There are 40 seats up for election between the Dane County Board and Madison School Board only 4 of the seats are being challenged. And once again, people who have never run for election are walking into seats. What these two entities have in common, is that they rarely get regular coverage from the Wisconsin State Journal and other other media outlets (who mostly get their news from the Wisconsin State Journal). Without information, people can’t know what is going on and advocacy dies. When advocacy dies, so does transparency, which makes it harder for the media to cover, and on and on and on it goes.
I’m beyond disgusted. And bordering on depressed. There’s so much wrong here, I don’t know where to begin.
HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?
In no particular order, here is a start on what I see at the most basic level. It, of course, gets more complex than this.
Lack of transparency
I find both the school board and county board difficult to follow. You have to be an insider to figure out how to get information and much of it is not available electronically, particularly for the county. Consider the jail workgroups, one of the biggest issues most county board supervisors would list as important, we didn’t see what they were considering recommending until it was a final recommendation. You could kind of figure things out by reading some of the minutes, after things happened, but if you were to look at their agendas and try to email input or figure out if you wanted to spend the time attending the meeting (where there were likely handouts, that weren’t available electronically) its hard to know what you’d even be giving input on. Another issue I was interested in was the Bees and Butterlies report – how do we make sure we have pollinators needed in our community. But there was never any information linked to the agenda items to know what they were talking about and the meetings were held at times it was near impossible to go to, and if I recall, in locations that also made it difficult. Just go to the Dane County website and try to figure out how to figure out how to find meeting schedules. Even if you get to this page . . . how do you know what to do next? And the school board has a completely different software program than the city and county. Without transparency and participation, how do people know what is going on and if they want to even consider running for office?
Tight political control
This is directed at the county board. If you’re not blessed by the cool kids, the HUGE TENT liberals, which is more than half of the county board, its near impossible to run and win. And since the “liberals” or Citizens for Dane County’s Future (very little info available on this group) are such a broad organization, people who might be more progressive or left of the group are often not very welcome, its a more moderate type of group that expects strict discipline of those who it helps elect. Which I think, leads to a lot of mediocrity in general. Group think within that group limits innovation and new ideas.
Media
Media coverage in general has been cut back so much in the last 10 years that it is rare to have regular reporters attending meetings and becoming experts on subject areas where they can do fantastic coverage of these bodies. I know the county board better, but if the Sun Prairie reporter doesn’t show up, media row is likely to be empty unless I’m there. And, media coverage tends to be about what happened, they cover the meetings where there is a final vote, but not discussions and meetings that lead up to the final vote. So often, members of the public find out about something, when it is over.
Advocates
There a few or no organizers and advocates on many issues. There is hardly anyone out there alerting the media, organizing turn out or trying to influence our elected officials. Without this advocacy and organizing in the community, people don’t get involved, and when they don’t get involved at a basic level, there aren’t people out there that would naturally make good elected officials. And without people who have been involved and are knowledgable about how things work, people don’t feel “qualified”. So they can’t be convinced to run . . .
Slactivism
You can’t grow knowlegable activists and organizers when almost everything we do is ask people to like something on facebook, retweet or sign an online petition. You. have. to. show. up. Watch and learn people. See who’s talking to who, influencing what is going on and learn what motivates them. There’s no new crop of people coming up through the ranks to take on issues impoortant to the community and watching – when the media and activists disappear it all becomes insider baseball.
Lack of knowledge of how to run
Wow. Campaigns are hard. Getting harder. And without someone who has done it before working with people, lots of mistakes get made, some fatal (more about this later). And the less races there are each year, the less experience people have, the more mistakes are made and eventually, those who know how to run races become the king makers (see tight political control above), making it near impossible for the un-blessed to run for office.
State of hopelessness in Wisconsin
I don’t think I need to explain this one, but running for local office just to be constantly pre-empted by the State Legislature everytime you pass something isn’t very motivating. Plus, there are so many issues in so many places that its hard to know where to start and not just throw up your hands and go home and watch the Big Bang Theory.
Nastiness
With the nasty trolls and anonymous internet crap, things have just gotten ridiculous. Anyone who has ever read what is said about people on madison.com would wisely choose not to ever enter into the public arena. There is another option, don’t read the comments.
Thankless jobs.
Because there is no notice of the good things that happen, because no one knows if activists aren’t out there spreading the word and the media isn’t paying attention, the only attention elected officials get is when they are doing something that upsets people enough to do something. That something is usually electronic communicaitons, that as noted above, can be quite nasty.
Conservatives sitting it out
Where are the conservatives? Happy as clams that they are in control of the state and they just are sitting out. If the conservatves sit it out and the lefties are shut out by the mediocrity party – no one runs.
How do we fix this?
I don’t know. I think about it every day in one way or another. I sat out for several years from being involved in Progressive Dane in any meaningful kind of way, but I’m back, co-chairing the elections and policy committee and on the steering committee, but I haven’t convinced myself this will be the answer without an increase in people who see the same issues and are committed to doing something about it. I got so mad about the lack of legal places to sleep, I worked on Occupy Madison tiny house village and the pre-village efforts for a couple years – the village has been slow and painful (FUNDRAISING) work that has a limited impact for the amount of energy it takes. The pre-village activities were exhausting and the public doesn’t know half of what happened. I spent a few years serving on other non-profit boards (WYOU, Rainbow Bookstore, etc) but that work slow and full of detailed logistics that suck up alot of time. Clearly I try my best to be the media that isn’t with this blog, but where are the other bloggers? I bought audio and video equipment and learned to use it and edit work to try to get the word out in other ways. When there are 3 or 4 meetings scheduled at the same time, I can cover 2 or 3 of them (two audio recorders and hopefully City Channel videos one of them) but then there has to be time to watch or listen to them and figure out how to cover them. I am working with WORT to PREVIEW what is coming up as much as report on it after it happens – its an extension of my “week ahead” posts. I try to organize, but given the lack of transparency and information and timely information, that becomes incredibly difficult. And, as a result of all the non-work I do, my paid work has become extremely difficult as we were targeted for funding cuts – and non-profit work is just growing increasingly challenging for so many other reasons as well.
So, I don’t know. But I know I’ve tried. Obviously, I can only control what I do and try to spend my time in the most productive manner. . . you can see me struggling to figure out how to make something happen . . . but it can’t be done alone. And the people involved in the projects I work with (homeless advocates, Occupy, WORT, Progressive Dane) are awesome, but overwhelmed and struggling to figure it out as well. All I know is, that if something is going to change, people have to first KNOW that something needs to change, then decide that our current state of affairs is not ok, and then be willing to try to do something about it. If people come together, we’ll figure it out, but there has to be a way to come together, and man, people just hate meetings and don’t show up. So, like I said twice already, I don’t know. Hopefully tho, people will start thinking that this really is not ok, talking about it to others and thinking about how we can do better.
end unedited rant.
