Should special districts, such as the Arvada Fire Protection District and the Apex (formerly North Jefferson County) Park and Recreation District be required to have the county conduct their elections on regular election dates?
The Arvada Fire Protection District serves about 120,000 people, while the Apex District offers its facilities and programs to about 100,000. Both districts do great work, but the way they conduct elections isn't working.
Consider what happened last Tuesday, May 6. Both districts conducted what are usually referred to as "firehouse" elections, making their ballots available at the Apex Center for voters to cast for board members and a term limits issue.
Does it bother anybody else that only 1,930 voted in the Fire District elections? That's about 1.6 percent of the district's residents. Worse, the top vote getter received only 0.6 percent of the district's residents.
Only 726 people voted in Apex's election.That's about three-quarters of one percent of the Apex district population of 100,000. Just 0.44 percent of the district's population decided three terms would be better than two when it comes to limiting service on the board. And best performance for the board represents 0.23 percent.
The answer to this dismal turnout for special district elections is to put them on the same ballots with state, county , and city elections. Sure, it will mean that running for these special district offices will cost more and require more professional services.
Those, however, are the prices of our representative democracy. Arvada Fire and Apex Recreation are too important to be left to few. Both of these districts are too big and too important not to conduct elections on the ballots with all the other big, important stuff.
Here are the results of last Tuesday's tiny elections as provided by the two districts.
Arvada Fire (Top 2 Elected)
Ted Terranova 719
James Snyder 616
Mark Domenico 595
Apex Recreation (Top 2 Elected)
Lee Humrich 236
Jeff Glenn 193
Jack Monroe 159
Michael Chadwick 92
Vincent Davis 82
Apex Ballot Question: To limit terms to three, up from two.
Yes 290
No 150