Another Election? Who Cares?

Why bother voting? There is a slew of races for local positions on this year's ballot for the gen- eral election, but none of them are contested. So we already know who's going to win.

Well, okay, there's one contested judicial election, but heck, we've never heard of either of those guys. So who cares?

There are a couple of state-wide initiatives, but nobody really pays any attention to those either. And anyway, who cares?

Well, here at The Times, actually, we care. We go to a lot of city council and school board and hospital board meetings. Most of those are pretty boring, and we'd rather be home watching "The Voice," or whatever the important show's are right now.

But the people on these boards are doing really (re- ally!) important business. They're figuring out how to better educate our kids and they're figuring out how to provide better healthcare and better emergency and mu- nicipal services. And every single one of these boards is spending some of your tax dollars.

And besides that, the ballot now comes to you - through the mail. (Hopefully they'll get there more quickly than The Times got to Dayton and Walla Walla subscribers last week - see next column.)

All you have to do is sit down for five minutes, read your ballot and fill it out. If nothing else, you'll learn about who's doing all the work to make our local govern- ment agencies run - mostly with no compensation.