All voters don’t want issues worked out in private
It is hard not to see the Ocean City Third Ward election as a partial rebuke to the way Ocean City Council has been doing business.
In the only race that was contested among the four ward elections, the vote was nearly evenly split between challenger Jody Levchuk and incumbent Tony Wilson. At the end of night on Election Day, Levchuk had 557 votes and Wilson had 547, but with mail-in ballots allowed to be postmarked the same day, the Cape May County Board of Elections had to wait to certify the results and wait for those straggling votes to come in.
The final results gave the seat to Levchuk, 573 to 559.
One thing that didn’t have to wait past election night was seeing that approximately half of the those voters in the ward who cast ballots did not buy into the belief that the status quo is working best for them on city council.
The incumbent and the challenger agreed on most points, including the ones with the biggest price tags – the extensive years-long capital improvement program, the city trying to acquire the former Chevrolet dealership lot to prevent it from become filled with more housing, and keeping up the city services such as police and fire protection taxpayers have come to expect.
That left one prime area of disagreement – disagreement itself. Specifically, whether disagreement among council members and between council and the mayor should stay hidden behind closed doors.
Wilson argued there shouldn’t be any public fighting.
“The long and short of it is we work out our differences behind closed doors, we know what’s best for the taxpayer, we all have one job and that is to make sure taxpayer dollars are well watched,” Wilson said in an interview leading up to the election. “We do that behind closed doors, we come out and we’re gentlemen and ladies, and make sure we have the best interests of the taxpayers in mind. That is the perception we want. We are not going to fight in public, we are going to do our fighting behind closed doors so that way everyone knows everyone is getting the best result out of their vote.”
He and other sitting council members have suggested the same thing: only a small segment of the population wants to see infighting.
In the larger context, they are right. Most people would rather not have a smaller version of Washington, D.C., where divisive party politics create a logjam and inaction is the order of the day.
But in the context of how they go about business, they are wrong.
Ocean City Council is nonpartisan. They don’t have to worry about party politics superseding everything. While most people don’t want to see fighting for the sake of fighting, it is hard to believe the majority of people feels comfortable with their elected leaders working everything out in back rooms. It’s about transparency.
How do taxpayers know if important ideas, criticisms and counterproposals are raised? How do they know, if there is an issue specific to a ward, that their representative is standing up for their concerns?
We don’t want to discount the individual candidates themselves and voter perceptions.
Levchuk is a respected Boardwalk businessman. We are sure there are voters who supported him simply because they believe he would make a good member of council.
Conversely, we are sure there are voters who were turned off by Wilson over this past term, including his boating under the influence charge after a crash that left a passenger injured. The last time a sitting councilman was charged with driving while under the influence after a car crash, he opted not to run for re-election.
That said, we believe a reason so many voters chose Levchuk is because he made it clear he would have no problem dissenting or offering contrary ideas.
Ocean City Council members don’t have to be disruptive forces or argue for the sake of argument, but they should consider that being far more open with their deliberations would better serve the city’s interests.