Jaisen Rutledge wants to serve on the Princeton City Council and he seems to think that a sweet-talk campaign is his ticket to City Hall.
Rutledge, a longtime Princeton resident, joined Jan Goria in a candidate forum on May 30, hosted by the League of Women Voters.
I was struck by something Rutledge said about the nature of the constituency he hopes to represent when the runoff election takes place on Saturday. Moderator Aaron Rodriguez of the LWV asked the candidates for their views on how they would describe Princeton to a newbie looking to move here.
Rutledge said this: “Princeton is a fast-growing city that still has a small-town charm to it,” he said. “I believe … it has done a really good job of retaining a lot of its culture and I think … there’s a lot of extremely excited and engaged residents that live here.”
Wow! That’s pretty darn nice of the candidate for Place 4 on the council to say. But wait a second. Let’s take a little deeper dive into one aspect of residents’ engagement in municipal policy. Rutledge and Goria finished No. 1 and 2 in the May 2 race to succeed former Councilman Ryan Gerfers, who resigned because of health concerns. The race was for all Princeton voters. The city has nearly 19,000 registered voters living here.
How many of them turned out May 2? 476, that’s how many! That figure amounts to 2.52%.
When I see numbers like that — I only can surmise that a relatively small number of votes is aware of the chaos that lurks at City Hall. We’re on a third city manager in less than four years; our fire chief is gone; we have a new city attorney; the public works director has vamoosed; the city is trying to find a permanent replacement for the manager who walked off his job in less than two years; the police chief is now doing double duty as acting city manager and as Princeton’s top cop.
All that being said, Princeton is not populated by an “excited and engaged” group of residents. I consider many of my fellow Princeton residents to be victims of that double curse of apathy and ignorance about what’s going on at City Hall.
The place is a mess.