Report on the National League of Cities-- Part One

Last week I attended the National League of Cities annual conference in Charlotte. I was invited to speak on blogging. What I discovered is there are more elected officials blogging then meet the eye. Along with Mayor Jim Willey of Elburn, and the Scott Neal City Manager of Eden Prairie, there are bloggers like Eric Garcetti the president of the Los Angeles City Council, Bob Nowicki a City Councilman of Rochester Minnesota, Sandy Carmany of Greensboro, NC among others. While I think I know a lot about blogging, I learned more from the questions and the discussions that went on around the room before and after the program.

I attended an all day workshop on Wednesday entitled Public Problems, Democratic Decisions: The Role of Mayors and Council Members, which was excellent. The first part of the day was setting up a public policy matrix with four ordinal points’ liberty, prosperity, equality and community. You then evaluated the issue based on a four step process which involved critical decision making, definition of the issues impacts, mapping the issues, addressing them and then developing a consensus. The afternoon focused on 7 examples, that were to be honest quite good and challenged the small groups (5-6 people) we were broken up into. Interestingly, with all group members being relatively sophisticated elected officials, all the groups missed things that might or might not have been crucial.

The premise of the program was that our democratic system has a built in tension that causes tension. The tension is a good thing because when an issue comes up, this tension forces all issues out in to the open and thus all points are raised which then in turn can/should lead to responsible decision making.

There were a number of very interesting points about government that the speaker made throughout the day which I will pass on here.

• What is the fastest growing area of government in the last 15 years? Home Owners Associations!
• If you counted all the elected state senators and state representatives in the United States by party you would have roughly 3,500 democrats and 3,500 republicans, and it’s been this way for quite awhile. The point being that this is the "tension cause" which leads to decision making.