At the City Council swearing-in ceremony April 17, outgoing Ald. Brian Benford, District 12, took a peculiar approach to his final address as an elected official. Most alders that day offered trite reflections and expressions of gratitude, but Benford took a moment to, among other things, discuss how four years on the City Council had made him a more bitter and cynical individual and to apologize for not having done more during his four years on the council.
The resolution that officially commended Benford for his service listed among his proudest accomplishments that he worked with a full understanding of his limitations. Now, people who know Benford understand this as an extension of his natural humility, but it should be noted that he did, in fact, face more limitations than most local elected officials.
Namely, he is a father of four school-aged children, and has to work for a living. While that might not seem significant at first glance, it helps to consider what is involved in being a local elected official. Every night of the week, most alders have meetings or events that either directly pertain to business of the city or involve some matter important to constituents of the district such as neighborhood associations or PTAs, etc.
During election time, campaign activities take away the weekend as well. This is all easy to navigate if an elected official fits one of three categories: 1) No job; 2) Few family obligations or 3) No interest in actually generating legislation of consequence, and comfortable simply to do no work and show up every two weeks to vote ""no"" on all new ideas.
Our failure to properly compensate local elected officials for their expected workload brings several anti-democratic effects. First, the offices of the mayor and county executive become disproportionately influential in the process of crafting policy.
As full-time government officials with small professional staffs and with direct authority over city or county departments, the mayor and the county executive have more opportunity to develop for or against proposed change.
If the mayor is working on a significant policy change, he can staff it out. An alder working on a policy change has to find the time to do it on his or her own, while simultaneously fulfilling duties to committees and constituents.
The idea behind not paying alders and supervisors a lot of money stems from the philosophy that a council of ordinary citizens will better represent the community than a bunch of detached career politicians. However, the current system is having the opposite effect.
Right now, the majority of our local representation is composed of retirees, childless adults, self-employed individuals and college students. In this way the representative body is formed more by people with free time than those who mirror the community they serve.
The biggest disservice we see from this policy of low-valued representation is that many of the most dynamic and brilliant minds on issues of local policy never even bother to run because there is not enough incentive to draw them away from their other obligations to career or family.
Many neighborhood activists who would be great representatives have been known to say they would run if they could cut back to half-time at their other job or get the money needed for evening baby-sitters. Sadly, our discourse has been robbed of these voices who cannot logistically provide the energy needed of quality candidates.
In the future, our community would be well served to continue electing individuals like Brian Benford, but must commit the resources necessary to ensure them fair opportunity in legislative efforts.
