Welcome to the Chautauqua Vibe Round Table. This week, we’ve transcribed a portion of a presentation made by government reform advocate Kevin Gaughan to the League of Women Voters of Chautauqua County on September 16, 2009. We want to hear what you a have to say. Please send your thoughts, ideas and opinions to us at editor@cqvibe.com. A cross-section of responses will be posted on our Round Table next Sunday.
KEVIN GAUGHAN: “About 12 years ago, I started playing a small roll in starting the conversation about how we could improve local government, perhaps look at it differently. I founded a number of conferences at the magnificent, national treasure Chautauqua Institution. In that connection I did what my father always used to tell me. He’d say ‘look, if you really want to actually understand something, you can’t just read about it, you’ve got to go and see it.’ So I got on a plane and I went to Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, the place that’s taking so many of our young people. I went to Fairfield County, Virginia. I went out to Portland, Oregon and Louisville, Kentucky. I’m sure you’ve been there, all nice places - all really nice people. Couldn’t hold a candle, could not hold a candle to what we have here in terms of manmade and God-given gifts. And yet they’re moving ahead, they’re creating vibrant economies, they’re retaining our young people and they’re kicking our butts. And the reason is because they’re embracing these new doctrines, these new innovative ideas of local governance.
In the course of these last four years not only have I attended 255 town or village board meetings in Erie County, I’ve also gone to town board meetings outside. And by the way, let’s tell the truth, you go to a local government meeting here in our community and you’re told to sit down, remain quiet and not make any quick moves. And there’s an atmosphere of rancor and bitterness. That’s not us. It doesn’t have to be, and yet we accept it. Well, I don’t accept it. Because I’ve gone to these other community meetings and where our town and village board meetings are a lecture, in these other communities it’s a conversation. And I can tell you that interviewing our local politician’s counterparts around the country, the most innovative ones, the most forward-looking ones, the most interesting ones, the dynamic ones, here’s what they say: “If you’re a local elected official in America today, every decision you make should be made in service to one idea, and it’s a very simple idea and that idea is that an educated, healthy, protected and diverse community attracts other people. In other words, the whole idea of local government being involved in creating jobs or economic development is a bunch of hooey.
And what’s happening today in America in local governance, the buzz word...it used to be regionalism, it used to be consolidation, they’ve all done that, we’ve missed that boat, that isn’t coming back…the new buzz word, the new sizzle is “retrenchment” and the really forward-looking local officials are gathering themselves back in and they’re dropping all of the extraneous work and they’re focusing on those public policies in which they can have the most affect: education, land use planning to restore bucolic settings like this, transportation and the like.
I have to tell you something else, and this is under the category of tough love, at our board meetings there are discussions about where to hold the high school prom or where the Halloween parade is going to take place, or who’s going get this job or how many conferences everyone’s gone to in Albany to try to make them change. Outside of Western New York you know what they talk about? They talk about, not government, they’re less concerned about balancing the government budget because they all have to do that, they’re more interested in balancing the community budget, in finding and determining ways in which local government can be a nurturing presence to create a nurturing public environment for private investment.
I heard an interesting discussion the other day in a town board meeting in which they talked about two concepts, one was community metabolism, it’s a Richard Florida, the great urbanist whose up at the University of Toronto, he’s got this great phrase “community metabolism”, the definition of which is “the rate at which a community can take an idea and turn it into a product” and he rates every community in America on that rate of speed and you know where we are, at the very bottom. Because there are so many levels, so much bureaucracy, so many bosses that we have to gain their consent or dissent.
Then there’s this other concept called talent clustering, which is a very interesting idea, and that is: to be a successful community, to create and sustain and attract young folks with their education and ideas who are going to drive the new economy, you have to cluster them together in highly dense numbers, talent clusters. And from that sort of dense clash of ideas and energy and intellect comes the new products of tomorrow.
We’re missing that conversation because we’re all wound up in turf protection and discussions about these mundane matters. In other communities what they’ve done is they’ve turned those decisions back where they belong, in the hands of citizens and citizens committees, which we had in most of our towns and villages here until the 1970s, when they were abolished because as we lost population and capital, in an effort to rationalize their existence our public servants, who are the finest in America, we have the best services, they started inserting themselves into more and more decision-making processes as a way of rationalizing their existence - which is understandable, just as we all do – we’re all on edge, we all don’t know whether we’re going to have a job tomorrow, or a pension or whether we’re going to be able to pay for prescription drugs and the like.
What we have here is a dysfunctional community which is most manifested and dramatically reflected in our governance.”
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TAGS
local governance, government, board, communities, officials, citizens, Western New York |
