in the political arena

The slow job of transitioning our city from at-large to district council elections continues. I'd already been to a session designed to inform citizens about the issues; now we're in a stage of holding workshops to solicit citizen input on some of the major issues involved.

I went to the first workshop 3 weeks ago, in a large room at the community center. Each participant was randomly assigned to a round table for discussion, so there were 4-5 of us per each of 7 tables, plus each had a facilitator from the consulting firm the city has hired. My table had, besides me, one woman from the bitter anti-politics faction I'm well familiar with from neighborhood politics, but not so bitter that she couldn't be negotiated with; one Hispanic guy from the other end of town; and one white guy who claimed to have nothing to say but actually offered some cogent comments.

I actually found our discussion useful. Our first question concerned the mayor. By our charter, this person is chosen by council from among its members, chairs council meetings and serves as city spokesperson, but has no other executive function ("weak-mayor system" is the customary term). Our question was, if council goes to districts, should the mayor, who represents the city as a whole, be elected separately at large? I came in not knowing what I thought, but we concluded that having the mayor voted on by everybody was outweighed by the at-large seat being contrary to the spirit of district elections. Anti-politics woman said it'd make the seat more susceptible to influence from real-estate developers, which is what the anti-politics people always say, but I proposed the more general language of the previous sentence and she accepted that. It was at this point that she suggested I speak for the table when we gave our reports at the end of the session.

Second question: on what basis - besides equality of population, of course - should district lines be drawn? A number of criteria were listed, but we found that all our ideas fell under the category labeled "community of interest". School districts, neighborhood associations. Council districts are being proposed to increase ethnic diversity on council, but one problem is that there aren't any real geographic concentrations of ethnicities here. There is one neighborhood that's heavily (though not overwhelmingly) Hispanic; in another form of division, there's a part of town full of mobile home parks. All we could do about those is say that they should be the centers of districts, not divided between them.

At the end the table spokespeople all stood up and went to the microphone to deliver brief reports. (This was videotaped, and was supposed to be put up on the election website. I've been waiting for it to appear before posting about this, but it's been 3 weeks and I still don't see it there.) Most though not all of us were in agreement. I hobbled slowly over, not realizing until the next morning that the cause of my difficulty walking was not my usual leg problems but a small cat toy stuck in the toe of my shoe.