When issuing a challenge it is always best to think through the consequences. Especially the possibility that someone just might take you up on it.

There’s often no better call to action than saying to someone, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Or, “Go ahead. Try and stop me.”

There’s a good chance someone will try, which is the first step to succeeding.

We point this out this week after taking a look at the battle in the Town of Kearney. A battle about how the council there should or shouldn’t be elected.

Council asked a group of citizens to take a look at the existing ward system. They were also asked to and make recommendations about how the governing municipal body should be constituted in the future.

There currently are three wards in Kearney, each with equal representation by two members.

However, one ward has more than double the number of voters of the other two wards combined.

So the central problem with the status quo is simple math.

The math plays out such that the majority of ratepayers receive one-third of the representation at the council table compared to their fellow Kearneyans.

The wards committee looked at the math and decided the easiest solution would be to just get rid of the arbitrary boundaries creating the inequality. The move would thus give every voter the same say at the end of election day.

Simple enough?

But there’s politics afoot here.

Without even nudging the ‘seasonal ratepayers versus permanent residents’ elephant in the room, an obvious political conundrum faced the ward committee’s recommendation.

See, they were asking the politicians to vote themselves out of a job.

That’s a tough proposition, no matter the circumstances or locale.  

As it stands now, councillors are regularly acclaimed to council in the wards with only a quarter of the population of Greater Rural Kearney.

Change would mean that those councillors might actually have to wait for the election results before they start preparing to take the oath of office.

Of course, this didn’t come up during the debate of the finer points of ‘to ward or not to ward.’

Instead, there was talk of well-funded candidates running rough-shod over perhaps equally or more qualified candidates of meager means.

A red herring for sure.

Firstly, the Municipal Elections Act set strict guidelines over what a candidate is allowed to spend during the duration of a campaign. That number is based on population. And while Kearney, we believe, is set to grow we don’t believe it is about to hit the tens of thousands of dollars.

We have not calculated the amount, but we are certain the total amount is less than $5,000.

Which is beside the point.

Just what would said well-funded candidates be spending their money on?

Ads in this newspaper are, of course, we believe a good investment. But how many full-page colour ads have you witnessed for public office in our pages?

Or maybe the concern is billboards on Hwy. 518 or a carefully calculated television campaign?

We digress.

What we are trying to get at is that council has been provided another opportunity by its ratepayers to end the existing electoral inequity. If they once again ignore the knocks at the door, council will be issuing, for a second time, a challenge to the 1,200 or more under-represented voters of Ward 3.

Math alone dictates that they are quite capable at not only electing councillors willing to vote for reforming the current ward system but the mayor as well.

That creates a situation where the votes for abolishing the ward system total three out of seven with only one vote to be found for success.

Not an impossibility, for certain.

It would be a shame for Kearney politics to be reduced to this “Us vs. Them” scenario, and council has the chance to prevent it.

But if they don’t, remember it was council that issued the challenge.