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In this campaign, I am going to tell you what I believe about Columbia and its future. I hope that you believe as I do and will vote on April 3 to elect a Mayor and City Council that wants to take back control of and responsibility for governing the City of Columbia.
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I believe Columbia is a great place to live and work.
I believe Columbia can have a great future if we plan for it. Or, it can have a mediocre to poor future if we do not. This is the challenge for Columbia, for the City Council, and for the Mayor that the voters will elect on April 3.
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I believe that we are all in this together. We are all Columbians; we will thrive, togerther, or we will just get by, together.
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I believe in the election process. Columbians deserve a public discussion about their future. I believe that election campaigns are the best, if not the only, "place" to raise issues that are often ignored and to find out whether those issues really matter to voters.
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I believe in citizen participation/engagement in the public decisions that affect our lives and I believe that the City Council should facilitate that participation/engagement.
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I believe that the important choices for the future of Columbia have to do with governance, leadership, and policy issues pertaining to the whole city and its government. I think these are the most important issues because our decisions on these issues will affect decisions on every other issue that Columbia faces. |
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I believe the "council-manager" form of government in which "all powers of the city shall be vested in an elective council, ......., which shall enact local legislation, adopt budgets, determine policies, and appoint a city manager, who shall execute the laws and administer the government of the city" is the best combination of citizen control and professinal administration for the City of Columbia. In this form of government,the council, not the city manager should be the governing body of the City of Columbia.
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I believe the City Council should take an equal leadership role with the City Manager in developing and making policy for the City government. The issue is how to get the Council to be a policy-developing and policy-
making body, not just a micro-managing and reactive body, and how to make it more representative and more responsive to voters.
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I believe this form of government can be the kind of government that we want - representative, effective, accountable, inclusive, equitable, transparent, and responsive.
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But, I believe the "council" side of our "council-manager" form of government is broken. I believe the City Council has failed to live up to its Charter responsibilities for quite some time, it has lost control over most everything for which it has a responsibility to the citizens of Columbia. I believe the City Council has abdicated its Charter responsibilities to make policy, and by its inaction, has asked the City Manager to both make the vast bulk of public policy (mostly by de facto means) for the city government as well as to administer the city government. For the "council-manager" form of government to work well for Columbia, we need a competent, professionally trained City Manager and staff to administer the city gobernment on a day to day basis and we need a a City Council that wants to live up to its responsibilities under the City Charter to govern the City of Columbia.
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That was the bad news. The good news - I believe that we can fix the problem by electing a Mayor and City Council that wants to take back control of and responsibility for governing the City of Columbia. I believe that a Council that wants to fix itself can do so and we can catch up on 20-30 years of un-done work in 3-5 years. (For my five-point recommendation, please look at my governance platform - in progress.)
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I ask the voters of Columbia to elect a Mayor and City Council that wants to take back control of and responsibility for governing the City of Columbia. |
