Don Marsh for City Commission

Today I will be filing to run for the At-Large #2 seat in 2011. I am starting early to insure the best chance for victory. The Supervisor of Elections has not yet set the exact date for next year’s city elections, but it will be in March. That date must be fixed in June, according to staff.

Since Mayor Craig Lowe has been sworn in, it appears that the city is unwilling to deal with it’s current emergencies, and is seeking to place new burdens upon its citizens. Although it is not the purview of city government, the Mayor is placing a priority on education and is looking forward to being an ambassador to other cities. Meanwhile, citizens near the contaminated Koppers site are still concerned that the clean up will be given the same level of neglect that it has received for decades.

I look forward to a promising future for this campaign. We came very close to winning this year. We have no other choice but to win if we want change!

Today is the last day I can file a complaint that could possibly overturn the April 13th election. I am not saying I am going to do that, but the time between then and now has allowed some information to surface that does tempt me to do so.

As I have been taking a break and getting back to making a living, my friends have been looking into those pesky last-day address changes that were written about in the Sunday Gainesville Sun. As the Sun reported, there is no evidence required to prove that you have actually moved into the Gainesville city limits on election day, and so anyone in Florida can actually come here and say so…and VOTE. If I had known that, I might have told those hundreds of county voters, who expressed remorse over not being able to vote for me, that they could move in with me that day, and move out that night on the grounds that it was too crowded!

My campaign workers have also been checking into absentee ballots. This appears to be a rich vein of voters who don’t really live here, but still vote here regularly. We know that over 40 of these phantom voters voted on March 16th, but we cannot get the April 13th voter data from the Supervisor of Elections until AFTER the 10 day period in which we are allowed to protest. That seems to be a pretty convenient rule to shut down investigations before they can even start. It seems to me that voters who want to commit fraud are on the honor system, but if you are a victim of fraud, you have very stringent guidelines.

At the end of the day, all we will probably know for sure is that according to the rules that I have to follow, I lost my race against Craig Lowe by 42 votes. But we will also have a cautionary tale for other candidates that run against the Democratic Machine in Gainesville FL: You had better make sure you beat them by a few hundred votes to cover the ones that you will be spotting them before Election Day.

Today, we will be getting the results of the machine recount, and I am not expecting a different result. We will not be mounting a legal challenge to the election. And I don’t think the Supervisor of Elections Office did us wrong. There are probably some irregularities, like people who came here to vote from other cities, but in some cases it is legal to do so under Florida law, and even if you tracked down the illegal ones, you cannot be sure how they voted. In the final analysis, all elections have irregularities, just like all football games have a few missed penalties. We’re all only human, and elections are pretty good at determining the winner.

During this race, I learned the hard way how it feels to have my reputation smeared. It’s a new experience for me. I have never had to defend myself so vigorously against so much trash talking. While resisting the various charges and name-calling, I know I have struck a few innocent people. Brett Buell at TV20 took a lot of angry phone calls that resulted from a misunderstanding, and I told him I was sorry for that, and I asked my friends to leave him alone. And after asking for people to tell us if they got 2 ballots, we got no more reports than the three we initially heard about. I’ve concluded that it was the inevitable human error that is unavoidable when handing out over 12,000 ballots. And I have owned enough electronic equipment to know that it is most likely to fail when you are desperate to get something done on time. So the voting machine failure on election night is only a reason to curse the machines, not the poll workers. So, I offer my regrets and say I am sorry for doing to you what was done to me. It wasn’t fair, and I don’t want to have to hide from you in the grocery store. You are the referees in this game, and I appreciate your oversight.

Right now I am getting ready to get back to work and our normal lives. To my supporters, I say this: I am not giving up. The political process is a continuing story. As long as we have a high cost of living heaped upon us by our local government, it should be resisted. Our city commission may learn nothing from our campaign and keep raising our utility rates in the future, and increasing the size of government, and this must be addressed again in next year’s election. There are 3 seats to contest, and we must have like minded people challenging them.

As Zig Ziglar says, “Failure is an event, not a person”. We are not failures for having tried to hold an incumbent accountable. We will build on the support we have and make them listen to us next year. I thank you for having supported me in this effort, and I hope you will do so again. We came so close. Next time, I believe we will achieve a different result.

A woman contacted both me and the Supervisor of Elections to tell us that she was given two ballots by a poll worker. She is a Democrat who came to vote for me, and she was an honest person who gave one of the ballots back to the poll worker. She ran into someone at Publix right after that who told her she was also given two ballots! I would not have thought much of this except a man who supports my campaign told me he got 2 ballots during early voting…and he is a Democrat.

If anyone else wants to contact me about this, please do! Did you get 2 ballots from a poll worker? Are you a Democrat? How many of you are out there?

Send me an email at dontwc@gmail.com with your contact information! We want to make sure we had an honest election here!!

As many of you are aware, the election finished with our campaign down by 35 votes. This triggers an automatic recount. It also triggers a new round of slanderous accusation from Craig Lowe. At least this time he is saying them with his own mouth instead of depending on nameless surrogates. Here it is from the Gainesville Sun:

“All I can say is Don Marsh ran the dirtiest electoral campaign in the history of Gainesville,” Lowe said.

We ran an issues centric campaign from the beginning. Craig Lowe did not refute any of  our points in any of our forums. He ignored every issue and stuck strictly to his script of, “I have proven leadership…I have experience”.

He had nothing to say about our ever rising electric rates that HE VOTED FOR. All he can do is change the subject and call me names, or have others do it for him. It is the same pattern of behavior that he demonstrated during the Transgender Bathroom debate in which he characterized anyone who disagreed with him as a homophobe and a bigot. This is cowardice of a high order. And it is a slap in the face to every Gainesville resident who suffers under an burdensome cost of living inflicted on them by a smug and self-satisfied city commission. But it’s nothing new.

So, did they cheat? Is there some sort of collusion between the Democratic machine that ran their puppet and people who supervise the vote? I am more than happy to let others utilize legal avenues to find that out. Let’s just say that if I judge this in the light of the nastiness of Lowe’s campaign, I would not be surprised.

Whether or not there is a conclusive discovery that overturns yesterday’s result, there is still a bigger problem: 83% of Gainesville voters sat on their hands and did nothing. This is the biggest contributor to our commission’s ability to abuse and manage us. If there had been a 50% turnout, and people voted according to their own self-interest, this would be a moot point.

Although it is apparently the plan of politicians to vilify and ruin me, I will stay in business because my customers know better. And I will run again, because it must be done and these cowardly individuals must be overcome. If not this week, then next year when there are 3 seats in contention.

Yes, we included a disclaimer!

I got a call from the Supervisor of Elections today. A citizen (translation: a Craig Lowe supporter) complained that our sign on the 34th Street wall did not have the required disclaimer. I told her that we did have it and that I had photographic evidence. This is what it looked like at the time it was painted.

Next, she questioned the legality of the sign. There was a question of the wall being government property. Isn’t it amazing that this never comes up when ANY other free speech is exercised on this wall?? No, it’s only an issue if a local conservative candidate utilizes Gainesville’s most recognizable public display.

During the late 80′s, I recall that the city wanted to scrub the wall and keep it from being covered with graffiti. At that time, I recall that the city was prevented from doing so because someone discovered that the wall was private property. I never learned whose property it was, but that is what I remember.

Personally, even if it’s public, it’s a good example of UNequal protection. No one else EVER gets a call from the authorities for what’s on the wall!

Yeah… A “concerned citizen”…

The 34 ST Wall is now part of the Marsh Invasion!

The past couple of weeks we have been working hard to get our message out to the people in the Koppers-effected area and to East Gainesville. Of course, Koppers effects a very large area, but as you get away from it, people have different concerns. Of course, GRU electric bills are the transcendent issue that hits every household. Yet, in East Gainesville there are burdens that predate high electric rates and the 1983 designation of Koppers as a Superfund site.

As growth and prosperity came to Gainesville, it seems to have passed the East side by. The East side is much more African-American in population, and it relies on the cohesive communities formed by its many churches much more than commerce. And there are not only churches, but many smaller ministries that specialize in teaching values to their youth and assisting the needy in learning how to add value to society by improving themselves. During this campaign we have only scratched the surface of a body of people who work tirelessly after hours to serve those who are less fortunate than themselves.

I had a conversation yesterday with a minister who runs a small business in East Gainesville. His real passion is teaching the values of marriage and pre-marital abstinence to young people and ministering to HIV/Aids patients. His business is successful, but he lights up when he talks about his vision of creating a community of shared values. You cannot listen to him and not want to buy into his work. It is just one of the great things that is happening in Gainesville.

So, why do people look down on the East side? Is it because of race? Is it a perception of crime? Or is it that working class people are looked down on in general? I know that I have been belittled for my job during this campaign, and I am a white man who works for many white professionals on the West side of town. So race isn’t a part of what gets me a lot of grief. No, it seems that I have just enough lower-class credentials to make some people wrinkle their noses at me.

In some ways, I think we have all played into this condescension of the East side. Is it possible to stop calling it East Gainesville? Aren’t they Gainesville as much as the rest of us? Am I not running for Mayor of Gainesville? The heroic people I am meeting are my fellow citizens, my brothers and sisters, of Gainesville. And they are putting me in a very inclusive frame of mind.

This campaign is a referendum on your high taxes, high utility

bills, the closing and cleaning up of Kopper’s toxic waste site

Vote April 13th to take our city back.

Craig Lowe and I have survived the March 16th election to fight another day. These were the results of today’s contest:

As you can see, these numbers are not very large for a city with 72,623 registered voters. There was only a 14% turnout.

This race will be settled on April 13!

I have been thinking about this a lot. I have been online since 1994, when the Alachua Freenet first opened up it’s dial-up lines to Gainesville residents. I was user afn43269, and in a short time I was on USENET, engaging people in discussions about religion and politics and Dave Barry. When the Gainesville Sun first got online as Sunone.com, I participated on their lively message board from early in its existence as the user, DonTWC, which stands for Don the Window Cleaner. Even though I had a username, I have always been up front about who I was. I have never liked anonymous posting, because I think that your testimony loses power when you are not willing to put your name on it. This is not for everyone, but if you are an elected official, I think there should be a record of what you believe and what you stand for.

After I ran for the county commission in 2002, I started a web site that would allow candidates to get their message out for free. I would give any candidate for local elected office a platform to tell the voters whatever he or she wanted, with no limits on space or content. Sadly, very few have taken me up on it, and no incumbent has EVER posted on AlachuaVoterGuide.com. A few challengers have. Some ex-officials have. But it has been a source of extreme frustration for me that so few will go on the record on a site where they might get…GASP…comments from the public.

During the incendiary leadup to the vote on Amendment One last year, I was the only one to open discussion on the site. When people from around the world came to post comments accusing me of bigotry and hatred, I tried to engage them and find common ground. No other public figure had discussions like these that I have been able to find. No one takes comments and tries to have a civil discourse, AND puts his name on it!

I want you to know that as your Mayor, this will not change. I will still blog. I will still deal with your criticisms, comments, complaints, and suggestions in the same manner that I always have. For me, transparency is not a fad, or a novelty, or an undefined promise that can be fudged on later. It has been my life, and you deserve accountable, accessible leadership. Please vote for me March 16th.