It’s Not Apathy, It’s Barriers
During the last municipal election I had a rather disturbing conversation with one of the folks running for council. The gist of the conversation was that I believed that city hall, elected councillors and city staff could do a way better job of engaging, informing, inviting and generally including constituents in local initiatives, decisions and plans.
His suggestion was that I should pay more attention to the newspaper and just be prepared to jump at the few chances there were for engagement.
I may have also suggested that if city hall was a business and the marketing department repeatedly came back saying .. uh, well, we put an ad in the paper, guess no one was interested… they’d be job hunting really quickly.
Finally someone with more eloquence and cognitive organization than me has said exactly what I wanted to say. How cool is that!
What I expect from my local government, at the very least, is information and invitations to participate, both delivered in a variety of formats and in plain language. Is that really too much to expect?
What do you expect from your paid officials?
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