Sarah Spansail for Medford City Council

 Vote Sarah Spansail. 

A Medford Ward One voter needs to be strategic. 

First things first: Sarah Spansail is intelligent, reasonable, qualified, and interested in being your Ward One Medford City Council person. Sometimes kooks or unqualified people run for local offices (more about that in a minute), and it is hard for voters to tell the wheat from the chaff in local elections where the information about candidates is scarce. 

Spansail is "wheat." She is a good one. 

She has been involved in a variety of committees and civic organizations, she has a particular interest in housing and homelessness (issues of special interest in Medford), and she has the interest and capacity to do this volunteer job. She has a website where you can learn more about her, and I urge you to visit it. www.votespansail.com

The fact that she has a website up and running tells readers that she is taking this very seriously. She has enough respect for her future constituents to provide a fleshed out introduction of herself, with photos, her positions on local and national issues, and list of endorsements. 

There is a reason to be strategic here. This is a three-person race. Sarah is young, female, and liberal in orientation. These seats are nonpartisan, and my experience in local government is that the issues that come in front of City Councils are, in fact, local and not aligned with national and state partisan issues. But she has that perspective. She is a wife and mother of young children. She represents a generation that is generally underrepresented on civic boards. 

Yikes, again. One of her opponents is Curt Ankerberg, so we have the familiar and tiresome "Curt Ankerberg problem." 

Curt is the guy who runs and is defeated time after time for local office. He was trained as an accountant but got in trouble with his regulatory board. Curt earned the name Curt Angry-Bird, for his wild, nasty, threatening comments on social media and in letters to others.

Curt writes this blog signed comments, anonymous comments, and comments he attributes to other people that reflect whatever mental health issues seem to consume him now. His comments for publication are vulgar, sex-oriented accusations of the themes of sex with children, male sexual impotence, homosexual sex, and adultery. Some comments imagine with pleasure the suicides of others. Some are accusations of misuse of money. Some make trouble by trying to pass off his own comments by attributing other people's names to them. His writing style is easy to identify. Readers of this blog sometimes see them up, briefly, before I remove them.

This is a three person race. The third candidate, Jeff Thomas, recently switched his Party to Republican, I suspect so he would have better credibility with politically conservative people in Ward One. Otherwise people looking for a conservative mindset might make the disastrous choice of voting for Ankerberg, who combines his Republicanism with a toxic personality. Good for Jeff for switching parties.

However, we saw with the Republican primary contest between the very strong candidate, Jessica Gomez, and the angry vulgar Ankerberg, that Republican voters were reluctant to support a newly-hatched Republican. She barely beat him.The same thing might happen here. Jeff Thomas will get some votes, but Ankerberg might actually get a plurality. Ankerberg is famous, after all, even if he is famous for his misbehaviors and obsessions, not for anything good.

What to do? Concentrate votes on a single, electable candidate, Sarah Spansail. If there is a split between the two candidates who are reasonable in orientation and whose profiles might look generally similar, and if Republican reluctance to vote for a new Republican holds true, then, possibly, Curt Ankerberg will get some combination of the accidental vote and the kook vote of people who actually want to throw City government into chaos. A split up vote might elect Ankerberg.

Sarah would represent Ward One well.

But whatever you do, don't confuse Curt Ankerberg for anyone else or vote for him. There is enough hate and crazy in the world without electing some of it into local government.