Did you buy this argument? Namely, it's not fair to vote for an incumbent that term limits will keep from being seated.

Sadly, these incumbents have no one but themselves to blame.

In 1993, assembly and term limits passed by more than a 70 percent majority. Recent opinion polls indicated that the topic was still very popular. It was hoped that politicians could read the writing on the wall and decide not to run in a race if they probably would not be seated. Apparently they couldn't or wouldn't read.

The Alliance of Concerned Taxpayers beseeched the assembly twice to forestall such a situation by introducing the same ordinance in the assembly. When a legislative body passes substantially the same ordinance, a citizen's initiative is bypassed. There are numerous examples of just such a reasoned response.

If the assembly had passed their own term limits ordinance, everything would have been resolved before the Oct. 2 election. Unfortunately, both public and private lobbying attempts were ignored.

If you add up all the individual votes in 1992 and 1993, term limits were approved more than 11,400 times. Compare that with six assembly members who decided in their infinite omniscience that those 11,400 votes were mistaken as they repealed term limits in 1999. Keep in mind that members seated in 1993 received a clean slate of six more years, without regard to how long they had already served.

What about all of those 11,400 votes? Don't they count? Is it wrong that their wishes were ignored, negated? What gives those six assembly members the right to take away their decisions?

Citizen initiated ordinances have a two-year shelf life. That is, they cannot be repealed before two years have elapsed. If the term limits initiatives were written any other way, they could have been repealed once again by the assembly before fully taking effect.

Do you really trust this assembly to uphold the vote of the people?

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I plan to vote "Yes" to term limits on Oct. 2.

Vicki Pate

Nikiski