The Future is Local: Who Are the People in Your Government?

They’re not the people that you meet each day, but they should be

If you grew up with Sesame Street, you might remember the recurring sketch I’m referencing here. If not, “who are the people in your neighborhood” is only a websearch away, and it’s worth watching a few minutes of YouTube and then coming back here to continue. I’ll wait. 

Now that you’re back, let’s talk about what these bits were teaching children. At their core, these pieces were celebrations of working professionals that most people interfaced with almost daily but could overlook: teachers, garbagemen, the police, and so forth. This lesson, that each of us should pay more attention to the people around us, is both well-meaning and valuable. I want to carry it a touch further and hook it into my broad thesis that the future is local, especially regarding your interaction with government. 

I grew up in Riverside, California, which even then had a quarter-million people in it (and has grown since). For me, government was invisible. Things just happened in the neighborhood. Trash got picked up by trucks coming and going to and from … someplace. School buses materialized to take kids to and from school, and vanished the rest of the time. Fire trucks and ambulances were always going somewhere. Police cars were almost never going anywhere. Road construction crews were like migratory animal packs forever drifting along the highways. School was inevitable for my kid self the way death and taxes were to Benjamin Franklin. Stuff was happening, but as a kid you barely see it, and don’t understand what drives it or how any of it is organized, and most of all how much it all costs.   

Years later, I found my adult self living in Perry, Oklahoma (population 5,000) for 12 years. In a town that small, government is very visible. You meet city councilfolk in the grocery store aisle. You’re in band boosters with members of the school board. You have a co-worker who’s married to a county commissioner. The public works department is only a half-dozen guys. Everybody knows who the emergency contact for a power outage is, by name. For the first time in my life, I saw how a population tried to use government to make everybody’s lives easier.

And I saw how government inevitably screwed that up. I watched the city council blithely condemn fixer-upper houses in the middle of complaining about a lack of housing in town. I watched a city councilman declare $25,000 “not a lot of money” when considering the city manager’s request to hire a consultant to write job descriptions for city government employees. I watched the Perry police department squeeze eight brand new Dodge Chargers from an already-thin budget. I watched the school system (only about 1000 kids K-12) ignore abuse allegations until they exploded into a 13-plaintiff lawsuit and a child pornography scandal. I watched city government spend an exorbitant sum on a local sports complex, speculating that it would pay for itself via visiting tournament teams (a vain hope, as many predicted). I got in a shouting match with the mayor in a town meeting about his plan to subsidize the despised local hospital with a 1% local sales tax increase because “we gotta have a hospital.” I watched a series of pretty-tyrant code enforcement officers cite an endless succession of property owners. Over and over I watched government be stupid. And I didn’t like it. 

Fast forward: the kids got raised, the company I worked for got bought, and finding myself both alone and with some nest egg options, I moved back to Riverside, the land of my people. I love Riverside. It’s got a vibe. But now I could see the government. And I didn’t like it. It was doing all the same stupid stuff as the small town government I had found so infuriating. But because the general population was so much larger, it could hide. So many people were living so many different lives that few government actions affected everybody, so the populations of the aggrieved were separated and unable to find one another. And most pernicious, even when government idiocy affected everybody, nobody knew how to do anything about it. Because very few people even knew where “the government” could be found, much less petitioned or changed.

This is the great success of local-weasel government: making itself deliberately inaccessible. Local government obfuscates itself like a stingray wiggling into the sand of the ocean floor. You can swim right over it every day, but the moment you put your foot down you get stung. It’s got high-profile organs (everybody knows what a local police cruiser looks like) but much of the daily workings of government are either purposefully camouflaged or placed behind a wall (both figuratively to describe bureaucracy generally, and literally as visiting most offices requires citizens to communicate with clerks through a pass-slot in a plexiglass barrier).       

If you, like me, are now noticing that your local government is lame and somebody needs to say something, you may be wondering as I did: how do you find these people? How do you get informed so you can get involved? 

Here is a list of things you should start doing right now:

First, find the links to the online presence of your state, county, city, and school board (there may be others like a water board, depending on how things are organized around you, but focus on the big ones first). At those places, find out what district you live in. Your school board trustee area, city council ward/district, and county supervisor district/area are almost certainly different, so you need all three. Maps are out there, but you’ll need to do some online digging around to figure out how you’ve been distributed to your local electeds. 

Note: these are different because any given body of representatives needs to carve up the community into roughly equal constituent districts. If there are five members of your school board, that means the school district will probably be divided into five separate areas so that each board trustee represents an equal portion of the town’s population. If there are also seven city councilpeople in your town, their districts will be a little smaller than the school board areas. This may seem frustrating, but it’s actually a subtle good thing. 

Anyway, as you determine which districts you live in (and you should write it down, and bookmark the webpage with the maps), find out who your local elected representatives are. Now find the websites for your various reps and bookmark them. If you live in a larger town, there’s a good chance that the city or county page has specific pages set aside for each rep. In smaller communities with less budget for that kind of thing, your reps may be relying on Facebook. Whichever way, you need to be subscribed to whatever newsletter/webpage/social media account your local electeds use. Get on their information distribution lists. Going forward, these are subscriptions you can monitor for information on community stuff. 

While you’re subscribing to all that, find out when the boards/councils meet. Put the meetings on your calendar. You don’t have to attend (you might not even be able to, since many of them are like Tuesday at 10am, when most normal people are working their own jobs) but you need to know when they’re happening. You need to know when the people playing the game make their moves.

Also, find out where to find their meeting agendas (and bookmark it). This is information they are legally required to post for public access, but it’s often done in a way that’s deliberately user-unfriendly. Don’t give up. Read the agendas. A word of warning and advice here: your local government agendas will probably make almost no sense to you at first. More on this in a minute. 

Rediscover your local news outfits. You might still have a newspaper. Subscribe. This might seem more expensive than it should be, especially if you haven’t subscribed before. It’s worth it. If you absolutely can’t afford it, then get familiar with your local library, who almost certainly maintains subscriptions to everything (and often has online subscriptions you can access through the library web portal for free). Local journalism still exists–it’s a shadow of what it used to be, but it’s still limping along. In addition, look around for unofficial “city weekly” rags, online watchdog sites, or even “What going on in X” community social media pages. You need to find local people writing about local things, and read what they write.

Part of that writing will be community groups publishing their meeting schedules (either in a printed calendar section or in community social media feeds). Find a group that seems to share your values and join it. Be very careful here, though. Remember that many groups have been co-opted as useful idiots by people with agendas. Don’t let your newfound sense of civic action lead you to pledge anything to a group that just congratulates itself for being a group and doesn’t actually do anything. Be judicious with your membership. 

That seems like a lot, and it is. You’re going to need to budget time to find this stuff and stay abreast of this stuff. But remember the rules of the game get made by the people who show up. If you don’t pay attention and show up, that doesn’t mean the game stops. It just means you’re volunteering to lose. 

A few final words of warning.

Remember when you were a kid (in the misty past before binge-watching was a thing) and you started watching a TV show, but you were coming in during season three so it took a few episodes for you to figure out the cast and the plot threads? Reading community calendars and local government agendas is like that. There will be a whole different kind of language you will need to get used to, but as you do the ins and outs of local activity will become clearer.

Keep in mind, too, that local action will look like very small ball to you for a while. It will be tempting to give up and just go watch cable news some more to catch up on whatever they’re telling you to be outraged about today. Remember, though, they have a real financial interest in keeping you both outraged and inert. They will be Very Concerned about a Current Thing you can’t affect (*cough* Ukraine *cough*) and will want all your attention riveted on the Thing. Resist that siren song. There’s stuff going on in your town that needs your attention. On paper, the idea of a new local sales tax to maintain streetlights may seem totally rational, and not anything you need to worry about. But if you start digging around, you may find that the last two times this got tried it didn’t work, and in fact there are no-bid sweetheart-deal contractors padding their pockets with that money. That’s a big deal you might have a chance of influencing. Don’t let events thousands of miles away distract you from the things happening in your neighborhood. 

There are things happening locally you can see each day, and you need to.