Traverse City Record-Eagle

Election 2007

November 4, 2007

Will it be 'in with the new' for TC?

Voters to choose commission seats, mayor Tuesday

Vanessa McCray and Melissa Domsic

TRAVERSE CITY -- Tuesday's city mayoral and commission races pretty much boil down to this: incumbents versus challengers.

And which way voters lean likely will be influenced by both the future and the past, particularly on issues ranging from publicly funded parking decks, taxes, funding strategies for street repairs, and rules that govern neighborhood areas.

An October EPIC-MRA poll commissioned by the Traverse City Record-Eagle suggested residents are split over whether the city's on the right course. The poll showed 40 percent of respondents agree with the city's direction, 40 percent don't like the way things are headed and 20 percent were undecided.

The poll placed mayoral challenger Michael Estes in a slight lead over incumbent Linda Smyka for a two-year term. Incumbents Ralph Soffredine and Scott Hardy and challenger Jim Carruthers earned the most support among poll respondents for three open commission seats. Challenger Barbara Budros came in a close fourth and challenger Scott Sieffert lagged in that race, according to polling figures.

City resident Lorraine Schueller is considering voting for Estes, Carruthers and Hardy.

Schueller has a list of concerns the next commission should address, including enforcing speed limits in Central Neighborhood, cleaning up after dogs and overnight parking.

The election highlights divisions on the commission. Lining up for the incumbents are commissioners Matthew Schmidt, Jody Bergman and Chris Bzdok. Commissioner Deni Scrudato is pulling for Estes, Carruthers and Budros.

Bzdok is running unopposed for a partial term. He alternately sided with and against the incumbent majority on several matters since his appointment in January.

Deck talk

Pre-election discussion among voters frequently focused on the August 2006 bond referendum, when voters squashed a proposal to spend up to $16 million in public money to fund a parking deck inside a West Front Street development by Federated Properties.

The Grand Traverse County Brownfield Redevelopment Authority, however, later paved the way to use $5.49 million in state brownfield dollars to lease and eventually own the deck. City commissioners, with Bzdok and Scrudato opposed, agreed to negotiate a contract for the city to run the deck, though no deal has been signed.

Smyka, Soffredine and Hardy all backed the original bond proposal and agreed to start talks with the brownfield authority to operate it. Bzdok, who acknowledged hearing some "negative reactions" after he endorsed the incumbents, thinks they will approach a proposed Old Town public parking deck plan differently if re-elected.

"I am rationally optimistic that if we are going to move on another parking project, it is going to be under a whole different set of expectations," Bzdok said.

Carruthers actively campaigned against the West Front Street project. Estes and Budros panned the commission's handling of that proposal, and accused the commission of ignoring voters' wishes.

The Record-Eagle poll indicated 71 percent of respondents oppose the use of public funds to build parking decks. Another 38 percent of responders said they were less likely to vote for current commissioners because of the West Front project, while 44 percent said that won't influence them.

City resident Suzee Saigger plans to vote for all of the challengers, in part because she's upset with how commissioners handled the West Front Street project.

"The city is heading in the wrong direction and we need to get people in there that are willing to go along with what the people of the city want," she said.

Resident Alden Glauch voted absentee for Smyka, Hardy, Soffredine and Sieffert. He said he voted for incumbents because he's acquainted with a couple of them.

"They just seem to pay attention to business and I know how they think," he said. "I'm confident they can handle the job."

Schmidt, too, is siding with incumbents, though his term expires in November and he is not running for re-election.

"I think this election is a big deal," he said. "There's so many projects that are pivotal to the future of Traverse City. Do we retain business in the city or do we make it so difficult that they move out of town?"

The challengers are a "just-say-no group" that will grind "everything" to a halt, Schmidt said.

Carruthers called that campaign rhetoric.

"I think that's ridiculous, just because we question what they have been doing up there," he said. "We are willing to think differently or to look at a broader audience."

Learning curve?

Hardy gave Carruthers credit for his knowledge and involvement in city issues, but said the other challengers would have a lot of learning to do if elected.

"This is a very complicated time and a complicated budget," he said. "We're going to depend on people having the knowledge and the history of where we've been so we know where we're going."

Challengers would have to make services cuts to follow through with their promised tax cuts, Hardy said. He also projected changes in the business sector.

"The investment community will get very nervous if we start to deliver messages to companies like Hagerty (Insurance) that we're not interested in any sort of partnership," he said. "It's going to be a dramatic shift in attitude (and) it's going to make people very nervous."

Budros countered that the challengers are pro-business and care about their interests just as much as the incumbents. She also said the city could lower taxes and save services by reallocating resources, "instead of putting money into special funds that aren't able to be spread out throughout the city."

Nearly 1,000 voters had mailed absentee ballots by Friday. The city sent out 1,426 absentee ballots, city Clerk Debbra Curtiss said.

The number of returned ballots is already up from the 2005 general election, when the city sent out 1,053 and had 939 returned.

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