To The Editor,

I have not given the change to Lee County’s method of electing commissioners serious thought until now. On the surface it would appear that voters in Lehigh would have more power to elect our own favorite if we didn’t have to vote as a small part of a county wide body for each commissioner. One would think that electing our own favorite son (or daughter) would ensure that they always promote and enact what we the voters want in Lee County. This could be far from true.

I would like to outline some potential scenarios that could work against us in the situation where we only elect our Fifth District Commissioner and cannot vote for any of the others.

First none of the other commissioners would feel restrained to do us any favors except when our commissioner made some kind of a deal by supporting a special project in their district in order to get their vote for something in ours. These kinds of trade offs are frequent enough in politics and they vary in their effectiveness in controlling the size of government and to focus on real needs.

Second, Lehigh is a lower income community that has the potential for wealthy interests to far overpower the political process to favor candidates they want in office for their own gain. Money talks louder than individuals seeking office because money can and has spread either dirt or media propaganda faster and sometimes more believably than debates or personal speech. In other words a given amount of money can influence a greater percentage of votes in a single district election. The needs of the individual voter might be granted far less attention while the influential supporter can expect the most influence in county government.

As we consider this change we ought to remember that it takes three votes on the Commission to pass something Lehigh Residents want. As it is now, each commissioner having to face the voters in Lehigh Acres gives us leverage if we need to lobby for the votes to pass what we need. Commissioners from other districts have to come out here under the present system and will listen to representatives from our churches, the Community Council, the Chamber of Commerce, associations and ad hoc committees that plead for our needs. Lehigh Acres gets more than three times the attention under the county wide electoral system even though we don’t elect all of the Commissioners.

John C. Miller

Lehigh Acres