It is not quite “controversial.”
On the other hand, it is not exactly boring, in an academic, thumb-sucking, pointy-headed intellectual sort of way.
No, it just sits there, hiding in the bowels of Hartford’s Charter Revision Commission proposals. “Charter revision” in almost any city or town in Connecticut that, in fact, has a charter, can be a dull affair, unless the populace is marching on the gates of the castle, demanding a strong-mayor system or a weak-mayor system or a change to city manager style of nonpartisan, cream-puff governance. There’s none of that in Hartford.
But among the proposals that the commission may spring on the City Council is the introduction of a modified voting-by-district election system for council members, who currently run city-wide, on the theory that city residents are one, big, happy family with shared goals and objectives, no matter what part of town they happen to live in.
Well, maybe not. Towns that have that kind of group-hug mentality tend to be white-bread bedroom suburbs, with city managers, not mayors, running the show and, in places other than New England, nonpartisan elections with nary a “Democrat” or “Republican” to be seen.
When Hartford switched from council-manager government to a “strong mayor” system, it pretty much conceded that brawny politics and neighborhood pettiness were part of the city way of doing things.
The city-wide versus district voting debate has been around for decades across the country. Cities and towns have gone both ways, have switched over time — usually without much fuss, but occasionally with great fire and brimstone.
The issue has tended to be most heated in the South, especially at the height of the civil rights unpleasantness, when blacks assumed (often, rightfully so) that in a “city-wide” election, no black would ever be elected to the governing body. In other cities, in other parts of the country, the issue tended to be more socioeconomic — a reaction to perceived slights aimed at poorer neighborhoods, at the hands of the snobby neighborhoods that elected more candidates in city-wide elections.
The, “why can’t we unite and be one” instinct that objects to district elections was, in decades past, often a reaction from the metropolitan elite who came to the realization that their days were numbered when it came to winning city elections — if, in fact, they were even still interested in running for office in what had become minefields of heterogeneity. In fact, a theory of urban political science suggests that many of the foundations that popped up in cities in earlier years were a quiet effort by the wealthy Protestants to keep a toe in the water filled with Catholics and Jews and blacks and Hispanics.
The old-fashioned “ward” elections in cities such as Chicago, filled with entertaining stories of corruption and patronage, gave the district system a bad name among good-government types.
For the old-fashioned, good-government types, the best arguments against Hartford changing to district elections are that the city is too small to justify the carving up; and, more ungraciously, that some neighborhoods lack a pool of sophisticated, well-educated, well-connected types to pretty up the political landscape.
The proposal most likely to come before the City Council is a conservative, modified thing, with five members elected by district and eight at-large. That would guarantee some neighborhoods at least a theoretical “voice.”.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
