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 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 regular 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 more eloquent than I has said exactly what I wanted to say. Thank you Dave Meslin!
What I expect from my local government, at the very least, is information and invitations to participate. Both ought to be delivered in a variety of formats and in plain language. Is that really too much to expect?
What do you expect from your government officials?