Local Government Still Works

Jackson County Commissioner

Qualifications: Age 18, Registered Voter, live locally.

Flexible hours, pay $100,000 a year.

Tuesday morning Status: No applicants. Filing deadline is 5:00 p.m. today

Local government still works. Clean water comes out of the taps. The waste in flushed toilets still disappear. Police, fire, and ambulances arrive when one dials 911. The roads are busy but mostly good, often great.

The government that most touches the lives of readers of this blog is local government, not national government. It mostly works. Attentive readers will be able immediately to draw to mind instances where it failed. Water in Flint, Michigan was made unsafe for a time. Local government in Ferguson, Missouri decided to fund city government by using fines generated by the police. Stop and frisk programs in New York City used race to profile criminality, which harassed and humiliated innocent people.

The important point is not the ubiquity of failure. It is the opposite, that failure is unexpected and newsworthy. Those are exceptions.

Pew: 2015, and it has gotten worse since

This blog mostly looks at national politics. The ongoing story is mis-rule and the failure of democratic institutions. Within that news environment public distrust of government makes sense. 

Controversy between national politicians is big news.

But real citizens live individual lives in their own local places and people can travel across America in the general, good faith that wherever they are, things will work. Because they do.

Local news is expensive to cover by local news media. Forty years ago, when I was a Jackson County Commissioner two local newspapers assigned a reporter essentially full time to cover the local county beat. A prolific reporter for the larger newspaper, Allen Hallmark, generated three news stories a day on the County. One story would appear on Page One, two stories on Page Three. In those pre-Craigslist days, local newspapers ran very profitable classified ads. They could afford local news coverage. That was then.

Now, city and county governments operate with far less news coverage. This encourages the trend toward movement of policy decision-making away from the political arena to the "management" arena. Citizens don't know, s hi o they don't care, so they don't mind that actual government decisions are transferred to HQ staff to work out the policy balance, for ratification in public, rather than in public by the elected officials. In relative news deserts fewer issues rise to public interest. 

The issues that do rise are ones that have engaged constituencies. (A cougar trapper, back when I was commissioner; a natural gas pipeline today.) That is democracy, but democracy works better with an informed, engaged citizenry. I consider the fact that there is an open seat for County Commissioner, without anyone filing, on this last day of the filing deadline, to be a significant problem, and an indication that the job, as presently constituted, full time, partisan, a mix of legislative and executive, no longer fits the circumstances of the time. 

There are three Commissioners, so any two Commissioners make policy. The county has serious responsibilities. This is the equivalent of having a large passenger jet aircraft, filled with passengers, loaded with fuel, the engines running, sitting on the taxi-way with a sign: "Pilot Wanted." And there are no applicants. We need good applicants, and several, so the public can register its own policy choices.

This is a signal that we need change: My own view is that we need five commissioners rather than three, both for broader representation and to deal with the fact that currently no two commissioners can legally talk with each other about anything of public interest without public notice. We probably need to pay them less to indicate that the job is now part time and for broader policy, not day to day management. We probably need to make the the job non-partisan to reduce the relationship between the job and the broader state and national partisan disfunction. There is nothing very partisan about the job. 

Would that help? I don't know. But what we have now does not appear to be working.


UPDATE: 10:30 a.m. Rumors of two candidates planning to file, one Democrat, one Republican.