BCR's "Why I'm Voting For..." series: An introduction

In three years of writing Bull City Rising, I've generally shied away from "endorsing" candidates. But it's a position I've wrestled with. There are stories where I purposefully try to take the most objective perspective possible -- in recaps of candidate debates, for instance.

But I've also had folks ask in the past if I'd share what my thoughts were on races, particularly this fall's race. Some say it's because they're not sure they align with or feel connected to Durham's PACs. Others say it's because they'd just like to know where I stand on the election, as someone who's been watching the race.

I put the trial balloon out on the blog in recent weeks, and asked for feedback from readers as to whether they'd find my recommendations on candidates a help or hindrance. The response, by email and in the comments, was overwhelmingly positive.

So, this week, I'm going to step purposefully into the frame, and share who I'm voting for -- and why. But, in keeping with my approach to BCR, I'm not going to call these "endorsements" per se.

Instead, I'd like to focus on my reasons for making the choices I'm making at the ballot box this fall. Many of you may reach different conclusions, particularly if the factors that matter to you in a candidate vary from mine. That's why I'm calling this series "Why I'm Voting For" -- rather than an endorsement.

Over the next three days, I'll tackle the mayoral and City Council ward races. But before going there, I'd like to start with some background -- on why I think we as a community too often get it wrong in choosing our elected officials.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Frankly, I think too much of our campaigns are preoccupied with stances, visions, pro's and con's, and speechifying. It's great to hear someone say they'll do this for downtown, or that for neglected neighborhoods, or something-or-other for youth.

Vision and ideas matter, don't get me wrong. But what is the job that we're electing men and women to City Council to fulfill?

Fundamentally, there are three core roles:

• Provide fiscal oversight, providing input to a $350+ million budget, major capital expenditures, and tax levels; in the process, set policies that guide the administration's decisions over future spending (and therefore taxes)
• Serve in what's almost a "board of directors" function over the CEO (city manager), with hiring/firing responsibility. (The same applies to the city attorney and clerk roles.)
• Represent Durham effectively to the broader world -- be in communicating with state officials in Raleigh, peers in Durham County or other local governments; working on regional committees for transportation, growth, water and more; or lobbying business, non-profit, and university leaders looking to relocate or expand in Durham.

Bottom line: I don't think our goal is to elect the best orator, or the most extroverted, or the most dynamic.

Instead, as someone who's spent the better part of a decade managing people and budgets, I tend to apply the same filter to municipal candidates that I would to someone I might hire for a professional position.

Just about everybody who hires people has been through behavioral interviewing training, a program that comes back to the obvious (but often overlooked) idea that when you're hiring someone for a job, you ask them specific examples from their past as to how they handled a difficult situation, or a personnel problem, or made a mistake.

Asking a job candidate questions that don't ask for specific experiences and memories is inviting them to answer simply based on their visualized future success -- rewarding them, in order words, for being great storytellers.

This is common sense for absolutely any real-world job hiring.

Why is it such a novel concept, it seems, when we look for political candidates?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Sure, challengers criticize the incumbent board for the decisions made. And incumbents stand by those same decisions, or talk about the outcomes and results they've accomplished (or haven't.)

Those are important elements in a decision; ultimately, the preparation one has for a job is necessary, but not sufficient, for success in accomplishing one's outcomes.

Still, the preparation is most necessary.

I want to see elected officials who have experience as managers. Who understands how budgets work, and how the financial interplay between revenues, operating expenses, program funds, and capital borrowing work.

I want to see elected officials with the experience and gravitas to be able to sit down at a table with Charles Meeker and other Wake County leaders over difficult choices facing us on Jordan Lake and on transit.

I want to see elected officials who actually know how our local government works.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

True story: heading into the candidate debate last week at the downtown county courthouse, I arrived at the front door of 200 E. Main St. simultaneously with another candidate who shall remain nameless. The candidate asked where the debate was being held. I said it was in the County Commissioners' chambers -- then, after hesitating a moment while I turned a hunch over in my mind, opened the door and gestured for the candidate to go first.

The candidate strode down the first floor, and got ten paces ahead before I informed him that the County Commissioners' chambers were on the second floor.

Folks, our City Council members meet regularly with their peers in the County on all manner of issues. They jointly manage inspection and planning functions. They discuss possible mergers of government functions.

Am I going to hire someone to oversee a $350 million enterprise, to manage that business' CEO, if they don't even know where the County Commissioners meet?

One might argue that the values I'm suggesting matter here are full-tilt leans towards incumbents, towards the status quo.

Not so, I'd say. John Best was the incumbent against Mike Woodard four years ago, and could speak to his experience on Council versus political newcomer Woodard. But of course, Woodard -- long active in civic organizations, and as president of the INC -- had plenty of real-world leadership experience. And he knew the issues cold.

Woodard was more qualified for the office than the incumbent who held it -- to say nothing of Best's much-publicized personal problems -- and won the office with broad support.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The standard response from those who lack such professional experience -- or the civic experience of the form the novitiate Woodard had four years ago, or that city/county board experience Frank Hyman talked about in a column several weeks ago in The Durham News -- might be that fresh ideas and passion can and should trump these skills, that we need (to use the Obama mantra) change to accomplish what we needed.

Well, I voted for Obama for change. Change from (if I may take the sopabox) ill-informed public policy and an insular view of the world.

Obama's change was that he was both personally magnetic and also intellectually brilliant, able to chart a better course for our country in the eyes of those who voted for him.

But change for change's sake isn't wise if the replacement doesn't have the skills and experience to make the right decisions -- or is unwilling to take the political heat to make those decisions.

One example: I came under some heat in forwarded emails last year for criticizing Joe Bowser's stand on the water rate increase. But Bowser's been calling for Durham to grow its population at a time when, in order to accommodate even reasonable growth, we need to make major capital investments in our water supply.

And given that we pay for water and sewer expansions with revenue bonds -- a funding mechanism that is securitized against cash flows from utility sales -- and that our water rates were in the bottom decile for N.C. cities, it was hard to understand how he could be supporting population growth while opposing an investment in water infrastructure about which we literally have no choice.

Bowser's stand, I argued, was either shamefully populist -- willfully ignoring the facts for the sake of scoring political points with those who didn't know better -- or showed an ignorance of the issues.

Don't misunderstand me. Bowser's a sharp politician; wily might be a better word. I'd lean towards the latter over the former explanation in this case.

But when we look around our city and see that we're years behind in investing in roads... that we're taking out capital bonds for deferred maintenance on city parks, parking decks and the like... that we're having to re-invest yet again in Rolling Hills (quite properly, I think) through national developers after the failure of one politically-connected, city-backed local development group after another....

Well, color me unconvinced our city runs best on new hopes and dreams.

Or, for that matter, on the shoulders of those who tell us what we want to hear, not what we have to hear.

From what I'm hearing in the campaign debates, there are plenty of candidates for office this fall who are playing that same populist card. But hopes and dreams built without the firmament of experience, facts and data get you the same bad projects, bad outcomes, bad spending we saw in yesterday's Durham.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now, besides candidates having the real-world experience to be successful in the roles, I'm looking for a few things from an issues perspective.

• Do they have a vision to help make the investments needed now to allow Durham to meet its projected significant growth in the next 30 years?
• Do they understand that growth and economic competitiveness -- regionally as well as within Durham -- is impossible without greater density, and that effective bus and fixed-route transit is required to accomplish that, along with road projects like the East End Connecter, US 70 freeway upgrade, and other such critical improvements?
• Will they support more early intervention for youth to maximize the chance of breaking the cycle of poverty?
• Can they articulate how the City should move forward on the twin issues of improved water capacity and improved pollution and stormwater standards?
• Do they recognize that we need to bring in both more professional/scientific/medical positions as well as skilled manufacturing, logistics and the like? And do they understand that education is critical to preparing Durham's pockets of poverty for the jobs of tomorrow -- since the old-line unskilled manufacturing so many pine for is long gone?  (William Julius Wilson's "When Work Disappears" seems to remain the seminal work here.)
• Can they balance the ongoing needs of downtown with the need for investment in long-neglected neighborhoods... and are they willing to support neighborhood reinvestment without drawing down into the "take care of our local folks" mentality that led to the disastrous histories of Rolling Hills and the Heritage Square shopping center?

Tomorrow at BCR: the Ward 3 and mayoral races.

Wednesday: the Ward 2 race.

Thursday: the Ward 1 race.

Comments

[Doug Roach]

Thanks Kevin.
As a rookie in the Bull City I'll be anxiously anticipating your take on what is (to my somewhat uneducated eyes) a most definitive race.
I have and will continue to attend "candidate forums". But until some new concept of communication actually allows for intensive interaction with the candidates on very specific public points and doesn't focus instead upon the "sound-bites" and hyperbole, I'll remain ignorant of exactly where most of these people stand on specific issues.
As you said, dynamic oration is useless in this process IF our goal is to elect the most qualified candidate. Perhaps this is why we seem to elect great communicators instead of good managers.

[Todd P]

Kevin - This is very well said:
_____________
"But when we look around our city and see that we're years behind in investing in roads... that we're taking out capital bonds for deferred maintenance on city parks, parking decks and the like... that we're having to re-invest yet again in Rolling Hills (quite properly, I think) through national developers after the failure of one politically-connected, city-backed local development group after another....

Well, color me unconvinced our city runs best on new hopes and dreams."
______________

Durham has a long history of poor choices, of a ongoing failure to invest in basic maintenance of streets and parks and city buildings, of failure to follow through on capital and development and transportation planning, and of failure to efficiently spend voter-approved bond money.

We need elected officials who are wise enough to see the big picture and recognize how their actions impact the entire city in the long term. Whether it is placing an arbitrary cap on the tax rate and thus placing the city's AAA credit rating at risk, or going back one more time for funding re-development of Rolling Hills, the history of poor decisions made shows that incumbency does not necessarily imply wisdom. The question is whether we can expect better choices and decisions from this year's challengers.

[John O]

I would argue that you are 100% correct Kev,
and also 100% wrong.

That's not easy to do, but you pulled it off.

(However, most people I read seem to be around 10% correct and 90% wrong, so I'll gladly take your view (which averages out to about 50%).)

What I mean though, is that we need BOTH
**better Managers**
AND
**better Visionaries.**

No one on the council is talking about making Durham truly great. No one is dreaming the big dreams, or if they are, they're not advocating them. I'm not saying we need a council of pie-in-the-sky-ers.

But that we don't have even one single idealist up there arguing for universal quality preschool, or light rail right right here right now, or major tax changes to facilitate major investments!

What we instead have are a couple fantastic technocrats/managers like Woodard, and a whole lot of pragmatic hacks taking up space.

I want more good managers, just like you do. Bring on the Woodards replacing incumbents.

But I would also like at least one good idealist. Preferably two. I was hoping Hughes could fill that role, but I'm not yet convinced.

The problem is that idealists need to be both incredibly knowledgeable/experienced *and* be true believers in their ideas and ideals.

Otherwise their dreams are just fantasies, and can never be adequately advocated.