JCC Supes to Hold Special Meeting on Eliminating Staggered Terms

By Desiree Parker Friday, December 02, 2011

James City County’s Board of Supervisors will hold a special meeting this month to decide whether to eliminate the Board’s staggered terms.

Supervisor Bruce Goodson said in the spring that he liked the idea of eliminating the staggered terms, but the Board didn’t take action at the time. Goodson and Supervisor Jim Kennedy asked the Board this week to hold a special meeting to vote on the issue, which is set for December 20. Supervisor John McGlennon thinks the board should wait on the decision. The December meetings are the final chances for the board to vote with its current members before Goodson leaves and is replaced by McGlennon, leaving the Board with two Democrats and two Republicans.

Goodson wrote in an email to the Board and key staff this week that he wanted to address the issue because “staggered terms creates inequities for citizens who have to wait 6 years to elect their supervisor due to redistricting and creates supervisors who continue to serve even though they no longer live in the district they represent.”

Kennedy noted in a related email that 2,000 of his constituents will have to wait that six years before they can vote again.

Supervisor Jim Icenhour has said recently that he isn’t interested in being appointed to his new district, Jamestown. “The discussion over whether or not Jim should accept the appointment for the Jamestown seat would not even be taking place were it not for staggered terms,” Kennedy wrote.

McGlennon responded via email that “there are reasonable arguments on both sides, as the Founders determined when they wrote the Constitution. But rushing the decision by calling a special meeting in December certainly gives the impression that this is being done for narrow partisan reasons.

“If the arguments are sensible and valid, why not let them be fully considered in a deliberative manner?”

He went on to say, “your conclusion that staggered terms don't work and the county isn't benefiting from them offers no evidence, other than that the redistricting the Board did this year created complications. Those complications are as easily seen as the result of an unnecessarily disruptive redistricting plan.”

McGlennon questioned why the vote had to happen right away. “In April, [the idea] was not advanced. In November, it was not proposed in the regular order. Now it is so important as to justify a special meeting.”

The email exchanges between Kennedy and McGlennon also focused on problems arising from the redistricting plan that was recently approved.

McGlennon argued that “the problem was created by the Board's decision (advanced by the Chair) that we eliminate the criterion of not moving supervisors out of their election districts, if possible.

“Since the Board majority insisted on approving a map that put two supervisors' homes outside of the districts they were elected to represent, the Board created the problem, not staggered terms.”

Kennedy responded that the plan “minimized the number of disenfranchised voters as much as possible and was not ‘unnecessarily disruptive’…If we had chosen to draw the lines only using the residences of elected officials as our guide, our lines would have been grotesque and our districts would not have been compact.”

He questioned what the reasonable arguments would be to keep staggered terms, and pointed out that voters would continue to be adversely affected until staggered terms are eliminated.

The Board will discuss the issue on Dec. 20 at 7 p.m. in Building F of the county government complex on Mounts Bay Road.