Another topic which looks to us like a solution in search of a problem to address is the idea embraced by Bur-lington’s city council last week at a retreat that it enlarge the council’s size from five members to seven.
There’s nothing we can tell is broken in the council’s current five-member configuration – four council members elected to four-year terms and a mayor elected every two years, thus a potential change in a majority of council seats every two years (which, as a matter of fact, happened in 2025).
Frankly, as best we’ve observed, there’s been no groundswell, or even a ripple, of interest from the general public for this idea, but it keeps bobbing around, largely at the original instigation, several years ago, of mayor pro tem Bob Ward.
But there are several dimensions to the idea that pose significant potential problems.
Do all voters determine a council, or only those from certain districts?
A corollary dimension to the issue of how many members should be on the council is whether the city’s elections should move from an at-large basis – where all citizens vote on all candidates – to a more restrictive one.
There are several variations of the more restrictive methods: one is to stipulate that a certain number of council seats must be designated for districts, sometimes termed “wards,” in which candidates for council must live.
An even more restrictive variation is that not only must the council candidates live in those designated districts, but only voters in that same district (rather than the city as a whole) can vote on their council member.
In the first instance, the whole city votes on the individual district representatives; in the second, only those within the district can decide.
We think the latter case is fraught with dangers, which are clearly obvious from observing other cities across North Carolina and the nation that have adopted this methodology.
Rather than having the city as a whole, and all of its people, as the people whom they serve – i.e., their constituents – precinct/ward representatives end up often concentrating primarily if not exclusively on their own, much smaller, more parochial domains.
Instead of considering the good of the city as a whole, this electoral format tends to balkanize cities into councils that often demonstrate intra-city friction or tensions, dissension, and even policy gridlock.
The oft-stated reason for districts is in order to “improve” minority representation. But that – a rather racist conclusion, in our judgment – presumes only someone of the same race can represent others of the same race. Similarly, geographic requirements often undercut other, practical considerations that voters can decide.
For instance, current council member Dejuana Bigelow and former councilman Ronnie Wall both grew up on the east side of the city, but ultimately moved to the other side of the city, and were subsequently elected.
But where they’re from (now or originally) doesn’t necessarily adequately capture their overall approach.
With district or ward representation, very often the climate of council meetings rapidly deteriorates into a hostile environment in which fewer members of the council as a whole are looking after the overall best interests of the city versus those interested only in his/her own district.
We believe Burlington and all other local cities and towns are better served by all “at-large” councils, in which all of a municipality’s voters determine who serves, rather than have a split approach with some at-large members and some district members.
Who manages who?
While we’re not at all sure that there’s any pressing need for an expansion of the council, we certainly don’t concur with the justification for such opposition used by councilman Jeff Smythe, who, granted, was the only council member to voice any reservation or dissent about expanding the council’s size.
“The downside is you have seven people that [city manager] Bob [Patterson] and [assistant city manager] Rachel [Kelly] have to manage rather than five.”
Smythe seems, fundamentally, to misunderstand the role of the council in a council-manager form of local government. He and other council members are supposed to be the ones overseeing, even managing, the city manager, not the other way around. It’s probably all too true a slip that he revealed – what many citizens often suspect – is that the tail is wagging the dog. In other words, city bureaucrats are running the show, telling the council how it should vote or operate.
The one encouraging comment from the discussion was the insistence of Ward that any change should, ultimately, be subject to a referendum vote by Burlington’s voters.
We strongly suspect they’ll come to the same conclusion: if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it.
It might be time for a more transparently partisan approach
But one thing the council didn’t want to do was be more transparent about its partisan divides. Increasingly, we’ve come to think that municipal elections should be conducted on an openly-partisan basis.
The trouble right now is that the Democrats, locally, have decided that’s the objective – and they’ve increasingly moved to conduct partisan campaigns during nonpartisan municipal elections. They succeeded quite well last fall in electing two of their three favored candidates – one to Burlington’s city council and another to the mayor’s post – and in Graham, where they successfully targeted, and ousted, Republican Jennifer Talley in favor of Democrat Chelsea Dickey.
So, in Burlington, the underlying partisan makeup is four Democrats on the ostensibly nonpartisan board (mayor Beth Kennett, and council members Ian Baltutis, Dejuana Bigelow, and Bob Ward) and one unaffiliated member (former police chief Jeff Smythe).
We think all voters, not just one party’s faithful devotees, should know the partisan leanings and loyalties of those on the municipal ballot.
As local municipal boards – and we might add school boards, as well – adopt increasingly ideological and partisan stances, while pretending to be “nonpartisan,” we think voters should know in advance where the candidates stand in their party politics, not just be surprised after the election.
