EDITORIAL:

We watched Tuesday night’s presidential election returns with genuine awe as so many more of our fellow Americans helped to write another captivating chapter in our country’s history.

While we’re still not certain who the nominees will be we can say with certainty that the two front runners — Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama — have emphasized the importance of a post-partisanship era and both have earned reputations over the years for reaching across the aisle to recruit allies.

It may not make some of the activists in their parties happy, but it’s clearly a formula clicking with most Americans.

So, we ask, can’t that spirit of compromise catch on here when it comes to a spay-neuter law?

In November, we praised our City Council for charting a path to compromise on the issue, but earlier this month that deal collapsed into a pathetic shell of itself.

Instead of finding some way to address the core of the problem — the overpopulation of cats and dogs — we get some nominal bureaucratic maneuver that requires business licenses for those advertising sales of kittens or puppies. Oh, and you can pay $5 to license your cat, but it’s not mandatory.

That’s it?

The compromise would have rewarded those who spayed or neutered their pets and penalized those who wanted to opt out.

That sounds good in principle, but City Council members got hung up on the fees. They apparently didn’t like socking pet owners who opted out with an approximate annual $200 bill.

We heard a bunch of reasons why they didn’t like the ordinance their staff gave them.

“The wording was not drafted by the council,” Mayor Debbie Cook said when the council rejected the compromise. “It does not reflect the discussion we had at our meeting.”

OK, so you’re the boss, mayor — you and the council can just ask staff to take another crack at it.

Or is there something else in play here?

One woman said she would start a recall effort against Councilman Keith Bohr if the ordinance passed.

That’s the spirit. How do you expect your political leaders to be decisive and solve problems if you shake your fist and threaten them?

Of course they’re going to default to doing nothing under those circumstances.

But the problem remains. There are too many strays. You can’t just ignore the issue. City leaders ought to get back to work and come up with a revised ordinance.