The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: County Council

At the beginning of this week, one Civic Commons member organization, the Citizens League of Greater Cleveland, posed this challenge via a Civic Commons conversation:

We would like to know what the citizens of Cuyahoga County expect from, and should expect from, their representatives on County Council. We would also like to hear from citizens in Summit County, who have experience with a chartered county government and a county council.

(You can learn more about the Citizens League at their website but they may be best known to Civic Commons purveyors because of the recent, wildly successful collaboration around the prosecutors race. You can check out the three-day forum they helped foster on the Commons here.)

 

Is there any expectation that what a resident, a voter, a taxpayer, wants from a county council representative will be different from what the same person expects from a different level elected? I suppose it's possible, but as Jim Dixon's contribution indicates, certain qualities have got be there, regardless of the position, don't you think? Here's part of what he wrote:

A few qualities are easy:  a good measure of intelligence, a great measure of integrity, experience in or with public administration, a commitment to transparency, and the ability to engage and serve constituents. 

I completely agree.  But then he goes on to mention how one county council member is looking at what to do, what to do with all the plastic bags in circulation (her idea is to charge people for them, as a deterrent from using them and an incentive to use re-usable products instead). And Jim wonders, legitimately as all voter-taxpayer-residents should, is this how he - we - want our electeds to spend their time and energy?

As much as I probably shouldn't admit this, because it really pleases very few people, council members generally are responsible for just two things: appropriating and legislating. And while even those of us who run for and earn a place in elected office like to imagine dealing with lofty yet weighty and life-altering, direction-changing matters once we are in the arena, the truth is a lot less noble. It just is. Tonight, for example, I spent ninety minutes observing a Planning & Zoning Commission meeting in my city because a Panera wants to build here but the developer is requesting multiple variances for a very odd yet prominent piece of property that's currently occupied by a vacant old house that used to be bar.  Neighbors who like green space have perceptions, neighbors who see the area as the center of a bustling yet endangered business zone have other perceptions, P&Z commission members have other ideas and other land owners/developers have different ideas from all of those other stakeholders.

What is an elected to do?

Propose a fee for plastic bags, of course!

Just kidding.  But we do see this bait and switch all the time at the national level, especially in an election year.

So what can we, as constituents of the entire county, as well as the one county representative's district, do to minimize such activity that we might consider to constitute distractions?

The Citizens League and Jim Dixon give us a great start: enumerate the baseline qualities we want in an elected person. Then consider what tasks you most want them to tackle, what goals you most want them to achieve that contribute to the vision of the community you want to call your own. And don't settle - Jim is right to imply that maybe an ordinance about charging for plastic bags isn't a high priority in these times, and others can and should chime in publicly if they support that idea. Council members who want to stay council members will, eventually (believe it or not) hear and listen to their constituents.

I'm not convinced that lowering the bar is the best route, though one area Twitter user suggested this, because I believe we must actually do the opposite. I believe we should set the bar high and make them reach, or how else can we ever be satisfied (and we do deserve to be satisfied)?

But I do believe we should be realistic, and that means that every now and then, there are going to be proposals about plastic bags.  What's your pie in the sky combined with the sober reality of a winter on Lake Erie County Council Member Profile look like?  You can tee it up right here.

 

 

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Copyright © 2012 Jill Miller Zimon; available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.