news story / By Hank Sims

Thrilla in Manila

Bizarre elections snafu has them roasting on the Spit

(July 23, 2009)  Here are the facts of the matter, as best as they can be ascertained.

Michael Fennell, a member of the board of directors of the Manila Community Services District (MCSD), was elected to a two-year term of office in 2007. However, his seat will not be up for election again this November. Instead, following decisions by the MCSD and the county elections department, he will be allowed to serve until 2011 if he so wishes.

Wouldn’t you vote this job? Phot by Hank Sims

GALLERY >

Strange stuff, and of questionable legality, but whether it’s the work of a shadowy conspiracy or just a massive cockup depends a lot on where you happen to stand in the quarrelsome world of Manila politics.

“My feeling is that somebody wanted to keep [the current] quorum,” says Dendra Dengler, a former member of the district’s board of directors. “I don’t know who … but someone.”

With means, motive and perpetrators still unknown, though, a very reasonable case could still be made that the current strange state of affairs — an official elected for two years unilaterally given another two years, without the approval of voters — was purely the result of confusion and a failure of communication between MCSD management and the county elections department reaching back at least to the 2007 election.

There were four seats on the district’s board of directors on the November 2007 ballot. Because of resignations, two of the seats listed were for two-year terms. The other two were for four-year terms. The county elections department had earlier sent a preliminary draft of this ballot to Mark Dubrow, then the district’s interim general manager, and Dubrow gave it the OK. In contested elections, Michael Fennell and Shelley Lima were elected to the two-year seats and Joy Dellas and Dan Ihara were elected to the four-year seats. The four winners had run together in a slate campaign.

A year after the election, though, the district realized that the ballot had been in error: In fact, there should have been three four-year seats up for election and only one two-year seat. On Aug. 29, 2008, MCSD Administrative Assistant Norma McClary wrote to the elections department seeking guidance on the matter. Several e-mails were sent back and forth between the county and the MCSD over the space of several months. The working assumption, throughout, seemed to be that the seats now held by Fennell and Lima would both go up for election in November 2009, at which point they would be established as full, four-year terms.

But on June 18, 2009 — just a couple of weeks before the deadline to finalize the coming ballot — the elections department wrote back saying that this solution would be unacceptable, due to the fact that the “term cycles” had to be maintained, despite the error on the 2007 ballot. Therefore, the elections department said, one of the two seats erroneously listed as a two-year seat — and certified as such by the county elections department and the state of California — would have to be extended to four years.

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