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Nov
18
There’s a lot of agreement that nothing will change in our county government if we don’t change the people. But if the people behind the people who are the people we as voters are going to get to choose from just pick the same people or same kind of people, or the money behind the people who are the people we as voters are going to get to choose from just pick (and give money to) the same people or same kind of people whom they always pick or give financial support to, then the lame-o blame-o that gets placed on The Voters for making bad choices will continue to be as much a red herring as it always is.
So what can The Voter do to change that?
From someone I believe knows what he’s talking about, voters need to demand ideas.
And I will add: We need to demand that the candidates, from the moment we suspect that they’re considering being a candidate for either one of the ward/district positions or the county executive, must give us his or her very specific, detailed and operationalized ideas of what our county can become and will become if we elect them. And we must not stop pressing them.
Now – voters also have to show that they will not settle for crappy people – character-wise or leadership-wise. How do we work on making sure that we don’t get stuck with crappy people, who sound like they have good ideas but might be lousy leaders or have lousy character?
We again have to ask questions and demand answers.
I think voters should always be doing this. During my campaign, some of my toughest but favorite moments were when people who didn’t know me would cold call me and ask me my position on issues. And it was even harder when people who did know me would do the same thing.
Why are we not doing that with everyone? Why not a Meet the Bloggers with every county council and county executive candidate? That is the single best way to meet and hear these people, as people as well as candidates, untainted by having paid bazillions to meet them but rather, they are there because you are their constituent. End of story.
Voters are going to have a lot of work to do to make sure that the implementers of Issue 6 and county reform don’t make it turn out to be as disappointing a decision as selecting Adam Wasserman for the Port Authority was in 2007 or ramming the tax through to support the very precariously situated, literally and figuratively, Med Mart project.
But we have only ourselves to blame if we don’t start figuring out how to make Issue 6 work better for us, given that we know the proponents certainly must have their own ideas for how they want to see it unfold, and not necessarily with an agenda, moving forward, that will be made open to all of us.
What’s the first step for The Voter? Make a list – a list of every person we think might be a candidate for county exec, from the GOP and the Democratic side. And research and write about them.
Ready. Set. Go.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 6:49 pm November 18th, 2009 in Campaigning, Cleveland+, Elections, Government, Ohio, Politics, Transparency, Voting, democracy, leadership, med mart
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7 Responses to “What can we do to impact affect implementation of county reform via Issue 6”
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by Tips and TricksNews Now
Shalom Jill,
Please tell me you used the word impact under extreme duress and serious distraction by your family.
B’shalom,
Jeff
[...] 1005: What can we do to impact AFFECT implementation of county reform via Issue 6 [...]
Shalom Jill,
And I re-read this fictional, but all the more true for it, bit in Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah last evening.
B’shalom,
Jeff
Thanks for the tip, Jeff. I had to look up why I can’t use impact that way – I only heard about that incorrect usage sometime this year. I was not an English or journalism major – I imagine I have a lot of errors like that throughout WLST.
Doesn’t that make me more…normal and authentic!?
As Jeff Hess quotes above, “The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.”
Last week, the P.D. deigned to publish a letter I wrote in response to a front page story by Laura Johnston that stated: “In the first few months under the charter, council members are expected to tackle a code of ethics and campaign finance reform.”
That will be too late, as the money powers in the County will already have selected and purchased the county executive, and at least strongly influenced the campaigns of the ll council members.
Until we get private money OUT of our political campaigns, any pretense of democracy is only that: a gloss obscuring the power brokers behind the curtain and an occasional bone tossed to a restive electorate.
We can start at the local level with voluntary public funding of campaigns, and I propose that this is an ideal time to start.
BTW, here’s a suggestion for rewriting the title of your post: “What can we do to implement county reform via Issue 6?”
It’s pretty amazing (and depressing) that the League of Women Voters apparently totally missed the issue of campaign finance reform in their eagerness to endorse Issue 6, which is silent on the subject.
Hello Jill and congratulation.
It’s interesting how Allegheny county PA never was mentioned related to issue 6, makes me wonder if it was never brought to anyones attention that the county that Pittsburg sits in went through the relative same change in 2000.
Here is a Wiki link, notice that Allegheny has only four cities within it, but has 130 individual municipalities and they are represented Cites, Burroughs and also Townships.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_County,_Pennsylvania
It implemented the same type of county reform in 2000 after implementation of a home rule charter.
Study show that consolidation of municipalities within these types of charter county government would better serve them.
Cuyahoga does not have that many municipalities with only 60 individual Cities, Townships and Villages
We do have two operating townships, but the nineteen original townships are all defunct or on paper only townships.
That’s because home rule in Ohio allowed referendums early on allowed the incorporation of sections into separate municipalities. Allowing 21 townships to become 60 separate municipalities.
There is also a 300+ page government circulating an efficiency report for the city of Cleveland, that report calls for (in part) combining city functions with like county functions.
I feel very strongly that the county should offer centralized information technology, it should offer a standard software application and central data storage. It could offer that to every municipality and track statistics and metric for them. It could also sort by and categorize that data by townships. Doing that could and may reveal that consolidations back to township may better serve the citizens within them.
Running though a standard methods allows for comparative analysis, per capita costs and tax revenue.
Since the county is the primary front end for intergovernmental funds and dispersions it all could be tracked and recorded by districts to and for all of us to see where the money goes.
Things like departmental funding could be displayed like an accordion, tiered and then split down into line items. By project and by who was awarded the contracts, then even summaries by contractors who get the lion share of government spending in NEO?
Cost of road crew compared by districts, cost per mile for resurfacing or replacing roads.
Morals are great thats if you can see them, its more about actual business skills, Wasserman never presented the Ports Board with a business plan. He last asked for what $50 million, he also just returned from Washington and must not have felt he had support. Not that such a ambitious plan as his required a formal business plan? it was all very tentative and highly subjective to changes in the economy and also required a support from several entities, I’m sure that they would have liked a more formal business report as well.
We will not see the first inland US container port in the US, thats likely to go to Oswego and not likely to see a cruise ship terminal like that going in at Toledo….we are not an easy region to work within, Wasserman would undoubtedly express that if they did not write him a severance check.
I agree that you can’t blame the voters for making bad choices when the same old pack of second-raters keeps getting recycled year after year. Still, I think voters have to be more involved in the process than they are now. It’s not enough to come out once a year and vote. Good government takes time and effort and energy. There’s a lot of cynicism about government and about this region, not all of it unjustified. But we need to cut through that and convince people that they really can make a difference. If people don’t actively demand something better they aren’t going to get it.