Quick, without looking: Name the eight candidates running for the two Vero Beach City Council seats up for grabs in next month’s off-year election.
Can’t do it? Neither can I. (Answers, P9.)
Sure, I know Brian Heady is running – because, well, Brian Heady always runs. He’s the Timex of local politics. Year after year, he takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
I also know local attorney Joe Graves is on the ballot, mostly because I’ve seen his law firm’s TV commercials and partly because I wrote about the tragic death of his teenaged son, Jimmy, who was killed in a boating accident in December 2016.
And I know former Vero Beach Yacht Club commodore Ray Neville is in the race, but only because he recently gave me a fascinating interview in which he recalled growing up in the house that’s now the home of The Tides restaurant.
The other five candidates?
I suppose I should’ve mentioned Bob McCabe, too, but it wasn’t until I saw a couple of his campaign signs last week that I remembered he ran unsuccessfully for a council seat last year.
The rest of the field, though, reads less like a Who’s Who and more like a Who’s That.
“There’s certainly not much name recognition in this race,” County Commission Chairman and longtime city resident Bob Solari said. “Four of the eight candidates, I’d never heard of before. Two others, I’d never met or had a conversation with – and I travel in local political circles.”
Perhaps that’s why there has been so little buzz about this election, which will fill the seats being vacated by Mayor Val Zudans and Councilman Harry Howle.
The city’s off-year elections tend to generate little excitement and produce small turnouts, anyway. Across the past decade, only twice have more than 25 percent of Vero Beach’s registered voters cast ballots in off-year elections.
One of those years was 2011, when more than 35 percent of voters turned out for a referendum on leasing the city’s power plant site.
“Unless there’s a referendum on the ballot or the city is confronting an important issue, such as the sale of the electric utility, it’s the candidates who drive turnout in off-year elections,” County Supervisor of Elections Leslie Swan said.
If so, I won’t be at all surprised if the turnout next month doesn’t reach 20 percent – because here we are, less than three weeks from the election, and most of us know almost nothing about most of the candidates, including their names.
Which reminds me: Where are all the campaign signs?
Driving around town last weekend, I saw considerably more “For Sale” signs than campaign signs. That puzzled me, given the candidates’ need to put their names in front of the voters.
“Six of the eight candidates filed their papers in the last two days before the (Sept. 6) deadline,” Vero Beach City Councilwoman Laura Moss said, “and I think that has a lot to do with why we’ve seen so few signs.
“It costs money to have signs made, and you can’t raise money until you file,” she added. “So if you started fund-raising only a month ago, you might not have the signs yet. It takes time to design them, order them and get them made.”
Why did these candidates wait so long to file? Were they undecided about seeking public office? Or were they waiting to see who else was running?
It doesn’t matter now.
There are eight candidates in the race – John Cotungo, Jeff Nall, Estelle Panagakos and Nick Thomas, along with Graves, Heady, McCabe and Neville – and all of them need to tell people who they are and what they hope to accomplish if elected.
This is an off-year election, but that doesn’t mean voters should take the year off. The next council will make pivotal decisions regarding the future of the city’s water-and-sewer operations and the fate of the Centennial Place.
Buzz or not, this election matters.
“The next council could be one of the most important councils ever,” Moss said, “because next year could be one of the most important years in the city’s history.”
For that reason, Moss said she has “lost sleep” worrying about the lack of information the candidates had provided to the public. The county’s Taxpayers Association held a candidates forum last week, but there are fewer such forums for off-year elections than for general elections.
As a result, Moss said, some city residents know so little about the field that they’ve asked for her opinions.
“I’m so concerned about this that I talked to the city attorney to make sure we could legally invite the candidates to our meeting and give them each three minutes to speak,” Moss said. “It makes sense to me to do this, because two of them are going to be sitting with us on the dais in November.”
The candidates were scheduled to speak at Tuesday’s council meeting.
Solari, meanwhile, has his own concerns: He attended the Taxpayers Association forum and came away disappointed, particularly with what he perceived to be the candidates’ failure to take strong positions on the local issues they’ll confront.
“If you’re running for public office, you should be able to tell people what you want to do,” Solari said, adding that he wasn’t overly excited about any of the candidates. “You can’t say you’re just going to listen to the people.”
Maybe that’s the problem: The candidates are doing too much listening and not enough talking.
If nothing changes, Heady and Graves might be able to ride their name recognition to victory in a no-buzz election in which 200 votes – or a few campaign signs – could decide the outcome.
“All bets are off on this one,” Moss said. “Anything can happen.”
