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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Candidates for Central Arizona Water Conservation District


*UPDATE* Vote for Heather Macre and Terry Goddard only.

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As promised, here are the results of my evaluation of the candidates for CAP Board / Central Arizona Water Conservation District.

These are obviously going to be biased, but to avoid injecting my bias too quickly, I built a formula with four components. I did a lot of guesswork to fill them in, but hoped my mistakes would average out well enough.

  1. Subject Matter Expertise - This is, after all, supposedly a non-partisan position, so we want some people who understand the water and infrastructure issues the board deals with.
  2. Intellect and Competence - This gives points for intellect as well as knowledge and experience in ancillary areas such as law, finance, energy, politics, etc.
  3. Alignment - This gives points based on how well the candidate will represent my personal interests as a consumer and water user, and as a citizen concerned about good government, justice, etc. This scale varied less than others except that over-emphasis on agriculture and mining interests lost a point or two and delusional ideological obsessions lost a lot of points.
  4. Sustainability - This score measures my own delusional ideological obsession with maintaining long term stability of ecosystems as well as human civilization and protecting and conserving natural resources for future generations.



Goddard and Macre obviously get two of my five possible votes, with scores that win pretty much across the board. What a coincidence that they are the only two Democrats ;)

If I were just to vote for the five best, I might read more closely to refine the scores, but Guy Carpenter and Robin Bain stand out. Though conservative Republicans, both appear to be strong subject matter experts, so their constructive contributions could make up for some of the negatives they bring to the table. Some people think this is a position where expertise counts.

Just as important, however, there are four candidates who need to be defeated. Brickman, McGrath, Mecum, and Thom are unqualified and unacceptable!

Now, the problem is to determine how to vote strategically to meet the two goals of

  1. Electing Macre and Goddard and
  2. Stopping the wingnuts from sabotaging our water management system

I am currently leaning towards just voting for my two to increase their chances in this Republican-dominated region and just crossing my fingers in hope that enough Republicans are sane enough to pick their qualified folks instead of their batshit crazy ideologues who have no idea what this office is about....