Dolavim.us

This summer I went to a Tigard city council meeting to voice some concern about how the city was annexing properties in my area. It was interesting to get a little glimpse into our local government and also a little disappointing. I’ve grown to have the opinion that the city doesn’t have the vision or desire to guide development in a sustainable way.
Our city’s major problems are related to growing pains (eg: traffic problems and clean water sources). The city council seems to prefer to react to these when they become so troublesome that the voting public’s sentiment forces them to. In the particular context of annexation and residential development, they don’t have rules that would require the developers to invest in infrastructure to support their developments. Instead they allow developers to quickly build, sell and then when residents move in they begin to find the problems, complain to the city and eventually (maybe) something boils over and the city either can’t afford to address the problem, says residents should do something themselves or has to pass a tax to fund a solution. The problems that I see in the city are largely caused by lack of sustainable planning on the city’s part. Either they don’t see the problems or they’re choosing not to solve them now (when they’re cheapest) versus in the future. Neither possibility is a sign of strong leadership.
Having noted that Nick Wilson is up for election this year, I was particularly surprised to see him talking about fairly sustainable ideas in the press. Of the people on the city council with whom I interacted, Nick Wilson struck me as particularly short sighted and lacking in spine. So much so that his is actually the only name I consistently remember on the council! The others didn’t inspire me, but he actively uninspired me. If he is elected it will be interesting to see if he actually pursues and drives the things he’s now talking about. In the meantime I can’t vote for him.

Oregon governor candidate Ron Saxton held a short “session” today at my site of employment. I guess for reasons related to that it wasn’t an implicit campaign stop, but I’m not sure what else it really would have been. He spoke about his vision for the state (mostly derived from the need to improve K-12 education), the need for individuals to become more involved in finding and implementing solutions, and fielded questions from the audience. Mostly straight forward stuff as on his campaign web site.
Despite party affiliation (Republican) there was no typical party retoric. In fact he quotes Bill Clinton, talks about virtuous and vicious cycles ala Robert Reich, and is openly against No Child Left Behind and federal impositions on the state. After the meeting I wanted to find more about his stance on broader topics and interestingly the web search turned up mostly dialogue about whether he’s a liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. It’s sad that this is what rules the political conversation in the US.
He seems to have a pragmatic approach to solving local problems locally. It is interesting to see somebody in politics with a long-term vision of how we can prosper which is rooted in improving public education and who’s come up into politics out of public school involvement.
My main worry is that his belief that the economy will continue to grow, generating more tax revenue and making decisions about where to find money for things in the budget a non-issue, could be wrong. He previously supported tax maintenance and growth while now is for tax reduction, but again that seems to have been a practical response to the current economic trends more than rigid party ideology. Assuming he’s wrong about goverment revenue growth under his assumed term, would that mean lots of new/expensive state bonds or cuts in service? Who knows.
Either way, he emphasises we have people and systemic problems which take leadership and open dialogue to change, not money or traditional politics. That view seems lost on most of the web though, if all the dialogue is around whether he’s “really” a Republican or Democrat. For me, I’ve not seen first hand most of the problems he talks about and compared to California it seems like we get a lot for or (tax) money here.
It’ll be interesting to watch him and the incumbent duke it out over the next few months.