By Armchair Mayor

Running twice, running in place and not running at all

Sep 22, 2018 | 7:47 AM

SOME CIVIC ELECTION odds and ends to catch up on this week.

I’ve recently written about a couple of quirks of our civic election system. One is that people are allowed to run for more than one office at the same time; the other is that candidates don’t have to live where they run.

Donovan Cavers’ decision to run both for City council and for the Kamloops school board was the subject of much coffee-shop talk during the week. At the least, he’s gotten himself a lot of media coverage and virtually doubles his name exposure.

While he suggested early in the week he might withdraw from one of the elections by Friday’s 4 p.m. deadline, that deadline came and went and Cavers stayed in, saying his supporters back his decision. So his name will be on two ballots, the first time in history a Kamloops City councillor has run for a school board seat in the same election.

And, of course, as previously mentioned, Clearwater councillor Shelley Sims is also a double filer, and is already in by acclamation for a school board seat representing the North Thompson.

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Turns out there’s another candidate in our general neck of the woods who filed papers for two different positions. As I was scanning through the rosters of candidates in various communities this week I was interested to see the name of Ross Tapping on the list of candidates for Clinton councillor.

Tapping, a Clinton resident whose bio says he’s worked as a ranch hand, realtor and business owner, is also in the running for the job of regional district director in Electoral Area E (Bonaparte Plateau) of the TNRD.

If elected to both jobs, Tapping wouldn’t be able to sit on the regional board as a municipal representative but it would, in effect, give Clinton two directors. (Regional district boards include both electoral area directors from rural areas and urban areas appointed by municipal councils.)

His situation is a little different than running for both school trustee and City councillor because municipal/ regional boundaries overlap. Tapping, though, doesn’t live in Area E.

Which brings us to the issue of living where you run. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not uncommon for candidates at all levels to parachute into jurisdictions in which they don’t live. That includes municipal politics.

There are two candidates in the Kamloops election with home addresses outside City limits. Carolyn King lives on Durango Drive, which is in Del Oro east of town, and Sadie Hunter’s address is on Ironwood Crescent in Sun Rivers.

The logic of allowing people to run in places they don’t live is that some communities are simply too small to guarantee there will always be resident candidates, but it doesn’t make as much sense in bigger cities.

An argument can be made, of course, that if you work in a certain city even though you don’t live there, it shouldn’t matter. The solution, though, would be to let non-residents run in very small places but set a population maximum after which it’s not allowed.

The roster of candidates this year is one of the more interesting ones I recall. There’s the Cavers situation but we also have former school trustee/City councillor John O’Fee running for school board again. As I remember, John first entered local politics back in the early 1980s on school board.

I heard him say this week he chose school board to re-enter civic politics because it takes less time than council and therefore he can fit it in around his job in the law faculty at TRU. No doubt that was the case a long time ago but I wonder if school trustees would challenge the assumption now that their job is less time-consuming.

The most bizarre civic-election story of the week goes hands down to Kevin Krueger. Kevin decided some months ago he was definitely going to run for a council seat again and was planning to file his papers on the last day of the nomination period, Sept. 14.

As he explained it in a Facebook post, God had other plans.

He took what sounds like a terrible fall in his yard, suffering a concussion and being taken to the RIH emergency department. So he didn’t file, but doesn’t rule out running four years from now.

I got some interesting reactions to my mention of him in an editorial this week, not all positive. Some people feel Kevin would be a disruptor on council, and that’s likely true. The question is whether that would have been a bad thing.

Elsewhere on the hustings, there are a lot of mayors retiring this year. Among them, Jack Jeyes of Ashcroft, Virginia Smith of Barriere, Jim Rivett of Clinton, John Harwood of Clearwater, Jessoa Lightfoot of Lytton and Akbal Mund of Vernon. In other parts of the province, the mayors of West Kelowna, Nanaimo, Ucluelet and half the mayors in the Lower Mainland are bowing out.

Must be a tough job.

And, finally, best question to candidates so far comes from KamloopsMatters.com, which asks, “The next time you walk in the woods and you come face to face with a Sasquatch, what do you do?”

It’s also the easiest one to answer. You grab a selfie and then slowly, very slowly, back away.