How to Talk to Your City Councilman? Is This Even a Useful Question?

GELFAND’S WORLD-Neighborhood council people debate the proper relationship to have with our City Council representatives. One thought is that we should attempt to kiss up to them, to treat them with the utmost deference, to be good courtiers. After all, they rule the city. This is supposed to win a few favors. But it seems like the coward's way, as it undercuts the great narrative theme of independent neighborhood councils standing up for their neighborhoods and their rights. It would be braver to fight for what we believe in and to demand a fair, ethical government. 

It is a conundrum. You can join the insiders' culture of glad handing, back slapping, and giving out gratuitous compliments. This has certain definable advantages, in that you won't find yourself and the neighborhood council you represent becoming persona non grata. At the same time, it is a losing strategy for those with noble aspirations, since there is no great cause that is won by such tactics. At the most, there will be some nominal insider status that can be won, but it is a thin thing at best. There will be invitations to speeches which you will attend, and then you will complain about how bored you were. 

The alternative of standing up for truth and justice is, under the current governmental culture, hardly better. You will perhaps feel some self respect, but the real world outcome is to remain outside the centers of power. 

The answer to this conundrum begins with asking the right question: What is power and how do you get it? 

There are many kinds of power, and only a few actually exist in a city government. It's not like the story in the book Catch 22, where the General arbitrarily orders a soldier to be taken outside and shot. City governments don't have that kind of power. They write traffic tickets and enforce zoning irregularities. They collect some taxes and fund police departments. They don't raise navies or amend state law. 

Cities gives the real power to a small, well defined set of people. It's the mayor and the City Council and the judges, along with agencies that get their authority second hand from the council reps and the mayor. You as a city resident and neighborhood council participant don't have legally defined powers, other than to advise and to give away a few thousand dollars to worthy recipients. 

So it is fair to define attainable power as political power within the system that includes these elected officials. That translates to obtaining political influence.

So what kind of political influence is it possible for a neighborhood council to attain? 

It basically comes down to whether or not you can influence your City Council representative to do what you want him to do.  It involves you having some influence on whether he pushes the yes button or the no button on a vote that's important to you at the City Council. 

What would create that kind of influence? 

Money is of course one such influence. It's not shocking to realize that professional politicians rely on monetary contributions to their campaigns. It's not illegal. It's the official system. Our civilization has developed a whole set of laws that define how a candidate can collect campaign money and how he has to report how much he got, and who he got it from. 

But as much as money is (to quote the late Jesse Unruh) the mother's milk of politics, it is not the only route to political influence. 

To understand why not, you just have to consider what campaign money is for. It's to help win the next election.

You and your group (whether it is a neighborhood council or a homeowners' association) can negate the effect of money on a politician's next election. That's because money is one part of winning an election, but it is not the only thing. An angry group of voters could negate the effect of money. It just requires enough of them. 

Politicians intending to get reelected worry about raising money, but they also worry about taking a position that will offend voters, or failing to achieve something (such as repairing the streets) that the voters expect of an elected official. 

In other words, public opinion matters to a politician, because negative opinions are what get you defeated in your reelection bid. 

What's the most important element in public opinion as far as a politician is concerned? It's obviously the number of people who oppose you or oppose your current position on some important matter. 

And that's where neighborhood council power comes from. Or to be more precise, the lack of neighborhood council power. The more people who get involved in some local issue, the more likely it is to affect the City Council representative's decision process. Right now, the neighborhood councils are not doing to well in bringing in hordes of people. 

So here's the opportunity and its built-in paradox. The City Council representative probably thinks of your neighborhood council as an indication of overall public opinion. That's because your council is kind of a random assortment of people who are serious enough about public policy to come to your meetings. In other words, as far as your City Council representative is concerned, your neighborhood council is equivalent to a public opinion poll with a pulse. If the neighborhood council is strongly worked up about parking meter rates, then it's fair to assume that the neighborhood council participants aren't the only ones. 

We get to be the Councilman's own private canary in the coal mine. We let him know what we are angry about. 

It's our numbers that count in terms of gaining and holding political influence. It doesn't really matter whether we are diplomats in striped trousers, or whether we are just blunt talking beer drinkers. If we represent twenty thousand voters in the district, then we have influence. If we represent only the twenty or thirty people who show up for meetings, then we have a thousand-fold lower influence. 

This observation makes one other point clear. The City Council representative has a pretty good idea of how many people supported or opposed some policy at a neighborhood council meeting. But he doesn't actually know how accurately that represents the community as a whole. The neighborhood council might be unrepresentative of the average voter. The council might be overly weighted towards rich homeowners, for example. The Councilman and his staff will try to guess whether your neighborhood council is representative of the community as a whole, but he can never be completely sure. 

In other words, it's all about expectations. If the council representative (or his staff) sees you as a fairly average group of people who have come to the council at random, then he will be more inclined to treat your views and votes as representing community sentiment. What's important here is that small numbers of people don't make for good statistical samples in politics, anymore than they do in medical studies. It's a lot easier for the councilman to laugh off the split vote of 12 neighborhood council board members who are sitting in front of an audience of 8 people. 

But fill those seats with 200 people, and your influence is established. Make it clear that your council really speaks for ten or twenty thousand voters, and you have become a political player. At this level, you don't have to act like a fawning courtier. It doesn't hurt to be courteous with our elected officials, but getting the peoples' needs fulfilled depends more on having influence with the voters, and in the game of politics, it's the numbers that matter.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

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CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 48

Pub: Jun 12, 2015