I once learned that you can define the political parties by how they feel about legislating economics and how they feel about legislating morality (republicans like to legislate morality but not economics, democrats are opposite and libertarians don't want to legislate either).
I've observed that in our city you can separate council members by their level of scrutiny of developers and their level of scrutiny of the budget/administrative policies. Some scrutinize both pretty thoroughly, some lean more heavily to one of those areas and some kindof pick and choose their battles on both ends. If I had time to call the candidates again, I would ask them which camp they fit in. Maybe some of them will read this and let us know. I know I personally would lean more toward scrutiny of budget/admin than of developers but I also think there's a nice balance when you have differing philosophies on the council.
As another personal note, I've enjoyed getting to know the candidates. I appreciate the time and courage it takes for them to put themselves out there and I truly won't be disappointed no matter what happens because I think they are all wonderful people who will serve the city well.
I would think there are probably at least 2 things that influence which way council members lean.
ReplyDeleteFirst, many councilmembers run after having served on the planning commission. This give them a background dealing with developers and so they would naturally gravitate toward that side based on expertise.
Second, budgets deal with numbers and unfortunately too many people are not comfortable enough with numbers to really want to dig into the numbers to really figure out just what is going on.
Obviously, you cannot categorize everyone with these 2 brushes but it does help understand why people have the tendencies that they do.
Regardless of which camp a candidate comes from obviously the most important thing is how diligently they learn their new responsibilities and how diligently they work examine the issues that come before them.
Personally, I nearly always felt that I didn't know enough when I sat down in council meetings. One of my problems was me. I wanted to be an expert about everything that came before the council but I don't have multiple engineering degrees with 20 years of experience in Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Geo-technical and every other branch of engineering so I could understand and know the right questions to ask developers, contractors and the Development director who had projects and issues come before the council. Nor did I have a CPA or MPA or JD degree so I could fully understand and know the right questions to ask the administrator, budget officer, police chief, fire chief, HR director and City Attorney about the many things that we had to deal with in administering the city government.
So I had to rely upon the expertise of those people to be honest and forthright and to willing bring out all sides of the issues so that I would know the pluses as well as the minuses about the decisions we were asked to deal with. Unfortunately, I found that I did not always get all the information or even sometimes the correct information to help me make the proper decision.
Continued in future comments hopefully.
Stacey Haws
First, one of my areas of expertise is insurance. Prior to moving to Riverdale I had worked for health insurers in Boise, ID and Las Vegas, NV as an actuary (someone who does much of the backoffice math and statistics to develop insurance rates).
ReplyDeleteNot long after I was elected to the council, we had to deal with the renewal of the health insurance contract for the city. As always it seems, costs were rising at quite fast rates. The administration was proposing that we go with particular plan but that we slightly modify the way that employees were getting their insurance in a way that could encourage them to embrace changes which might help encourage the employees to change their utilization of the insurance plans in way which might reduce the rate of growth of costs in the future.
The city had always provided the employees with an extremely generous health insurance benefit and this modification while fairly minor was fairly radical. The way this plan was set up, initially, the employees would reap any savings that might occur from their choices. Eventually, the plan might allow saving to accrue to the city as well but initially the city was not going to realize any savings.
The plan was presented in a way that gave the impression that the city might see savings initially. So I asked fairly directly if the savings would go to the city or to the employees. Since I already knew what the answer was and I thought it was a fairly simple answer I was shocked when administration at the time responded that the city could see some savings. I had already decided that the direction that the city was going was a very positive way. And to be fully honest, I was a bit shocked that administration would even propose this because it was, while minor, a fairly radical change from the way the city dealt with the employees in the past. I applauded the cities administration for their bold proposal, but unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed that they could not be honest and forth right in answering the question because I was fairly certain from the comments of the other councilmembers that they though that some of the savings would immediately go to the city and of course the council wanted to show that they were saving the city money.
After that point I was always very leery at the answers that I got from administration because when I had asked what I though was a simple straight forward question which while it seemed a negative, was simply another side of the issue that I felt the whole council should understand before making a decision, I got an answer which was not the whole truth.
Katie:
ReplyDeleteI have never though of it as a choice between whether to scrutinize budget or scrutinize developers. On the planning commission, we deal with creating legislation as it applies to our land use ordinances, and then making sure that those ordinances are adhered to by property owners, which I guess would be primarily the "scrutinize developers" side of things. The council has the final say on the same issues, and also has to legislate other parts of the city code, as well as do the budgeting. I intend to apply the same level of zeal in matters of budget as in matters of land use decisions. I think that it is less a matter of which I will scrutinize, as it is how I will scrutinize.
As far as development is concerned, I have seen council members place unreasonable demands on developers, which has created word "on the streets" in development circles, that Riverdale is not the place to do business. I have seen other cases where developers have submitted plans which, I thought, were lacking in certain areas. I think there's a middle ground of applying our city's ordinances, yet allowing for reasonable exercise of property rights, that should be striven for. There's more on my website about this.
As for budget, I'm fundamentally opposed to the idea of tax and spend, and think smaller is generally better, and that taxpayers' money, if not sacred, at least represents trust on the part of the residents that the elected officials are ethically bound to honor in using the money wisely. I had an internship with UDOT and another with Ogden City, and worked as a consultant for Brian Head Town as their engineer, and saw first-hand some of the waste and inefficiency that occurs in some government jobs. I also saw, on the other hand, the damage that can be done when overzealous elected officials scrutinize every penny and squeeze their staff, chop off heads and acquire new staff. It can be demoralizing and create a downward spiraling effect in the performance of city staff. There is a factor of "you get what you pay for" and caution and restraint should be used, particularly when trying to cut costs by taking it out of the household budget of city staff. If we want Riverdale to be a good place to live, we need to make sure that the people who actually take care of the town full-time aren't crucified by those who come in for a few hours every other week and tell them how to do their jobs.
Does that make sense? If it seems like I'm talking about taking a middle ground, that's because I am. That doesn't necessarily resonate with the political right or left, but it's what we need to get the job done.
Thanks for doing this blog, I think it's a great idea.
Here's the fast link to the article I wrote two years ago about property rights and land development:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.statenforcouncil.com/2009/08/property-rights-and-planning-go-hand-in.html
-Mike Staten