ROTHENBURGER – Newcomers have the power over City council incumbents

FIRST OF ALL, the important part — I correctly called seven out of the nine winners for Kamloops City council. Other than that, what else of significance occurred last night?

Well, a certain amount of justice was meted out. Some people who deserved to lose, lost. On the other hand, a couple of people who deserved to lose, won.

But there’s reason to be optimistic about this new council. It will certainly be much less “chaotic,” to use the favourite word associated with the outgoing council. There’s some real talent among the newcomers — Christopher Mitra, for example, and Randy Sunderman. It was about time the community put Sunderman and Jesse Ritcey on council.

Rob Bertrand, who topped the councillor polls, clearly appealed to voters with his likeable Joe Lunchbucket personality. He has the potential to bring a true common sense look to the job. Hometown boy Steve Bucher’s enthusiastic plain talk should fit well with Bertrand.

Newbies now have the power on council. They have the votes to outweigh incumbents Katie Neustaeter, Kelly Hall and Margot Middleton, and O’Reilly, on issues such as transparency, Stuart Wood, the Alternative Approval Process, and even spending.

The rudeness of Neustaeter and Hall will have nowhere to go in council chambers with Reid Hamer-Jackson out of the chair, and their cohort Mike O’Reilly taking over. Speaking of O’Reilly, he was probably the most ardent supporter on council for the use of AAP, misreading both the purpose of AAPs and the public’s unhappiness with them. If anything changes in that regard, it will be up to the rookies.

Kamloopsians shouldn’t expect anything significant to happen with high taxes under O’Reilly. His claims during the campaign that Sun Rivers and the New Afton Mine can be brought into the City’s taxation fold, and that this would reduce taxes, were frankly bogus.

But his proposal to set up a “campus of care” and emergency shelter at Mission Flats holds promise. It has similarities to a plan floated four years ago by Hamer-Jackson and then-councillor Denis Walsh, but better late than never.

I’m also hopeful that O’Reilly will support bringing transparency back to City Hall. Put public inquiries back on the agendas for council meetings. Open up comments again on the website. Relax those really bad rules about public attendance in council chambers. Again, the newcomers hold the power in that regard.

SEE ALSO: ‘Hamer-Jackson ponders future from hospital bed’

O’Reilly will be a pro-development mayor. It’s in his genes and in his experience. He’s establishment all the way — that was evident in his high-profile backers. He’ll get along with business, and he’ll get along with City Hall staff.

All in all, it’s a bit of a mixed bag but the next four years hold positive possibilities. If O’Reilly will only buy himself a new sports jacket, and lose the upspeak, he can look like, as well as be, a good leader.

As to why Hamer-Jackson lost, and what went wrong with his term and his approach to this election, it deserves a more detailed review than we have space for here, but I’ll get into it when things settle down a bit. After all, the man is still the mayor for the next couple of weeks.

Nelly Dever’s second-place finish behind O’Reilly surprises some, who thought she might be seen as an alternative both to RHJ and to O’Reilly’s incumbency baggage. Maybe the Pivot Kamloops slate was a bad idea — Sunderman is the only member of it who was successful. And maybe she didn’t have enough time to catch up to O’Reilly’s eight-month head start.

It’s not becoming of anyone to gloat but the drubbing handed out to Bill Sarai and Dale Bass isn’t anything to be disappointed about. Sarai’s Tapegate escapade should have disqualified him anyway. The acerbic Bass has been, well, annoying and tiresome over the course of this waning term.

Karpuk may have been sunk by his bungling of the fart joke attack on the mayor but who knows? Bepple is a little harder to figure out — for some reason she hasn’t been popular with a lot of people, who seem to remember her unending “Points of order.”

For those who value experience in their council members, there’s enough left on this new one to create a reasonable balance between the old and the new. It’s easy to bemoan the outcome for any particular candidate, but if anyone expected perfection they were destined to be disappointed.

Instead, let’s look ahead rather than behind, and approach the next four years with optimism.

ELECTION NIGHT TRIVIA: The City did a good job getting the votes counted and posted last night even though the first results were slow coming in. There have been a few past election nights when the counting has lasted for hours, so getting everything wrapped up roughly a half hour after polls closed was good work…. The one disappointment in how the tallies were handled was the fact they weren’t made available on a poll-by-poll basis, so we don’t know the vote counts in each station. There are big differences in the number of people voting in each polling station and it’s usually very interesting to track which ones are reporting, and when. Last night, we didn’t have that…. CFJC’s coverage was sluggish. News director James Peters and his two-person panel were reporting updates several minutes after everyone was seeing them on the City’s website…. School board candidate Cole Hickson deserves some kudos for bringing energy into the campaign with his Batman costume humour and his plain hard work…. Remember Brady Rogers, the Kelowna council candidate who amused commuters with his campaign sign slogans such as “Fine, I’ll do it” and “I barely want to do this,” and “How hard can it be?” He won a spot on the council, finishing fourth with 12,635 votes…. A lot of incumbent mayors lost their jobs around B.C. last night. Among them was John Ranta, who’s been the mayor of Cache Creek forever. He ran a surprising third behind winner Wendy Coomber and second-place finisher Annette Pittman. Another is Merlin Blackwell, who lost a squeaker to perennial run-for-everything Shelley Sim, 492 votes to 510…. It seems newspaper editors do well in Ashcroft-Cache Creek. Barbara Roden, editor of the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal, was elected mayor of Ashcroft for a third term. And Wendy Coomber, now the mayor of Cache Creek, is a former editor of that same paper…. A couple of unsuccessful candidates will still have politicians at the supper table. Stephen Karpuk’s wife Kathleen won re-election to the Kamloops school board, finishing in the fifth and last available city spot. And John Ranta’s wife Carmen made it on to council…. It rarely happens but one mayoral election ended in a tie. Incumbent Denise O’Connor and challenger Jennifer Thoss both got 45 votes in Lytton. How the tie will be broken isn’t known at this writing, but it’s usually done through a highly scientific means — a coin toss or drawing of straws.