As the Gazette editor, I challenge every reader to care enough about this town to vote on Nov. 7 when we will elect a mayor and two commissioners to the five-member board of commissioners. The mayor, who votes only in case of a tie, is the sixth member of the town board.
In recent town elections, it had been estimated that only 11 to 13 percent of voters bothered to go to the polls. The real numbers are lower. In 2015 1,598 of the 22,644 registered voters actually voted, 7 percent! That means, despite the protestations of loving the town and the small-town charm, only 1,598 people voted to keep that small-town charm. The rest, I guess, trusted their neighbors’ judgment. I don’t. That’s why I vote.
There are 26,463 voters inside the town limits out of a pretty accurate estimate of 41,157 residents. Could we get 25 percent of those voters, 10,289 people, to the polls? I think that would be somewhat short of miraculous but well above outstanding.
But, from experience and a definitely cynical viewpoint, I will bet we might strain to reach 10 percent. Why don’t you prove me wrong?
5 Responses
You’re missing the point completely – I also heard the whole conversation and while TRACS is, in fact, a county program, relying on any Government-run solution such as TRACS, the WF loop bus, the WF express bus, etc. are clearly a disaster, and the fact that the Mayor thinks adding more buses will suddenly make the system work, or to think that any resident who works in RTP or elsewhere in Raleigh is going to take a bus shows how out of touch she is.
Anne Reeves isn’t even in the same area code in this conversation. She’s off in la-la land.
The Mayor did, in fact, express disappointment that the woman hadn’t brought this up before. Interesting how she only seems to care when it’s election time and she’s “in the neighborhood”.
Mayor Jim Thompson will care for all, all the time, and will usher in a new era of more modern leadership and a vision for the future that looks forward, not back in time like the Mayor, Reeves, and Harrington.
It is amazing how people hear what they want to hear and not what was actually said. Mayor Jones did not blame a disabled woman who asked a question about the bus service that takes her to her medical appointments, She respectfully explained that the service is run by Wake County and that she was sorry to hear the problems she was having. She indicated that the service is a part of Wake County TRACS and not under Wake Forest government. She offered to look into it and I noticed Major Jones speaking with her after the forum. That was a useful answer not Jim Thompson’s answer about Uber.
Your math is a bit off – 26K voters and 41K people – most of whom are under 18 or otherwise ineligible to vote. So 25% of the voters would be about 6500 people.
Regardless, great point and it’s a shame we don’t have 26K people vote every election…
Are you not going to cover Saturday’s forum, where Mayor Jones blamed a disabled woman in a wheelchair for her problems, saying “I wish you would have called me” rather than acknowledging how her solution for bus service is failing, especially for this woman?
Or how about how out of touch Commissioner Anne Reeves is when she butchered the names of the alternative transportation services Uber and Lyft and still has no clue that what soon-to-be Mayor Jim Thompson means is that rather than forking out ungodly sums of money wasted on empty buses, we used those same dollars to provide point to point transportation for women like the woman who spoke up, would be an absolute win-win for all?
If that wasn’t a glimpse of exactly why new leadership is needed, I don’t know what is.
The woman’s issue was with TRACS, a Wake County service, not the town bus service, and therefore not Mayor Jones’s “failing solution”. Also, feel free to mention the fact that Mayor Jones apologized profusely for the issue (that she has no control over) and the situation was remedied after the meeting.