Excellent! Nice work, neighbors.
It is good to see that even though all of the “right” people in town supported this referendum, the people still saw through the malarkey. Now we look to the School Board for actual leadership within the means of the district’s taxpayers. The fact that they are bragging about not having a Plan B speaks to their poor management of the district to date. Let’s hope that now that there isn’t a bailout on the horizon, they get serious about their jobs.
On another note, here are the results of the West Bend School Board.
What is interesting about this is that there is a significant undervote. Remember that voters were voting for two board members. Even though over 14 thousand people voted on the referendum question, the highest vote count for school board was less than 7 thousand. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people voted because people could have just voted for one candidate. But it’s likely that most people voted for two candidates as instructed, which means there was a very large undervote in this race.
Why? All three candidates ran supporting the referendum, which failed by a large margin. Without an anti-referendum choice of candidates, I’m sure that many people didn’t bother to cast a vote or wrote in (there’s an unusually large number of write-ins too). I’m one of those. I didn’t vote in this race because it didn’t matter.
I hope that the two candidates who were elected are humble enough to recognize that they would have lost had there been an anti-referendum candidate on the ballot. And shame on the conservatives in the district for the fact that there wasn’t an actual fiscal conservative on the ballot.
In a different forum, someone pointed this out as a vote of no confidence in the current leadership. I second that motion. May take a few election cycles and stability in administrative positions before confidence is restored.
We had some fiscal conservatives on past boards, at which time the Badger & Silverbrook/Green Tree referendums were successfully passed.
They’re far more likely to pursue a strategy of bolstering their wants/needs position by intentional fiscal mismanagement with the aim of inflicting varying degrees of pain on the voters who refused to authorize their spending spree. Mis-prioritizing spending and warning of severe cuts to student extracurricular activities is one of their favorites. So is instituting all manner of student fees. You uppity deplorables will be made to pay for your intransigence one way or another.