Audio By Carbonatix
If dissatisfaction with the Phoenix City Council keeps growing, it’s safe to bet somebody’s going to suggest tinkering with the district system–the “reform” election system voters approved in 1982.
And someone’s bound to suggest Tucson has a better idea.
For sixty years Tucson has tried to combine the “best of both worlds,” sort of a hybrid between district and at-large elections. Council members are nominated in each of the city’s six districts; the top Republican and Democratic vote-getters in each district face off in the general election, in which all city residents vote on all the races.
The philosophy is to provide the benefits of a councilmember elected from–and beholden to–residents of his or her own section of the city, but yet not too beholden to forget the responsibilities to the entire community.
Unlike Tucson, the Phoenix city charter specifies that its council elections be nonpartisan. So to implement the Tucson system here would mean having each district’s top two vote-getters–no matter their party affiliation–run citywide in the general.
George Miller, serving his twelfth year on the Tucson council, loves the system: “We get a cross-section of the population [because] each ward is represented through the primary,” while at the same time preventing the “total parochialism” he sees on straight district systems such as the Pima County Board of Supervisors or the City of Phoenix.
But not everybody thinks Tucson has such a hot thing going. In fact, its new mayor would like to see a change. He’d like to copy Phoenix.
First-term Democratic Mayor Tom Volgy is leading the charge for a public vote on straight districts, complaining that the Tucson system “discriminates on the basis of access to money. In a district type of system, you or I, if we work hard enough, with a couple of thousand dollars and 30 or 40 or 50 people, can win a district election. In a citywide race, when you have to deal with 400,000 potential people, you need a lot of money to compete.”
Those were precisely the arguments used to convince Phoenix voters–and overcome the unanimous opposition of the city’s “establishment”–to change to districts.
Volgy thinks Tucson voters are ready to follow suit.
“In Tucson, the central issue is not developer influence,” Volgy explains. “Here the issue is money. If you talk to a cross-section of people, they indicate they think there is too much money going into politics.” He thinks the less expensive district races would appeal to Tucson voters.
There’s also the possibility that voters won’t have to make the change–it may be done for them by the U.S. Department of Justice. Volgy says the feds forced one Texas city to forego its Tucson-style system for a straight district system because Hispanics–despite having 27 percent of the population–couldn’t seem to survive the citywide general election.
Volgy says Tucson has escaped that fate so far because of what he calls an “accident of history” that has given the city a high proportion of minority representation. (There are two Hispanics and one black on Tucson’s council; Phoenix has one Hispanic and one black on its council.) “If that changes we’d probably be sued immediately by the Justice Department and would have to change the charter,” Volgy says.
The possibility is not as crazy as it sounds.
Earlier this decade the City of Douglas amended its charter, switching from a straight district system to the style used in Tucson. City Clerk Victor Stevens says the Justice Department came in and vetoed the change, arguing it could dilute minority voting strength. So Douglas councilmembers still are nominated and elected by districts.
Tucson Mayor Tom Volgy complains that the Tucson system “discriminates on the basis of access to money.”
