A post in which the blogger attempts to clean himself of the ickiness of judging eight people who applied for an open city council seat in Olympia.
I spent the last week or so writing eight posts about people that are applying for open council seat, and I’ve come to a conclusion that about half of them shouldn’t be on the council. I also concluded that I’m not worthy to judge and I only hope that the small amount of wisdom I have helped people think about who might be appointed to serve on the Olympia City Council.
And, that if I had applied, I wouldn’t have been qualified to serve. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have even gotten through filling out the application packet. While I have some strong feelings about how Olympia can write a better budget, even thinking about the city’s compressive plan would have thrown me off.
Maybe I would have written something about trying to open that process up, make it more transparent and obvious, but that would have been a lot like my budget answer too.
Anyway, reading and writing about those applicants made me think long and hard about my own civic life.
One of the standards I used to judge was whether the applicant had served on a city advisory board, which I’ve never done. Those closet I came as an ad-hoc committee on wi-fi downtown. I think we served the council well, but that hardly gave me a deep understanding of any aspect of city management.
So, maybe next time the city recruits for their many advisory boards, I’ll be applying. Not because one day I want to apply or run for city council, but because if I’m so interesting in my city, I should try to be a bigger help.
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