Luke : “Listen, I can’t get involved. I’ve got work to do. It’s not that I like the Empire; I hate it. But there’s nothing I can do about it right now… It’s all such a long way from here.”
Obi-Wan : “That’s your uncle talking.”
Star Wars IV: A New Hope
Dad Windu, the Padawan Learner and I went to our city’s community meeting last night to help direct the path of our city. Padawan Learner was a bit skeptical about going; the word boring was, perhaps, mentioned a few times. Ultimately, though, he enjoyed it after the two BigWig speeches were over. It was a working meeting, with the 300 or so people who showed up breaking into 6 groups that focused on different topics relating to making the city more appealing to residents and tourists, environmentally sustainable and cleaning up pollution.
We focused on the transportation segment, not surprisingly. For the first 30 minutes, our group discussed the desperate need our city has for bike paths, of which the city’s transportation engineer has historically been opposed for “liability” reasons. Additional issues of ways to increased tourism and a rather interesting idea for new bus shelters were also brought up. We voted on what we thought the most pressing concerns were and then moved on to a question put to us from the city for the next 30 minutes.
“How can we make the city more walkable?” Pages of ideas were generated. Some of the more popular ideas were: sidewalks where they are currently lacking; mid-street pedestrian islands for wide roads; the ability to manually increase the pause between reds to allow slower pedestrians to get all the way across; pedestrian bridges to for high traffic intersections and across highways; allowing plantings in the city owned right-of-ways (especially between sidewalks and roads); actual enforcement of zoning requirements (such as sidewalk maintenance by property owners) and start-up tax breaks for new businesses in the city’s neighborhood business districts.
Padawan Learner, as we drove home, said that he found the process interesting and especially liked having an equal vote on the ideas. Several people in our group commented on how good it was to see him involved in the process and speaking up with his ideas. A good start to a lifetime of community involvement? I can only hope.
this is most excellent!
i think municipal level politics is one of the more rewarding levels to be involved in as the results can be a lot more immediate than in the other levels
i’m always surprised at things like appallingly low voter turnout for municipal elections as really, this level of government has such a tremendous impact on day to day life for the residents
good on ya
(so says the political science grad who just wants to smack people when they say ‘i hate politics’ or ‘whatever. this is just politics.’ what??? arrrgh)
Hornblower: I find it shocking how easy it is to ignore the things that affect us day-in and day-out, if we don’t take the time to pay attention. It actually matters if free neighborhood recycling is available or not – my garbage load would go up dramatically without it (not to mention my garbage hauling fees) – but it’s easy to pretend that local issues don’t really matter when there’s dinner to make, gymnastics to get the kids to and a great movie on HBO.