Three members of the Port Alden City Council have now held their seats for more than twenty years. Between them, Councilmembers Odom, Marchetti, and Krantz account for sixty-eight years of continuous service on a seven-member body. We think it's worth asking what that number is actually telling us, because we don't think it's telling us what it looks like at first glance.
The easy read is stability. Voters keep choosing the same people because those people are doing a good job, or at least a job good enough that no one has bothered to run against them. We'd like to believe that. But look at the last four election cycles in these three wards, and a different story shows up: in six of the last eight races across those seats, the incumbent ran unopposed.
That is not the electorate rewarding good governance. That is an absence of choice being mistaken for a mandate.
Why the bench stays empty
We don't think Odom, Marchetti, or Krantz are doing a bad job, and this isn't an argument against any of them individually. It's an argument about incentives. When a council seat is effectively a lifetime appointment, the people who might otherwise run, a small-business owner with strong opinions on the harbor fee, a parent frustrated with the school board's relationship to the council, a retired teacher who has sat through a decade of budget hearings, calculate correctly that the seat isn't really open. So they don't run. And the incumbent's twenty-year tenure gets read as popularity rather than as the absence of anyone else on the ballot.
A twelve-year cap, or two four-year terms plus one, would not remove good councilmembers from office. It would guarantee that every seat in this town becomes genuinely contestable at least once a decade, whether or not the incumbent chooses to step aside. That is not a punishment for long service. It is a floor under democratic competition that this town currently does not have.
The council will not vote to limit its own members' terms, which is exactly why this is a question for a ballot referendum rather than a council resolution. We'd support putting it in front of voters next fall.
