 40 percent last night, returning Morgantown to its recently pathetic historical averages.

In 2011, more than 3600 citizens voted in City Council elections. In 2013, roughly 2000 did. If you’re wondering if that decrease is bad, the answer is yes, it is bad. Here are the numbers as reported last night: Nancy Ganz-Linda Herbst produced 1924 total votes, Mike Fike-Jay Redmond produced 1942 votes, Marti Shamberger-Mark Furfari produced 1938 votes, Jenny Selin-Bill Graham produced 1917 votes, Bill Kawecki-Jim Manilla produced 1978 votes. I don’t have numbers for the two uncontested elections involving Wesley Nugent and Ron Bane. Clearly, those numbers seem to show roughly 2000 people voted.  

In fact, turnout was so bad that Jim Manilla (our now defeated mayor) bemoaned it to WAJR.

“The very, very low number of voter turn out.” contributed to his defeat says Jim Manilla.  ”We expected a lot more, we were hoping that people really followed the issues.” 

Let’s ignore the fact that Manilla decided to imply that Morgantown’s voters were a bunch of deadbeats. That puts the sour into sour grapes and nothing more about it needs to be said. Let’s focus instead upon Manilla’s apparent amazement that voter turnout was low. Because the question ought to be: isn’t that precisely what Manilla wanted?

Manilla spearheaded the opposition to the city’s wildly successful Vote By Mail pilot project. Despite it delivering him a victory in 2011, Manilla joined Wesley Nugent, Linda Herbst, and Ron Bane in abandoning Vote By Mail in 2013. Those four were repeatedly warned that voter participation would drop as a result of their decision, and those four went ahead with Vote By Mail’s cancelation anyway. They even promised the city that those of us advocating for Vote By Mail didn’t know what we were talking about; they insisted that competitive elections would turn out the voters in record numbers.

They were entirely wrong. In fact, exactly the opposite occurred. Not only did record numbers not materialize, but voter participation collapsed. This was what some of Manilla’s backers wanted. Various speakers at City Council meetings repeatedly argued that voter participation didn’t matter at all. “If citizens don’t want to vote, that’s their problem, and it makes no sense for us to encourage more participation…” is how the line generally went. Needless to say, all of Vote By Mail’s opponents got precisely what they wanted, and then, when it came time for an election, they ended up getting the opposite of what they wanted. 

It’s funny how that worked out. 

Of course, getting voters to the polls remains a problem. A city getting barely more than ten percent of its voters to the polls is a city struggling to get political buy-in from its citizenry. 2011’s voter turnout was only fantastic because it was so much better than what had happened in previous (and now subsequent) years. 

It should be acknowledged that we’re almost certainly not going back to Vote By Mail. And Morgantown Together, despite working its ass off, turned out enough voters to win in an election in which voter participation caved. What’s sad here is that we had the solution in our hands and four reactionary councilors punted it away, not because of any sort of good reason, but just because it wasn’t something that they were familiar with. Our city’s politics suffer as a result. 

I thought I was being brave when I predicted Morgantown Together going 4-5 in this year’s City Council Elections. I was apparently being conservative. They ended up going 5-5 (something predicted on this website, but not by me; congratulations Aaron!) and thumped their opponents, Victory For Morgantown. 

The next council will consist of Jenny Selin, Marti Shamberger, Bill Kawecki, Mike Fike, Nancy Ganz, Wesley Nugent, and Ron Bane. Those first five will comprise one block and will likely select Selin to be the city’s next mayor; those last two will comprise the opposition and will, ideally, do a better job of being outsiders than they did of being insiders. 

Morgantown turfed Jim Manilla (the current mayor) and Linda Herbst out of office. Morgantown also rejected the candidates that Manilla, Herbst, Nugent, and Bane personally backed: Mark Furfari, Bill Graham, and Jay Redmond each lost badly.

What’s incredible is that Victory For Morgantown had candidates going in each of the city’s seven wards; they only had to four-for-seven to maintain their hold on political power. Morgantown Together’s margin was much narrower, in that they only had candidates for five of the city’s wards. But in winning every seat they contested, Morgantown Together showed that their unified strategy - one decried by this city’s cranks and complainers - was in fact the better of two. Running as one publicly produced a stunning victory; running as one privately produced a night in which the only two candidates who won (Nugent and Bane) did so because they were unopposed. It doesn’t seem that unreasonable to believe that those two might have also lost had they only been opposed. That’s pure speculation though.

But that’s not the only takeaway from this evening. The city’s abandonment of Vote By Mail proved as disastrous as some of us had warned about. It appears as though upwards of half of the voters that participated in 2011 showed up in 2013. Plenty of us predicted precisely this outcome, but those opposed to Vote By Mail (Manilla, Herbst, Nugent, and Bane) swore up neighborhood and down the next that the truest way to maintain voter participation was with contested elections. They were entirely wrong. We had five contested elections this time around - voter participation plummeted. 

It’s not just that those four candidates were so wrong though; it’s also that they didn’t realize that Vote By Mail may have been the very thing that helped them to get (re)elected in the first place. The thing about Vote By Mail is that it gives all of the city’s 16,000+ potential voters the opportunity to participate in our local election. By foolishly abandoning it, these four candidates apparently believed that the same voters who chose them by mail in 2011 were just as likely to show up in 2013. They should have known better. It was the system that got them all those votes two years ago, not the glimmering shine of their own campaigns. 

Instead, they went with their reactionary gut instincts - “VOTE BY MAIL BAD! VOTE IN PERSON GOOD!” - and the city’s residents rewarded their opponents, people who rightly recognized that this year’s election would be won by getting voters to the polling places. I take some pleasure in the immediacy of that feedback, and ideally, Nugent and Bane will acknowledge how wrong they were in the next city council meeting. (Not that they will of course. Politicians don’t do that.)

More analysis in the coming days when the vote totals are finalized. 

A friend of mine and I were talking the other day, and he said, “Sam, you know I love you, and you know we’ve been friends for more than 15 years, but it’s not like you’re the easiest person to disagree with.” 

Which is true. A more succinct way of describing me is how my wife does it. “You’re like a dog who won’t let go of a pant leg.” Fair enough.

So when it comes to having an axe to grind, especially with local politicians, I don’t tend to let up. Ever. I get why some people don’t like this but I don’t understand when the some people who don’t like this are themselves politicians. After all, nobody forced them to run for office. They weren’t doing us a favor by choosing to run. They’re not doing charity work. 

Complicating things is our - and I’m putting this gently - complacent local media, a group of people more dedicated to maintaining the status quo than shaking it up. My general assumption about media is that it ought to distrust everyone; as somebody once recommended to me, “Verify, verify, verify.” 

Which brings us to Jim Manilla, our city’s thin-skinned mayor. His primary outreach element for his campaign for re-election is his Facebook page. It is available here. As it is currently set up, lowly residents are allowed to post on each of the threads that he creates…unless those residents have the audacity to ask him questions. Then he deletes either the threads themselves or the offending comments. Because god forbid a constituent ask a question of their elected official. What is this, France? (Other Facebook pages supporting the candidates are guilty of the same sort of rank propaganda.)

That said, it hasn’t stopped me from trying to get Jim to explain Victory For Morgantown, the incredibly hypocritical group of behind-the-scenes politicos attempting to get the following candidates (re)elected: Wesley Nugent, Linda Herbst, Bill Graham, Mark Furfari, Jay Redmond, and Ron Bane. Each of these candidates has decried the idea of Morgantown Together, a group of candidates who have publicly acknowledged working together; Victory For Morgantown’s candidates refuse to acknowledge that they ever organized themselves, despite obvious evidence of the group’s existence. Needless to say, that didn’t stop me from voting for at least one of these candidates, but if you’re going to criticize your opponents for being publicly allied with one another, you shouldn’t be guilty of doing precisely the same thing in the shadows. 

I tried to ask Jim Manilla this. I am a voter that he allegedly represents after all. He lives a few blocks away from me. But asking an elected representative to explain their political scheming is a big no-no. Which is why I received and responded to the email below:

Got that? I’m “harassing” him because I asked him to clarify his involvement in a political group that he was obviously involved in. My question wasn’t profane or indecent; it just hit at a truth that he’d rather not acknowledge. To hammer home his frustration with me home, he also clumsily copied a local lawyer, Rocky Gianola, I guess assuming that either he had some sort of case or that I’d be quiet if I knew that a lawyer was involved. 

Except he has no case, as I tried to make clear in my response. I was asking him a question. He is an elected representative. If he doesn’t want to be asked questions, don’t be an elected representative. It’s a remarkably simple solution that most people could figure out in mere minutes. But as you can also see, he immediately replied, warning me not to post on “his” sites. Except that “his” sites aren’t his; they’re Facebook’s. Facebook, whether we like it or not, is a public forum. At least as far as he has configured his site. So I told him so:

Oddly enough, I haven’t received a response. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t harassing him? Maybe it’s because he realized that voters are still allowed to ask their political representatives questions, even questions that those representatives would prefer not to be asked? I know this can get confusing, but until that changes, or until Jim figures out how to set his Facebook group to “private” - seriously, there’s an explanation right here -  I reserve the right to ask him whatever question comes into my mind. He can ignore them or he can engage them. But being thin-skinned to the point of absurdity? That won’t get him anywhere. 

Have you been sitting there, thinking to yourself, “I wish these CityOfMorgantown folks could bother me in yet another forum. Tumblr and Twitter just ain’t enough!” 

I’ve got great news for you: https://www.facebook.com/TheCityOfMorgantown 

And unlike some of this city’s cowardly City Council candidates, I won’t take it badly if you decide to come to the group and criticize what we do. The world will keep on turning and the sun? It’ll come up tomorrow.

Got that? 

Jim Manilla - a man caught lying about his own coordination with other candidates in this year’s City Council elections - objects to the idea of “non-truths and misinformation” being disseminated against him. You’ll note that he doesn’t give us any specific examples nor does he attempt to refute any of these allegations. He simply alleges that negativity is out of bounds in politics, then implicitly portrays himself as the victim, and finishes by negatively attacking his opponents.

I’d love for Jim Manilla to describe the sort of candidate that he does believe Morgantown deserves. My guess is that Manilla’s description of the perfect candidate wouldn’t look anything like Manilla’s last two years in office. 

Here’s hoping that every incumbent loses this year; I’d rather have seven brand new people serving on council that endure this condescending nonsense.