Juggling Priorities
What if--instead of laughing--we heeded the call to public service?

A recent newspaper editorial about Kentucky’s open records and meetings laws made several excellent points about the people’s right to know the business being conducted on the public’s behalf in our schools, our small towns and our counties.

The commentary overran the rabbit, however, when it concluded – after citing several instances when information was wrongfully withheld – that “every week, some small-time officeholder with a puffed up notion of her (or his) own importance tries to keep the public’s files closed to public scrutiny.” Wow!

It isn’t the criticism about avoiding public scrutiny that stings. Indeed, anyone seeking to shield the public’s business from public view deserves such a comeuppance. But equating local offices with “small time” is a depressing thought to someone who believes, as many people do, that the basic building blocks for civic success are well-run communities.

This prompts a couple of suggestions, offered humbly by an advocate for local governments.

• First, it is time to stop tearing down people and institutions and focus instead on their actions and constructive ways to change them, if needed.

• Second, we must realize that we should look inside ourselves if we find our government institutions as abhorrent as we sometimes claim.

After all, to borrow some naming creativity from a successful toy retailer, the reality is that the “Government R Us.”

News reports before the fall election noted a shortage of people willing to become candidates for school boards or city councils. Harvard researcher Robert Putnam calls it “Bowling Alone” – people are dropping away from civic duty. Putnam and other experts tell us that the reasons for this pullback from civic life are many and varied: People have too little time and too much to do; they experience stress in almost every aspect of their lives; they are just plain exhausted.

There also could be a bit of hesitation to do anything that doesn’t guarantee a quick financial gain. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, in many cases, working as a local elected official offers little or no pay for several nights of work a week – not to mention the telephone duty on the side.

This reality is particularly unfortunate in these times when civic involvement is so sorely needed, especially at the local level. Even with all the rhetoric about a new world order, clearly the small things that happen locally remain very important. Aren’t our lives still affected by how things work in our neighborhood? Isn’t it important how well our children are taught to read in our local schools?

The best and brightest minds are recognizing that the sum of our local parts really does add up to something greater than the whole and that the human infrastructure is more important than the other types to which we give so much attention.

But no one would argue that meeting communities’ physical needs for streets, water, sewer services, etc. is anything but a huge task. Small wonder, then – given the challenges of balancing it all – that my inquiries to civic groups about who would consider running for office are often met with guffaws of laughter.

In the weeks following the election, we were treated at almost nauseating length to commentaries about the dysfunctional nature of Florida’s system of voting and vote counting. As the nation wondered how this could be, news reports pointed out that voting machines are expensive and voters had demanded that public money be spent elsewhere – just about anywhere else, in fact.

The point is that people have increasingly abdicated the responsibility of running government to the few souls who offer themselves up for public service. And citizens participate readily in a dance of decreased expectations – rewarding with election those candidates who promise deceptively easy solutions to complex problems, then decrying the failure of those same elected officials to effect lasting change.

I often say that the premium talent for tomorrow’s leaders (assuming we have any left) will be the ability to manage dissenting opinions – not to reach consensus. In a world of special interests – when we have diminishing indications that people are motivated by the common good – it will require quite a juggler to sustain a career in public office while making real progress at the community level.

Sylvia L. Lovely is executive director and CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities
editorial@lanereport.com

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