| Some Thoughts about Good Local Government |
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Council members represent all the residents of Ukiah
and not just those who voted for them. |
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Open government combined with frequent dialogue with
the general public is essential to good decision-making. Dialogue with
the public means far
more than adherence to the Brown Act. And use of citizen committees on
specific issues can only increase the responsiveness of the Council. |
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Informing and educating the public is arguably the
most important job of elected officials. |
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The obligation of a Council member, in the great tradition of representative
democracy in our country, is not only to listen to constituents’ viewpoints
but to become as fully informed as is possible and then to vote according
to his or her best judgment. Following the directives of the loudest voices
in the community, or conducting opinion polls and voting accordingly, is
not responsible representation. |
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Each new Council needs to articulate its vision for itself, to develop
a shared vocabulary, to reach agreement on how to settle disagreements,
and in particular to define the scope and limitations of its responsibilities. |
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Finding the right balance between responsible oversight of City operations
and micro-managing those operations is a huge and ongoing challenge. The
buck does stop with the Council and this requires ongoing vigilance over
City business, |
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It is the job of the Council to keep a broad perspective. Both the
Council and the general public can get so caught up in immediate issues
that we don't step back and make it clear that what we do with issue X
will not address the underlying problem (medical marijuana and water are
examples). In other words, our discussions need to look beyond the specific
topic to the underlying concern. Furthermore, while immediate crises obviously
require our attention, we cannot focus on them to the exclusion of long-range
planning. Again, this is an area where keeping the public informed is essential.
We need to work for long-term solutions, rather than ones that provide
an easy and politically viable fix, but with long-term consequences. |
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The balancing of rights in conflict is one of the most difficult tasks
before the Council. On many occasions in disputes brought to the Council,
both sides have legitimate arguments. The following topics come to mind:
rights of the homeless vs. the quality of life for the community; and rights
of home builders and developers vs. preservation of agricultural land and
open space. For some issues there can be a degree of balancing and compromise;
others need to be recognized as being impossible to balance. The Council
must inevitably make decisions that by their nature will reasonably seem
unfair to some of the parties. |
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Prop 13 has done much to obstruct good government in California, though
some of the waste and inefficiency that led to its passage is still present,
particularly at the State level. The political reality, however, is that
even truly necessary tax measures can be defeated. The Council’s job is
to create a climate in the City in which tax questions are looked at objectively
and the value received for tax dollars spent is well understood. |
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We have to promote free exchange between groups that see themselves
in opposition to each other. In our polarized society, individuals and
groups tend to talk among themselves, constantly preaching to their own
choir and telling them how bad the other group’s choir is. But many of
these disagreements run only as deep as the vocabularies used by different
groups. Below the arguments over words may be significant and productive
points of agreement that, if uncovered, can lead to better government. |
