Image courtesy Pixabay

Sarasota County voters in 2018 elected to begin picking county commissioners through single-member district elections. In March, they will decide whether to stay that course.

A county-wide special election takes place on March 8. All registered voters regardless of party can vote on a charter amendment that, if passed, will reinstate county-wide elections for commissioners. 

Sarasota County Commissioner Christian Ziegler sees it a chance to correct an error. He won his seat in 2018 in the last county-wide commission election, on the same day the switch to single-member voting was approved. He feared then voters did not understand that they were giving up their voice.

“Everyone lost 80% of their representation and 80% of their accountability,” he said. “They lost the right to vote for four of five county commissioners, and you need a majority to get anything done.”

But Kindra Muntz, president of the Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections, said voters understood the benefits of single-member districts in a growing county where it’s increasingly expensive to run countywide. She’s upset that less than four years after passing a charter amendment, commissioners have put the matter to a new vote— and with ballot language that doesn’t even mention the single-member voting change that just occurred.

“It is unnecessary and insulting to the people of Sarasota,” she said. “Almost 60% of all voters passed this in 2018 and now they are trying to overturn it in a quick special election.”

Sarasota now stands as Florida’s 15^th most populous county, and only four of the 17 largest hold county-wide elections, she said. The reason is that it’s simply costly to conduct a campaign in turf stretching from North Port to the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport and everywhere in between. And the result is county commissioners more beholden to wealthy industry donors like developers than they are to the people.

Ziegler disagreed, and said his own experience countywide informed him of voter opinions throughout the county. He noted that while River Road falls outside his District 2, he committed to voters to improve the road largely because he needed votes in south county. A majority of commissioners since has approved a road swap with the state and construction on improvements will soon begin. But the impact of that improvement may have little impact on his District 2 constituents.

He characterized single member voting as a Democratic plot to pick off a county commission seat in a GOP county— and based on a newly approved county map it may be his. District 2 is now a Democrat-leaning seat. While Ziegler said he’s confident he’ll win re-election anyway — Sarasota Mayor Hagen Brody announced he’s running as a Democrat against the Republican Ziegler — he said any scheme to get a big government liberal on the board in a conservative county should concern voters.

Muntz, though, said the accusation of partisanship was baseless. The groups backing the single-member initiative in 2018 and who want to keep the system in place today include Democrats, Republicans and independents, and the shift would not have been approved without broad political support.

Moreover, she points to the 2020 elections, the only time so far commissioners were elected in single-member elections since the 2018 charter amendment passed. The closest a candidate came to unseating a sitting county commissioner was actually Republican Mike Hutchinson, who came within 365 votes of incumbent Commissioner Mike Moran in a GOP primary. 

Image courtesy Pixabay