Oviedo charter amendments: one resounding win and a narrow victory

Oviedo voters may not have had any candidates to vote for, as none of the candidates up for re-election faced challengers, but five ballot amendments confronted voters in the polls, with some decisive results on election night.

Amendment 1 suffers blowout loss

An amendment that would have extended Oviedo City Council members’ terms from 2 to 4 years to align more closely with larger general elections suffered a blowout loss Tuesday night, by a 68.89% to 31.11% margin with 100% of precincts reporting.

The attempt to extend terms for council members was just one of a small handful of attempts in the last two decades to bring the city’s elections schedule more in line with state and national elections. All have failed.

“I see the benefit in having there be two, because if there’s a bad person you can get them out fast,” Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek said Tuesday. “But it costs a ridiculous amount. It’s $23,000 minimum.”

Amendment 2 also sees big loss

Amendment two, revising voting procedures on the City Council to remove the roll call vote from city council voting procedures, lost by 36.28% to 63.72% with all precincts reporting. Sladek said she preferred a roll call vote.

“Somebody said to me ‘You always vote different from people, and you need to have it on the record that you voted differently so that you don’t get blamed for being stupid,'” Sladek said. “You need to have it so everybody doesn’t blurt it out at the same time so that you have a record of how you voted.”

Amendment 3 wins easily

Amendment three, which would move special election procedures out to a window of between 90 and 120 days to better align with state regulations passed by a 68.28% to 31.72% margin with two precincts outstanding.

Amendment 4 barely passes

Amendment four was the nail-biter of the night in Oviedo. The amendment would re-align the election qualifying period for Oviedo City Council candidates to be more in line with state guidelines, but it was only barely holding a lead on passing, with a 51.05% to 48.95% margin with two precincts reporting, which potentially could swing that vote.

But that didn’t sit well with Oviedo’s mayor.

“It’s worse for the challenger now,” she said. “You have to decide and be sure that you’re running and get all your stuff done two and a half months earlier. You can be reelected unopposed in June now, and the election’s not for five months. That’s wrong. It’s really a sad thing for democracy. It was a bad idea.”

Amendment 5 passes in landslide

Amendment five, designed to increase rural boundary protections, was the resounding victory for the night in Oviedo, with 77.80% of voters in favor and only 22.20% against it with two precincts reporting.

“I am very glad that the public has stepped in on this issue, as it has on police and on fire and said that this matters so much to our community and is so important to our community’s identity, that we wanted to make sure that before anything changes with this, a supermajority of our elected representatives agree that this is the right direction,” Sladek said.

The same night, Florida Sen. Jason Brodeur, lost his re-election bid to Maitland Mayor John Lowndes. Brodeur had supported a bill that would make it easier to develop within the rural boundary.

“It passed by a very high margin, as it should have passed by a very high margin,” Sladek said. “But it’s very interesting, people who were in the rural boundary voted more for Brodeur than for Lowndes.”