In Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, no good deed goes unpunished. Politicians in that city just gave their initial stamp of approval to a ballot measure to gut the same term limits they all used to climb into office.
Back in 2014, Gardens residents – sick and tired of local corruption – collected signatures to place on their ballot a measure to term limit council members to two consecutive three-year terms.
In November of that year, the term limits passed with nearly 80 percent of the vote, with over 16,000 citizens coming out to support it. Voters also passed a companion measure to apply the new limits retroactively to current council members, some of whom had been in office for decades.
Within a two-year period, term limits flushed out every single member of the council, creating opportunities for newcomers to serve. If not for term limits, these fresh-faced outsiders wouldn’t have had a chance against the ossified incumbents.
Underscoring this point, current Councilman Carl Woods LOST his election in 2016 to a powerful incumbent who sneaked onto the ballot by refusing to accept term limits. Only after a Judge dumped that incumbent, David Levy, out of office was Woods finally seated. Woods even campaigned on term limits.
Does there exist a finer example than Woods’ win to showcase how term limits shatter the barriers of incumbency?
Woods apparently thinks so. At Thursday’s council meeting, he voted as part of a 5-0 majority to give himself and fellow councilors a longer term limit than the President of the United States. That’s right: Woods bit the hand that fed him his job. So did his colleagues.
Citizens of Palm Beach Gardens have never asked for longer term limits. They passed six-year limits only three years ago, and even flooded the council chambers on Thursday night to reiterate that position.
Unfortunately, the fix was in. council members Maria Marino, Mark Marciano, Carl Woods, Matthew Jay Lane and Rachelle Litt all voted to shred their constituents’ opinions by sticking a question on the March 2018 ballot to demolish term limits.
The council, except for Marciano, wanted the scam on the March ballot rather than a November general ballot to guarantee turnout levels far below the 20,000 people who voted on the initial term limits question. March elections typically feature a small universe of voters, many of whom have cozy ties with the council.
U.S. Term Limits President Philip Blumel and I attended the meeting to testify against this mischief. In all our years of working on term limits – across hundreds of cities, counties and states combined – these Palm Beach Gardens politicians showed us two things we hadn’t seen with such intensity before:
- Boundless contempt for term limits and voters, by trying to overturn the law a mere three years after its initial passage.
- A state of denial over the fact that all five council members would not be in office but for term limits.
All five council members climbed up a term limits ladder but are now trying to knock that ladder away so no one can use it to replace them. It’s no wonder Thomas Jefferson – a term limits advocate – said “whenever a man casts a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.”
Thankfully, there is still time to stop this rogue council and defend the people’s term limits in Palm Beach Gardens. The council won’t take its final vote on sending the anti-term limit scam to the ballot until 11/2.
Until then, we must melt their telephone wires and email inboxes with a simple message: “If you vote to gut the people’s term limits, we won’t return you to our city council.”