Over the weekend, city council candidate Curphy Smith sent this mailer to residents in the second district. It can only be characterized as a negative campaign piece. It sets forth in detail all the ways incumbent Barbara Van Auken broke her campaign promises, with some personal attacks thrown in for good measure.

This mailer was regrettable, especially considering Smith had, up to that point, run a pretty positive campaign. While I think the piece makes some valid criticisms of Van Auken, it steps over the line a little too much. Specifically:

• Overall, the piece reads as a response to the unsigned anti-Curphy flyer that was distributed to neighborhoods surrounding Bradley. In fact, an image of the flyer appears on page 3 of Curphy’s mailer, and Curphy attributes the flyer to Van Auken’s campaign.

  “Only one week before Election Day, Barbara Van Auken sent out an alarmist flyer urging people to vote on 7th,” the Smith mailer says. However, as I reported in a previous post, Van Auken denies any knowledge of the flyer, and says it was not authorized by her campaign. Unless Smith’s campaign has some sort of proof that it came from Van Auken, they shouldn’t be accusing her of sending it.

• The mailer heavily criticizes Van Auken’s success in building a new arbor at Rebecca and Main street completely at city expense. While pointing out that Van Auken didn’t fulfill her promise to repeal the $6 per month garbage fee, the mailer states, “She had other ideas to spend the money to make her look good as a council member — such as her monumental and extravagant arbor.”

  Construction of the arbor was a one-time cost of $143,287.66. The garbage fee brings in approximately $2.3 million in revenue annually. Was the arbor expense extravagant? One could argue that it was. But one cannot argue that it would have been more than a drop in the bucket to fill the revenue hole if the garbage tax were eliminated. A better criticism would have been that, in 2006, the council considered replacing the garbage fee by raising the city’s portion of property taxes 14 cents per $100 valuation. They didn’t, opting instead to approve a budget that didn’t raise taxes and left the garbage tax in place. Van Auken voted in favor of that budget.

• The mailer also makes this allegation: “People who have had to deal with Barbara Van Auken over the years invariably describe her as ‘vindictive,’ ‘mean,’ ‘divisive,’ and ‘abrasive.'” This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to voters. It’s a personal attack. It’s hyperbole (“invariably”?). And it’s unnecessary. There is sufficient reason to vote against her without resorting to name-calling. It just makes Smith appear mean-spirited. That’s unfortunate because, in my dealings with Smith, I had not found him to be mean-spirited.

In my opinion, this piece wasn’t necessary. Van Auken had brought enough bad press on herself, and the Journal Star had endorsed Smith. The unsigned anti-Curphy flyer was already counterbalanced by the release of embarrassing police reports and video of Van Auken from last September. The candidates themselves had successfully distanced themselves from these negative attacks on each other.

On the other hand, negative campaigning has a long and often successful history. I guess Smith’s campaign will just have to hope the tactic doesn’t backfire on them as voters head to the polls today.