Local governments have an immense impact on our daily life and the quality of life we enjoy. Through zoning they determine what can be built where and by extension how long it takes most people to get from where they live to places to shop, go to school, go to work, or go to a place to enjoy nature’s beauty. Through local Boards of Education most education policy and curriculum decisions are decided, impacting whether we live in a society capable of critical thinking, able to do their own research when they want to find something out, and able to communicate their ideas to others in society. Local governments determine the locations of where roads are built, how well they are maintained, where traffic lights are placed, the timing cycle of those traffic lights, where sidewalks and bikepaths are built and where kids can walk to school, they build local parks and playgrounds, they license and regulate cable providers, they run or oversee water and sewer infrastructure, in many ways they oversee the canvas on which we live our lives.
We have also recently scene the impact money can have at the local level, with the recent arrests of several NJ mayors. In many places developer money is the main source of campaign contributions for local politicians.
I will be moderating a panel of local bloggers at Netroots Nation in two weeks. It is a superb panel with Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg of the Philadelphia blog Young Philly Blog, Paul Hogarth of the San Fransisco blog BeyondChron, Eli Ackerman of the New Orlean’s blog We Could Be Famous, and Josh Kalven who blogs about Chicago on the blog Progress Illinois. And me, Evan Coren, moderating. I blog at Howard County Blog.
It is a great range from all over the country, from group blogs and individual blogs, from those who cover local government, politics, and news media to watch dogs and activists who went from blogging to considering to run for office to actually running, and in my case getting elected.
The other panelists in the next week and again at Netroots Nation will tell you a bit of their story of how and why they started covering local issues on a blog and how that blogging has connected into grassroots activism or having an impact on the political discourse in their community. But I will kick it off by leaving my lurker status and tell you a little about how and why I started a local blog and how that led me to run for and win a seat on my hometown’s city council.
I grew up in the planned community of Columbia, MD that was built in the 1960’s by James Rouse to be a socio-economically mixed community, preserve greenspace, fostered community, and have the infrastructure to support a high quality of life. Columbia is located half way between Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD on I-95.
The developer, General Growth Properties, that had bought the Rouse Company proposed injecting 5500 new residential units into Columbia’s downtown. Though I had long been aware of the growth pressures facing Columbia as a well designed community in a county with a great school system located between two big cities, the more I looked at the developers proposal the more I saw sloppy designs, which would destroy existing gathering places, create immense congestion and parking problems, and would not be socio-economically mixed. I thought Columbia’s downtown was a good place to absorb growth pressures and prevent sprawl, but it was clear that the plans were being done in a way that was directly at odds with the design goals that had made Columbia (along with neighboring Ellicott City) the fourth best place to live in the US according to Money Magazine.
As I was discussing my concerns with others in the community, I realized that I needed a place to direct people so they could look at the proposed plan, but I knew the county website with the plan had a lot of deceptive sketches that seemed designed to sell the plan, but were inaccurate in geospatial relationships. I had been a reader of DKos since 2003 and seen how our community could be such a great think tank for creative solutions, so I thought, "I will create a blog and it would give voice to those who had ideas on how to fix this sloppy plan". I also thought, it takes three votes on our five member county council to make zoning changes, this zoning change really effects everyone in the county, and our county could really use this type of format for other types of discussions as well. So I decided to call my blog "Howard County Blog".
At first I had this grand vision of making Howard County Blog formatted like DKos using scoop. I am not a programming wiz, so I started asking friends with more tech savvy than me on how to set something like that up. None of my friends had done something like that and as time wore on I realized that was going to be more complicated than I was able to do with the time and tech skills I had. Two days before a big community meeting I had organized with a former County Executive, who was now in the House of Delegates and who shared my concerns about the proposal, and I still hadn’t gotten the blog up and I knew announcing the blog address at the meeting would be my best launch time to get word out to the most people. Luckily a friend came through at the last minute and showed me how to use the tool Blogger. We had the meeting and I announced the blog address and started doing detailed posts about the problems of the plan and how they could be fixed. A good summary with links to some of my best stuff is here. I also started looking for guestbloggers, particularly ones from other parts of the county that could broaden the coverage on the blog.
Though the blog never had as big a readership as I hoped, I started noticing it did change the nature of the dialog about the plan. Politicians encountering pushback decided to wait until after the 2006 election to push forward on the plan.
In Howard County the County Executive oversees the Department of Planning and Zoning staff and the County Council passes zoning amendments. All county offices are elected every four years on non-Presidential even years. The city of Columbia does not have zoning power, but it does take positions on proposed zoning changes that effect it and try to get county officials to listen to its concerns by writing letters and testifying at hearings. The Columbia Council non-partisan elections are in late April every year with a rotation of which council seats are up every year.
In the spring of 2006 I had helped another local activist defeat the incumbent Columbia Council representative from Town Center that had been saying we had to trust the developers. I thought an important part of the Columbia Council’s job was to ask question and make sure any plans were well designed. By the spring of 2007, I found out that my representative on the Columbia Council was not seeking re-election. I started asking around to see who I would want to support. I discovered that one person definitely running was, Jason, the Vice Chair of the Village Board. Columbia is divided into 10 villages, with each village having a representative to the Columbia Council and its own board, so village board members like Jason had already been elected in the same district as the open Columbia Council seat.
I found out Jason was being backed by the guy I had helped defeat the year before. I then arranged to have dinner with Jason to see where he stood on the issues I cared about. Though he was a nice guy, it was very clear to me that he didn’t know very much about Columbia’s planning, he thought the developers proposed plan was a done deal the way it was, and he wasn’t likely to ask many tough questions or press for fixing the plan. Jason also was going to be hard to beat. He had already been elected in the district, was a coach of a lot of local little league teams, his wife was best friends with the PTA President at one of the local elementary schools, he had the backing of the Chair of the Village Board, who had been chair at that point for 18 years, and though I didn’t know it yet, would get both the support of the outgoing incumbent and the endorsement of the local newspaper.
I tried to find someone else to run, but no one was willing to run the type of race needed to win. Friends encouraged me to run, so I ran the past election numbers, figured out what I needed to do to win, got permission from work, and got in the race seven weeks before Election Day. I worked my butt off going door-to-door from 11am to sunset every Saturday and Sunday for the next seven weeks other than Easter and my sister’s birthday (she had a tree planting birthday party). I got about 35 friends to also do lit drops. In the end I doubled the turnout from past elections and won by 21 votes.
At Netroots Nation we will have a great discussion of the role blogs that focus on cities and counties play and how they relate to activism.
For those going to Netroots Nation, I hope you come to this fabulous panel and I look forward to talking with you. I have been to every one of the Yearly Kos/Netroots Nation conventions and they are always fabulous.
You can let us know you are coming and help us spread the word using this Facebook event announcement.
In the comments I would also love to hear about your favorites local blogs?