It’s not every day I’m shouting, “Amen!” while reading a newspaper editorial. My thanks to Jeff Ackerman of The Union for a well written and insightful piece:
In order to get our elected officials to remember who the “We” in “We The People” are, we may have to rearrange their furniture and confiscate their toys.
I don’t know when exactly it happens, but not long after getting elected, our various representatives start to use terms like “we” when discussing the people we elected them to keep an eye on.
We don’t send our representatives to Washington to make friends or party. We send them there to watch our money and to make sure our employees (and yes … if you work for the government you are our employee) are doing their jobs (once it has been determined that those jobs are worth the money it’s costing us).
But as soon as they take office, many of those elected officials start to sound just like the people they are supposed to be watching.
If you want to see how that might happen, go to a meeting of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors sometime over at what some call the “Rude Center,” which was actually named after a former county supervisor and first-rate gentleman named Eric Rood.
The five county supervisors sit in high-backed leather chairs elevated at the front of the chambers, looking down on the citizens they are supposed to be serving. If you want to speak to them you must approach a podium that sits just below the chairman. If you look up at the right time of day you can actually see nose hairs. It’s kind of like the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow and Dorothy standing before the Wizard of Oz.
“Who stands before the all-knowing and all-powerful Oz?”
“Well,” says the shaking and quivering taxpayer. “I was just wondering why you decided to spend a trillion dollars on a roundabout when a $200 stop sign would have served the same purpose.”
“Do you presume to criticize the great Oz, you ungrateful creatures? Consider yourselves lucky I am giving you an audience tomorrow instead of 20 years from now!”
The poor taxpayer scurries back to her seat while the five elected officials snicker, roll their eyes and cough in agreement.
I don’t know who designed those chambers, but they got it all wrong.
The five elected officials ought to be sitting in the front row of the audience and the county department heads ought to be sitting in a row facing the audience, at floor level (with the CEO in the middle). Our elected representatives, then, should be asking questions (provided by their constituents) of those department heads.
Read the rest here: Jeff Ackerman: The great and powerful board may just have it backward
Thank you Aaron Klein for bringing the editorial to my attention.
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