Local elections — where politics matters the most of all (opinion)

Local elections — where politics matters the most of all. While the race for president, and maybe certain races in the Senate and House, dominate the news, the fact is that all politics is local and that your local government is the one that affects your life the most. It’s local government that arranges for your basic services, such as water and sewer, trash, and all the utilities.

It’s the local government that decides where you can afford to live, by setting tax rates, zoning restrictions, and approvals of commercial and residential development projects. There’s more; and you can learn all about it on your local government’s website. Ours is carson.org.

So here in Carson City, we live with the cute myth that local political offices — mayor and the board of supervisors — are nonpartisan. Of course if that were true then candidates would not identify with one party or another when registering to vote; but as you can easily verify it yourself, they do. Theoretically there is no Democrat or Republican way to solve the mundane day to day problems of a small city or small county, but of course you can clearly see not only the unavoidable personality conflicts but also manifest partisanship in the way they do or do not put items on the agenda, debate those items, and vote on those items. Yes, there’s a partisan and philosophical difference when deciding whether and how to
* provide for infrastructure maintenance, repair and improvement,
* encourage and manage growth,
* implement the Master Plan and rule on zoning variations,
* fulfill or resist state, federal and international mandates,
* set and manage the city’s budget priorities,
* choose between services and raises, etc., etc., etc.

Another one of our cute myths is that we elect supervisors by subdivisions called wards. Yes, a candidate must reside in the ward he’ll represent on the Board. But each supervisor, like the mayor, is elected at large, not by ward. Everybody gets to vote for all the candidates from all wards. So that means, at least theoretically, that a particular candidate could be unpopular in his own ward but popular in another, and win.

Specifically in ward 2, this year we gave a real choice, a very serious choice.

One candidate spent many years being to part of the local education establishment, having termed out on the school board. Now she’s running for supervisor on the basis of that experience; I think, a very narrowly focused experience that provides no chance for familiarity with the many different and very wide ranging issues facing the city outside the limited scope of the schools — not at the level that supervisors are required to understand them. The way the education system is rigged, the local school board is simply a slave of the state board, which here in this state as all over the country is simply part of the Democrat machine and its blindly partisan left wing ideologues. Here as elsewhere the curriculum is fully Common Core and fully woke. In all fairness, we can count on her to do what she’s used to doing: instinctively toe the left wing line on all issues with which she’d care to become familiar.

The other candidate was born and raised here, has worked in a wide range of local public and private sector jobs, and he has served on the various local boards and commissions addressing a wide range of concerns. His work experience equips him with the instant rapport and camaraderie with the majority of the city’s residents as well as the city staff, who do the daily grunt work of keeping the city running; an experience that is sorely lacking on the Board but which is essential to be effective in this job. He understands their jobs, needs and concerns — of the residents as well as the city employees.

And at the same time he can argue with the best of them on the constitutionality of a proposed governmental action and its consistency with founding principles. He is a self taught and an impressively serious student of the founding documents, the US and Nevada constitutions, the city charter, the state and local laws, with an encyclopedic knowledge of state and local history. When pressed for a statement of how he’d do his job as supervisor, he responds, “I will at all times seek guidance from the founders to bring to you the community you want and deserve. .... We must listen and collaborate on issues and then take principled sound actions for the betterment of our community.”

And THAT, my friends, is the difference between being either a principled problem solver, or an unprincipled pragmatist dithering here and yon, or just a partisan apparatchik instinctively automatically uncritically seeking to impose one size fits all ideological solutions regardless of the facts.

This Election Day, carpe diem: seize this rare opportunity to elect the right candidate into the right job.
GO MO
https://mauriceforward2.com/blog
https://www.carsonnow.org/story/09/09/2020/five-questions-carson-city-bo...