Hi, This is Richard Selwach,
Candidate for Gainesville City Comm
At Large 1. My website is www.voteselwach.com
My priorities if elected are
To stop the biomass plant, clean city/safe city, government in the sunshine and fiscal responsibility…please visit my website for more info or to contact me.
Qualifying ended last Friday, and now the City Commission races are set for January 31. In the District 1 contest Ray Washington got in at the last minute. He joins Armando Grundy and Yvonne Hinson-Rawls in what could end up in a runoff. I look forward to all three candidates posting here and telling us why District 1 voters should pick him or her.
The At-large race saw Harold Save get out and serial candidate Richard Selwach and newcomer Mark Venzke get in. This is Selwach’s 6th attempt at a city seat. The rest are: Dejeon Cain, James Ingle, Donna Lutz, Darlene Pifalo, Lauren Poe and Nathan Skop.
Right now I am sending out the invitations to each one of these candidates to log in and tell us about themselves. Last January, this site saw 16,000 visits and over 37,000 pageviews. We hope they are willing to avail themselves of so great an audience!
Six months out from the next Gainesville City Commission election, and we already have four candidates for the at-large race. And they have all filed in the past week or so. There are also two names filed for the District 1 contest.
In District 1 we have Yvonne Hinson-Rawls, a sub-committee chair on the Alachua County Democrat Executive Committee, versus Armando Grundy, who most recently served on the county’s Charter Review Commission. This District represents East Gainesville and has been most recently served by Chuck Chestnut, followed by Sherwin Henry. Both men ran unopposed for their second term, and were then term-limited out of office.
In the at-large race, which represents the entire City of Gainesville, we have Darlene Pifalo, a Realtor with a history of serving on state and local boards to promote affordable housing; Donna Lutz, another Realtor I know little about; James Ingle, recent candidate for the District 2 seat on the commission who had union support; and Lauren Poe, who just got voted off the City Commission by Todd Chase.
Gainesville City Commission races are notoriously sleepy affairs with very, very low voter turnout. There will be the predictable but meaningless bellyaching about how these elections should be held in November instead of March, BUT THIS IS JUST HOW IT IS! It is so easy to vote now, we have no excuse.
That said, unless there is an epic revival of citizenship, Hinson-Rawls will defeat Grundy. She is the approved Democrat being run by the machine. Although Grundy is also a Democrat, he has been a Republican and is a bit of a maverick.
The at-large race will be a Pifalo-Poe runoff. Poe is the machine Democrat, Ingle is a populist Democrat, and populists are not reliable voters. That’s why there is no “populist machine”. Lutz will finish last. She is a first timer who will be needing support from Pifalo’s base, and that will not be happening. Poe lost in District 2, but did so respectably. If he keeps it close in that, the most conservative, district, he will take 1, 3 and 4 handily. That will make him the overall winner in April.
All of this could change if you, the voters, start connecting the dots between the people you elect and your cost of living and your lack of opportunity.
I am excited to post that I am running for Alachua County Commission seat 3 which Paula Delaney currently occupies. This is so important to me that I filed in February but laid low while we tried to get Rob Zeller and Todd Chase elected to the Gainesville City Commission.
I will say that I am not your typical hand picked Alachua County Politician in that I am not part of the local political elite. I am just a regular guy that is willing to step up to redirect our Countys vision and bring fiscal responsibility and common sense principles into our government. I believe that not ever having held a political office is my advantage. I can more relate to the 95% of our citizens that live throughout the county that find it more and more challanging to make ends meet.
I will make Roads and Public Safety the first items addressed with each budget.
I will work with businesses in our county to identify and eliminate those regulations which make it difficult to open new businesses or that keep new businesses out. We need to recognize that Business growth is essential to all aspects of our lives as taxpayers and consumers and is the lifeblood of our communities.
I would also represent all the munincipalities equally in our county and recognize that any money spent belongs to the entire county and not just a small core group.
I am a registered Republican and am on the Alachua County Executive Committee. I am also a member of our local Tea Party which is made up of a very good cross section of all political parties in the county that are concerned with the current direction of the BOCC.
As I know that the BOCC should not make any decisions without the input of our citizens I would welcome your input and ideas on how to make our quality of life truly better by being more efficient with taxpayers money. As individuals we have had to learn to live within our means and our representative government should reflect the same idea. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I would appreciate the support as I move foward with my campaign. For more info you can contact me at 352-356-VOTE or through my website www.voteforwalt.com
Newcomer Todd Chase took out incumbent Lauren Poe with almost 55% of the vote in the race for the District 2 seat on the Gainesville City Commission.
The voter turnout for this spring election was a paltry 21.9% in this district that is made up of mostly homeowners.
In District 3, Susan Bottcher won the battle of the newcomers with over 57% of the vote.
The turnout in this District was an abysmal 11.5% and it is mostly populated with students and university staff.
The Alachua County Republicans made an ad with parts of a Susan Bottcher campaign speech, put it on YouTube, and drew fire from the Bottcher Campaign. We had this video embedded on this site, and you can see as of this time it is taken down due to a copyright complaint.
Every candidate knows that whatever they say in public is up for grabs, and is likely to end up as an opposition ad if it serves their opponents’ purpose. The Bottcher campaign still prevailed upon YouTube to take the Republican ad down. But the ad is still available on the Alachua Republican web site at this location.
The Alachua Republicans have responded to this take down with this statement:
“As soon as we put out our “Bottcher Is Wrong” web ad, it was apparent from the phone calls and emails that we received that we had upset some Democrats. Apparently, being held accountable for her own words bothered her so much that she had a campaign operative file a BOGUS copyright complaint against us with YouTube.
“We made sure that we met all four criteria for “Fair Use” as described by the U.S. Copyright office, and we are confident that the video will be restored by YouTube. Still, that process can take several days, so, in the meantime, we installed our own video payer on our website.”
It was a pretty quick candidate forum at the Alachua County Health Department tonight as the African American Accountability Alliance only had the two District 3 candidates to examine. Susan Bottcher and Rob Zeller fielded some fairly routine and unrevealing questions before the local political organization gave the nod to Bottcher by a 9-2 margin. The organization does not make the final tally public, but I saw the sheet and the final vote total.
The forum was poorly attended, and a lot less interesting than those in the past, which used to have some fairly hot exchanges between opponents. The candidates were asked few questions, and some of them were irrelevant to the job of a city commissioner. The contrast was between Bottcher, a long time volunteer in civic organizations who has never run a business or made a payroll who brags that she will be the commissions “only full time commissioner”, and Zeller, a business owner with 140 employees and three young children.
Bottcher has been endorsed by Mayor Craig Lowe, which makes her the status quo candidate. The 4As have endorsed the incumbents as well. It makes me wonder just who they think they are holding accountable. High utility rates that hit poor East Gainesville citizens hardest, years of empty promises of growth, and a new fire services fee on struggling churches cry out for a message to be sent. But instead they gave the same old rubber stamp to the choice of the Democrat machine.
Tuesday night there will be another candidate forum, hosted by the Leadership Gainesville Alumni Association. It is scheduled to begin at 7pm and will be held at Santa Fe College in Building E Auditorium.
This race is over and has been won by Thomas Hawkins.
This race will be a runoff between Chase and Poe on April 12.
This race will be a runoff between Bottcher and Zeller on April 12.
Here’s a clip from the Chamber of Commerce/Builder’s Association forum. It’s 11:46 long, and it gives you a bit of one of the tamer forums.
Recently, two of the underfunded candidates in the District 2 and 3 races have released some campaign videos on YouTube. The first was a campaign song, now known as “The Ingle Jingle”, that first appeared in the Gainesville Sun’s City Limits blog. It’s a folksy, populist ballad sung over a slide show of photos of District 2 candidate James Ingle.
The second is another slide show of Ozzy Angulo photos in action as a local activist. Angulo is a candidate for the District 3 seat. His video does not have a theme song, but uses canned background music.
