The word of the day is “change.”

That’s what many of Tuesday’s municipal elections amounted to: change.

Butler City has a new mayor and a new member of city council; the current mayor and a sitting councilor have been replaced.

In Slippery Rock the sitting council president and mayor are also out, and two newcomers will join council next year.

In Butler Township an incumbent commissioner is out and a newcomer will join the board.

Adams Township residents will see a new face on their board of supervisors, after an incumbent with more than 40 years on the board lost a re-election bid.

Four new faces will also join the borough council in Prospect; and two new school directors were elected to positions on South Butler School Board.

Whatever your thoughts on the candidates in these races, this kind of turnover is a good thing because it demonstrates that people care. Change requires interest and engagement; someone had to run to replace these incumbents, and enough voters had to care enough about their local government to visit the polls and cast ballots making the changes a reality.

Unfortunately, there’s plenty to dislike about Tuesday’s elections as well. Let’s start with voter turnout overall, which pleasantly shocked us by reaching nearly 23.6 percent.

That’s higher than most party officials and election observers predicted. But it still doesn’t even amount to one-quarter of registered voters in Butler County.

Then there’s the races themselves, a significant number of which were either uncontested or simply empty — meaning that no one’s name was on the ballot Tuesday. Elected positions in least a dozen municipalities will either be filled by write-in winners or through appointments made by elected officials.

These empty races aren’t for tangential positions, either. They’re for boards of supervisors, seats on borough councils and mayoral positions.

In perhaps the most egregious displays of public disinterest, races for six seats on Portersville Borough Council and the office of mayor were empty Tuesday night. The same is true for Fairview Borough.

Voters responded to the apparent disinterest in public service with a collective shrug of their own.

A whopping six write-in votes were cast in the Petrolia’s mayoral race; 19 write-in votes were cast in the race for three, four-year seats on council; and 13 write-in votes were cast in the race for three, two-year seats on council, according to unofficial vote tallies posted online by the county’s Bureau of Elections.

In Fairview the turnout numbers for those races were five write-in votes, 26; and 11, respectively.

There’s simply no way to spin this into a positive thing.

Serving in local government can be thankless and time-consuming. But the work municipal officials do shapes their communities in ways that state and national politicians could never hope to achieve. They decide what your water bill amounts to each month; which streets will get paved next year; and how your community deals with everything from new development to trash collection.

It doesn’t bode well for the health of our communities that so few people are interested in pursuing public service — and it’s equally troubling that residents have so few ideas about who they would like to see in those positions.

So yes, this was a change election in every sense of the word.

Many voters who cast a ballot ushered new voices and perspectives into their local governments. And the overwhelming majority, who did not visit the polls Tuesday, serve as a reminder of the change we still desperately need.