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Armando Martinez
(Note: Articles Appear in Reverse Chronological Order)
Tab 8
FLAGLERLIVE
March 3, 2013
Bunnell’s City Election Tuesday: From the Revealing to the Embarrassing
Bunnell elections are like the town itself: blink a couple of times and you might miss it. Most
Bunnell residents needn’t even blink. They either don’t know or don’t care that a municipal
election is taking place Tuesday.
Two city commission seats are up. The city of 3,000 will be lucky if 300 people turn up at the
polls—or rather, the poll, at Bunnell’s old city hall–although in that regard Bunnell’s
traditionally dismal turnout is only slightly worse than Palm Coast’s or even Flagler Beach’s of
late.
The difference with those two towns is that in Bunnell no one bothers to host candidate forums.
So issues are hardly discussed outside of commission meetings, giving incumbents an automatic
advantage since they can simply advertise themselves as sitting commissioners with
“experience.” Also, not much is done to signal the coming election and give potential candidates
a better chance to enter the race. As a result, few do. Mayor Catherine Robinson was re-elected,
without opposition, just as she was three years ago.
Two commission seats are up. Both incumbents (Elbert Tucker and Daisy Henry) are in the
running. Only one additional candidate is in the race, Bill Baxley, who fell three votes short of
winning a seat two years ago.
That’s still better than Flagler Beach’s municipal election, which was to be held concurrently
with Bunnell’s. Two seats were up on the Flagler Beach City Commission, but after one
candidate briefly flirted with challenging the two incumbents, he withdrew, resulting in the
automatic re-election of Jane Mealy and Steve Settle. That’s unusual for Flagler Beach, where
elections have been hotly contested in recent years, if with a revolving set of familiar candidates.
In Bunnell on Tuesday, the top two vote-getters will be elected. So at least one of the two
incumbents will be reelected.
Absent forums and public interest—and better coverage from local media, this news source
included—Bunnell’s city commissioners are left to their own devices to draw the few dozen
votes that assure them victory. That involves the usual campaign signs and knocking on a few
doors. But mostly, it involves the equivalent of a mass mailing, or as close to a mass mailing as
Bunnell’s absence of anything like a critical electoral mass can elicit: Henry, Tucker and Baxley
each sent a letter in the form of a personal appeal to registered voters.
The letters are the sharpest self-portraits by candidates that most voters are likely to get.
They are also, in one case, the cause of controversy: Henry’s letter to constituents was so poorly
written, so incoherent and at times factually wrong that it drew a letter of protest from Hardy
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