Not much of an interesting day. Almost nothing noteworthy at all… Well, let’s see, over the last few days I’d had a few online exchanges with one of our current Mayoral candidates here in Jackson. He’s got a lot of, well what he might would call “fire in his belly”. He does have a lot of vigor and ambition to keep putting himself in our ballot races.
However, I’m not sure if that matches with my expectations of how the future “leader of the council” should lead the council. In my experience, I found a lot of votes as a councilmember to be difficult. Mostly, once I was in office I found that a lot of the choices were different than I thought they would be.
Not “wasting” money never seemed to be one of the choices, rather it was hiding behind every choice. Although the council gets the attention for a thousand other things, their essential duty is to spend money. Just over 100 million dollars per year of public money is spent by the City of Jackson each year. Of course, the one commonality is that no one agrees how all of those dollars are spent.
Some take a very aggressive stance and try to find anything they can stand strongly against. The pickings are slim, realistically there are just a few major departments of the City, many candidates seem to pick one as the area to save money or to make their claims for improvement. What I haven’t ever seen as often, is a candidate that displays a willingness to learn they system that they want to become a part of. Once you’re on the council, blaming the council for every problem doesn’t work as well.
I like when candidates can state a problem with unique solution they’ve thought of, a feasible solution. I really like when a candidate (or current office holder,) can take an affirmative defense on an issue. I have to admit thought, it is difficult when you knock on a door and the constituent is upset about water rates. (It’s relatively a small bill, yet coming quarterly it seems to surprise many people.)
I like to remind people about the quarterly nature of the bill and encourage them to divide it by 90 and see how much they are spending for water and sewer services per day. For even the largest families I’ve met, most water bills are well under $4 per day (just the cost of 2 or 3 bottles of water at gas station.) For myself, now that I’m down to one in my household, my water bill is only 55 cents per day.
I can’t find it now, but I’ve already written about water. I am very happy to have my public supply of safe water for less than a dollar a day, and I think most other people should be reasonable happy with our public water here in Jackson.
Although I am not running for an office at the moment (though, of course I can easily run as a write-in,) I do like the idea of public service and I think I’ve found a way to do that, even if I’m not running. Maybe I can use my blog to help inform the populace, my neighbors, my previous constituents about some issues regarding the election. Some how, I envision myself as a fact checker, as it is really easy to want to believe the things a candidate tells us, and it’s hard to decipher the difference if their new idea is even possible at all.
For anyone that likes the way I explore and write about issues and what ever questions pop up in my head every day, I wanted to let everyone know there is a way for you to get your questions answered too! Have a question about City politics? I can help. I like the graphic I found for todays post, though it might better say for me “The patient is IN”. For five bucks, you could get me to research your question and come up with my thoughts on it, of course- this is for public learning, the answers will be posted here for everyone to see.
Okay, enough about that, what else happened today? Not much, I did receive an acknowledgment from my doctor that he had received my last message and would pass it on to the decision makers. I spent some time and cleaned off my sit down desk, it had been covered with half a dozen electronics projects, now it’s another comfortable writing desk. Hm, a nap later in the day, a bit of Facebook even…
Yeah, not much exciting about today.. oh, wait one thing I guess. A few days ago I got a little tongue tied on Facebook and had gone silent in a situation that I felt I had something valuable to say, yet due to the people involved I didn’t feel confident in my lack of knowledge. Maybe two days late, yet today I went back to that post and did my best to provide a good apology for Catholicism.
Okay, enough typing, tomorrow I’ll work on having something more interesting to type.
Time to rest.