Primary Election in Richfield Scheduled

1/6/2017

Richfield Village Board met at 1:00 pm today and voted to hold a primary election for Richfield Village Trustees on Feb 21, 2017. Discussion noted that had the board not met before 5 pm tonight there would automatically not be a primary.

This is a new wrinkle in the WI State Law that allows Cities, Villages and Towns to not hold a primary if there is no state wide primary thereby saving tax payer dollars.

The agenda included Public Comments and Jeff Gonyo spoke and his comments will not be included in this post. Danah Zoulek questioned if it was a conflict of interest for Rock Brandner to participate as he is a candidate for the Spring election.

So what does a town do to meet state requirements when they have a 3 person town board? Violate state law? So what does a town do? Increase their board to 7 or more? Some might say Richfield needs to increase the number of officials on the Richfield Village Board to 7 or 9. HOGWASH.

One would hope the WI State Legislature considered that candidates in an upcoming election might be current serving officials. Therefore the law should permit current sitting officials to conduct official business in this situation, as it is their job to follow statutes set by the state..

This idea of conflct of interest, valid or not by Danah Zoulek, needs to be reviewed by the WI State Legislature.

List of candidates and order on the ballot wil be forth coming.

7 Comments

marie

1/6/2017 06:14:35 pm

Here we go again. Danah just does not get it

Danah

1/6/2017 07:28:52 pm

We are a Village, not a Town.

Danah

1/7/2017 07:34:44 am

It's not a violation of state law to allow all 5 candidates to appear on the ballot in the Spring Election. If the Village Board could not come up with a quorum (3 board members) to vote on whether or not to have a primary, then the statute is clear that there wouldn't be a primary.

Rather than vote on an issue you may have a conflict of interest with, it would make more sense to let the voters choose from the 5 candidates in April.

Marie

1/8/2017 04:54:20 pm

Why??

Danah

1/9/2017 04:21:18 pm

Marie,

By default, according to the statutes, there would be no primary unless the Village Board elects to have a primary. See Richfield Today's most recent post on the issue, the State Elections Commission verified that.

My point is simply that the voters will choose a candidate regardless of a primary or not. Whether or not we have a primary is not a deal breaker. I'm not opposed to a primary. I just thought it was odd that there was a last minute rush for the board to have a quorum to vote on having a primary when the consequence of not having the meeting would result in no primary, and there would be 5 candidates on the April 5th ballot rather than 4 candidates.

The question of Brandner's conflict of interest became an issue, that I thought would be worth questioning, when I saw that Collins was absent and Brandner would be voting to hold an election he would be a candidate for. I didn't feel it to be a big conspiracy, I just thought it looked out of place.

Marie

1/9/2017 07:14:09 am

There is no conflict of interest here. Understand what IS a conflct of interest. Nice try.

Marie

1/11/2017 08:24:45 am

A conflict would be if anyone would benefit from it. No one benefits. A candidate still needs to WIN the primary to go on. Local control is in favor of a primary. No right no wrong just fair to all

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Primary Election in Richfield Scheduled

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