Amid the flurry of last-minute work at the Legislature on Monday, Amendment 890 fell to the floor dead along with Senate Bill 213, ensuring that Sparks residents will still vote city-wide come next November’s general election.

The amendment would have stipulated that candidates for City Council be only be voted for by the residents of the ward that candidate wants to represent. If approved, City Council candidates would have been able to target their campaigns at specific areas of the city.

With the amendment’s demise, the current system will remain in place, meaning everyone in the city can vote for any council candidate, regardless of what ward the voter lives in.

But in the last-minute flurry, and with opposition from the Assembly, the amendment was rejected.

Amendment 890 was slipped into SB213 by Assembly women Sheila Leslie and Marilyn Kirkpatrick, as well as Assemblyman Kelvin Atkinson.

As one of the city’s representative eyes on the Legislative session, Sparks Assistant City Manager Steve Driscol was tasked with watching what happened with the bill, as well as taking note of the council’s official stance.

And what he hard was Sparks City Council members voicing several concerns about the voting amendment, including the possibility of extreme political bias.

“The other side of this, that the council stated they were concerned about, was that if you are going to elect based only on ward, how would that affect your decisions,” Driscol said. “You might be ward-only based in your thoughts and decisions. There is an awful lot of city-wide business that (a council person) has to vote on.”

Most of the council agreed. However, in the minority opinion on the council was Ward 1 Councilwoman Julia Ratti.

Ratti was in favor of the failed amendment, saying that it would promote grassroots campaigning.

“The bottom line for me is (it is expensive) to run a city-wide campaign,” Ratti said. “The candidate needs to raise enough money. That changes it from a grassroots campaign to a campaign where you would have to do mailing.”

Ratti added the change would have made running for office more feasible for candidates with smaller budgets. As it is now, a city-wide campaign is an expensive endeavor which introduces the possibility of being funded by special interests, she added.

“To run a city-wide campaign the candidate needs to raise enough money … and the only viable candidates are those who can raise a large amount of money,” Ratti said, tempering her statement with the concession that the grassroots candidate might not always be the right choice for the office.

The change to voting procedure in Sparks’ general elections started out as its own bill, but died on May 16 after discussion in the Senate Government Affairs Committee. The idea was then added to Senate Bill 213 by Leslie as an amendment.