Voters have decided

Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006

Many times, especially at the local level, voters choose someone because they know who she is, or know her family. They may not know much about the candidate’s position, but they know the person.

We feel this was the outcome in Del. Sue Kullen’s race against GOP candidate David Hale, currently the commissioners president, soon to be out of elected office.

Both Kullen and Hale were strong, intelligent candidates. Both had broadly appealing, moderate platforms stressing education, transportation, fiscal responsibility and the environment. During the campaign, and especially the last few months, Kullen simply showed up at every event and doorstep she possibly could, and Hale didn’t. The voters knew Kullen better, and she is the candidate who won.

In the county commissioner positions, the public clearly wants things to stay the same. All four incumbents running for office were returned with high vote totals, and the two candidates still fighting it out for the fifth position, Mark Frazer (D) and Barbara Stinnett (D), both have recent stints as county commissioners and share the credit with members of the current board for the solid performance of county government over the last decade or so.

The public would appear to want slow-growth policies, fiscal responsibility including no tax cut in the near future and the tradition of pragmatism the recent boards have fostered. Oh, and build that pool, already.

On the law enforcement front, the public rejected a weak record from Greg Wells (D), who performed poorly in his nearly a year in the state’s attorney’s office after being appointed last year, in favor of Laura Martin (R), who performed well in 10 years in the office as an assistant and deputy state’s attorney under now-Judge Robert Riddle.

Neither one of these candidates had a particularly strong public image or name recognition going into the election, so we must conclude that people examined their records and made a decision based on that.

The sheriff race was more exciting than we had supposed it would be before the election. It seemed to us that Sheriff Mike Evans’ four years in office had been exemplary and it would be hard to oppose him, but first former Sheriff John ‘‘Rodney” Bartlett in the primary and then business owner Joey McKenny in the general election took him on.

Both ran on a platform we considered to be flatly false, that moving resources from neighborhoods to Route 2-4 traffic enforcement was a bad idea. Apparently in the end the people of county decided, as we did, that it makes more sense to try to keep people from dying on our main artery than it does to protect peoples’ CDs and car windows from thieves and vandals.

Here we must also comment on the egregiously wrong-headed and embarrassing role played in the sheriff race by the Fraternal Order of Police lodge that represents the deputies of Calvert County. Their support for the losing candidate and their misguided reasons for doing so cannot pass without comment, not to mention the union chief, Thomas Phelps’ remarks to one of our reporters after the election.

The union climbed on the bandwagon of Evans’ opponents, weakly repeating their rationale that Evans had abandoned neighborhoods.

It appears that their real agenda was to get a deputy-friendly sheriff who would get them away from doing the boring but necessary work of traffic enforcement in favor of the more entertaining work of neighborhood patrols. Just as business owners don’t choose managers based on who their employees feel would make the most congenial boss, the wise voters of Calvert County chose not to listen to the grousing of some disgruntled employees, and instead listened to common sense.

For Phelps then to come after the election and chastise the public for not listening to the deputies’ choice for sheriff is so arrogant it beggars belief.

The voters of this county pay your salary, Mr. Phelps. You are in your job to serve and protect them; they are not in charge of satisfying your wish for cushier working conditions. They made their decision based on Evans’ record, and they analyzed your charges, in advertisements and a letter to the editor in this newspaper, and rejected them. Your role after this, Mr. Phelps, is to bow to the will of the people, as government officials in a democracy must, and soldier on.

Phelps’ remarks criticizing the public’s choice and vilifying them because they supposedly ‘‘don’t care” what the deputies think is far off the mark of acceptable political discourse.