League of Women Voters may become a victim of its own success

Three decades ago, Mary Figg sat at a folding table outside a Winn-Dixie in rural Lutz, offering to register folks to vote as summer flies buzzed lazily around.

League of Women Voters, her sign read.

Now and again, an older woman would walk up, intrigued. Yes, she wanted to register. Then she would turn to her husband and say something along the lines of, "Honey, what party affiliation are we?"

"That," says Figg, who went on to serve in the state House, "used to drive us crazy."

As the ad used to say, we've come a long way. But can nonpartisan leagues like this one survive?

The Hillsborough chapter has a storied history of helping kick off the careers of female politicians who paved the way for days when a female presence in office is not remarkable.

The league's focus: keep government open and on its toes; educate people, get them involved and get them voting.

It put out voter guides, held candidate forums and weighed in on everything from juvenile justice to the county charter. It studied amendments and environmental issues and put the word out. Members sat on boards and drove the county in the Vote Van, registering thousands.

Members were front and center at public meetings wearing big buttons identifying them as official observers, lest elected officials assume no one was watching.

"Let me tell you," says former league president Liana Fernandez Fox, "it changed meetings just as much as public access did."

Maybe they were not universally loved, a good thing in politics. "League of Women Vultures" someone used to call their ilk.

Longtimers will tell you of editorial writers who routinely called for their take. They were asked often for public testimony. These days? "Not very frequently," Fernandez Fox says.

Now we have a proliferation of places to go for the political lowdown, all the information you could want in a few clicks of the keyboard. Why drive downtown for a public hearing when it's as close as the TV in your living room or your laptop?

The Hillsborough chapter finds itself in rocky times. Though it is 100 strong, members say a core of fewer than a dozen consistently show up and do the work. New blood is hard to come by, given all the associations out there, Kiwanis and Rotary, business and professional.

And as always, there's the economy: "To join a social or civic or political organization now is a luxury," says current president Linda D'Aquila.

There has been talk of merging with leagues in Pinellas County, but as one member put it, if people don't go to meetings in their own county, why would they go in another?

Later this month, the Hills­borough League of Women Voters will talk survival. D'Aquila hopes the Feb. 26 meeting will be about evolving, not disbanding. It has ideas about an executive director and getting fresh faces. But its ultimate fate is very much on the minds of members I talked to.

Which seems a sad thing.

But maybe in an odd way, the threat of extinction — or at least a sobering call to evolve — is good, too. At the very least, the next generation that a league of women voters might inform and inspire won't have to ask someone else what party they're in.