With two months until the City Council election, campaign signs
are sprouting up, but after a two-hour cruise around town, one
council candidate and the two mayoral candidates appeared to be the
only advertisers
– so far.
Gilroy – With two months until the City Council election, campaign signs are sprouting up, but after a two-hour cruise around town, one council candidate and the two mayoral candidates appeared to be the only advertisers – so far.
“The early bird gets the worm,” said Councilman Craig Gartman, who’s challenging Mayor Al Pinheiro for the top council seat.
“We understand that this is going to be a tough race and that we need to get our message out,” Gartman added. “But we waited until Labor Day because we didn’t want to start too early.”
The two contenders each have a red-white-and-blue sign the size of small pool tables standing on wooden posts in an empty lot across from the Nob Hill grocery store.
Council candidate Perry Woodward, a lawyer who has started his campaign strong, has a smaller blue sign with white lettering for drivers to see after they drop off a letter at the post office’s drive-up mailbox in the alley between Fourth and Fifth streets.
Woodward could not be reached for comment by deadline Wednesday.
One man who declined to give his name passed Woodward’s sign as he pulled into his apartment driveway, but he said “it makes no difference to me” because he said he won’t vote in November anyway.
Pinheiro said he’s recycling signs from his 2003 election, and Gartman said he has targeted his six signs along heavily traveled areas such as Santa Teresa Boulevard, First Street, Monterey Street, West Luchessa Avenue, and along U.S. 101.
While signs play an important role in smaller cities such as Gilroy, Gartman said a candidates’ positions outweigh their marketing.
“Name recognition is always important, but issues are the driving force in any campaign,” Gartman said. “You can campaign to ad nauseum and it doesn’t benefit you,”
Carlton Oler, a professor of psychology at Gavilan College, agreed, but he said advertising has more influence in smaller cities such as Gilroy than in, say, San Francisco, where “people are deluged and overwhelmed with multiple messages” all the time.
“Some people will vote based on ad recognition, so they will go into the booth and punch out those holes, thinking, ‘I’ve seen this person on TV and their ads,'” Oler said. “But then you have those who are more sophisticated and want to know if a candidate supports their issues, no matter how many ads that candidate has.”
A potential backfire for candidates can also be advertising too much and possibly annoying hot, traffic-weary commuters.
“I am a sign man, but you’ll see mine in the next couple of weeks,” said incumbent Russ Valiquette, who added that “you’d think the presidential election’s this year” based on the amount of early campaigning going on.
Gartman understood the consequences of early campaigning, but he said he has tried “to minimize the amount of visual pollution that voters have to see concerning the election.”
“All they have to do is put up with it for 60 days,” Gartman said. “It goes along with the territory.”
One piece of territory that will receive much attention at Monday’s City Council meeting is Richard Barberi’s 23 acres of farmland at the corner of West Luchessa Avenue and Monterey Street, which developers hope to develop into housing if the council gives them the city’s last 191 housing allocations.
Barberi has allowed both Gartman and Pinheiro to post their signs on his property along Luchessa, but he says he doesn’t necessarily want one to win over the other. He just wants to sell his highly taxed, money-losing land and is hedging his bets by giving sign real estate to the two mayoral candidates who will help decide the fate of his land Sept. 10.
“As you know we’re going for the RDOs,” Barberi said, referring to the 191 “Residential Development Ordinances” remaining. “I don’t want the election to go one way or the other.
As of deadline Wednesday, the other candidates could not be reached for comment. Planning Commissioners Tim Day and Cat Tucker, former Councilman Bob Dillon, and incumbent Roland Velasco are all running for council seats.
