Mayor Kyle Palmer: The answer to disinformation? Accessible public servants.
We can make government less complicated by making our officials more accessible and accountable.
Housekeeping
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Kyle Palmer just started his third term as Mayor of Silverton. He believes that decency is not dead and meaningful discourse is not only possible, but vital.
Citizens deserve full information.
Not too many years ago, citizens of smaller cities got their local government news from one of just a few places - the actual meeting, a local newspaper (if there was one), or perhaps directly from the horse’s mouth in some booth at a local cafe.
To say that citizens were under-informed would be a gross understatement. Important decisions made, critical debates held, and significant ideas brainstormed rarely made it out of City Hall and into the public sphere. Then, as is the case today, these meetings were poorly attended, scarcely and selectively covered by local media, and only the topic of a few conversations in those booths at local cafes (booths that aren’t even available these days).
Now, being under-informed is a near impossibility. It’s a different world today, thanks mostly to social media, and it begs the question with regard to citizen engagement - “How much information is too much?”
A case could be made that more information leads to more questions, an increased expectation of access, and more headaches for elected officials as they struggle to field inquiry after inquiry, not all of which are friendly. In other words, some folks think that informed citizens, even if via social media, are more burdensome than beneficial to our democracy.
In theory, that might be a persuasive case. In practice, it’s simply not the truth, even in a world full of tweets, snaps, and posts.
Information is power.
Arguably, in the past few years as an elected official, I’ve spent more time on social media, on email, and on my phone in general, interacting with citizens than I have spent in local Council and committee meetings.
There hasn’t been a single occasion where I’ve declined to engage a citizen’s request for information.....for answers....for access. I’ve been reached while I’m spending the evening at home with my family, when I’m out to dinner, and when I’m on vacation. I’m sure I’ve appeared to be “not present” to friends and family (and without question my wife would say so) on many, many occasions.
More often than not, those conversations have existed solely because I voluntarily provided information that probably didn’t have to be provided, and really never was in the pre-social media age. And for what? There’s a good chance that citizens would be perfectly happy without much of that information. Perhaps even happier.
However, it’s their information. It belongs to them, and it’s the responsibility of a transparent representative to always strive to provide it. Elected servant leadership was never meant to be a career, it was meant to be a temporary stop for regular citizens as they took a turn representing their own. Short of content covered by Executive Sessions, a great general rule would be that if an elected official knows it, a citizen should know it, or at least have the opportunity to. I’d much rather someone get information in a timely and accurate fashion from me, then risk them searching for scraps on social media.
Are some citizens disrespectful in their handling of this information?
Absolutely.
Should that mean that they have reduced access to the information?
Absolutely not.
Local elected officials don’t work for their friends or those who share their ideology, they work for everyone in their jurisdiction, and to a degree for anyone who lives in the unincorporated area around that jurisdiction but identifies as a resident.
This level of communication is the hardest thing that some people may ever have to provide, but it’s vital to slowly reverse the trend of citizen distrust in their representatives.
The answer to disinformation on social media is better information shared through strong relationships with public servants. We can think of this as “relentless engagement” that breaks down barriers that commonly leave citizens ill-informed and ill-tempered.
We can make government less complicated by making our officials more accessible and accountable. You shouldn’t have to dig though public records on a dense website or pore through a local paper to get an answer to a basic question.
Most folks aren’t going to hurdle those barriers; they just know that things happening in their communities cost too much, take too long to get completed, and occasionally don’t make any sense. Of course, they’re often right, but that doesn’t always mean that the costs, delays, and lack of logic aren’t there for some very good reasons, or for their protection as taxpayers and ratepayers.
There’s no scenario in which more information for citizens is not an opportunity. Ten years ago, we could have met with a small group of citizens every hour, for a whole day, every day of the week, for an entire year, and not reach as many people as one great, informative social media post would today. Not to mention, the social media post takes roughly one hour and the other pathway is a full time job. That’s a gift for elected officials who choose to see it that way.
In a country built on the idea that government is by the people, and for the people, our ability to reach others en masse provides a glimmer of hope that the days when higher level elected officials are mostly wealthy career politicians may soon come to an end. Could expensive political television advertising and deals with powerful lobbies be on their way out? Can your “regular Joe or Josephine” neighbor successfully run for governor of a state, for a position in the US Senate, or even for President using the power of real time outreach and information transparency? Perhaps not today, but maybe tomorrow.
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