Why Attending Boring City Council Meetings Is Never a Waste of Time

Do you know how many of your tax dollars are going to your local government officials, their corrupt friends, their idiot nephews and all the other hogs feeding at your local public trough?

If not, you can stop laughing at the ripped-off citizens of poor Bell, California. Because if you aren't attending meetings and reading budgets and asking questions and demanding answers, then you're just as vulnerable as Bell's taxpayers.

Robert Cruickshank at Calitics has a good local take:

So there's been a LOT of discussion in Southern California over the last week or so about the situation in the small city of Bell, one of the hundreds dozens of incorporated cities in Los Angeles County, where top city officials were making truly stunning salaries, nearing $800,000 in one case.

The story is being pushed hard by the right, which sees an opportunity to undermine both government and public employee unions - although these salaries weren't the product of a union contract, conservatives are ignoring that detail to imply that Bell is symptomatic of a bigger problem of "overpaid" public workers, so that we should simply impoverish everyone instead of making the relatively minor fixes to address the occasional abuse of the system.

But another story in the region has gone relatively underreported. Maywood, which borders Bell to the north, has laid off its entire police force and contracted with the LA County Sheriffs Department to police their city. In the SF Bay Area, San Carlos is considering a similar move. Here in Monterey, the Peninsula cities have been considering integrating their fire services, and already Pacific Grove has contracted with Monterey to oversee its fire services.

The real issues aren't that government is incompetent or that public workers are greedy, as the right-wingers would have us believe. Instead the truth is that California's city governments are in need of some fundamental reforms - including city consolidation - and that we need to do a better job of ensuring residents are fully engaged in the process of local government.

For more great details on how racism and segregation play a major part in the latest California clusterfuck, read the whole thing.

But right now I'd like to concentrate on the fact that you, personally, are responsible for the conduct of your local government officials.

First, you vote them in, whether by voting for them or by failing to rally your neighbors in support of their opponents, or by abdicating your citizenship by not voting at all.

Second, if you don't attend every council/fiscal court meeting, "work session," committee meeting and hearing, then when they cheat the taxpayers, it's your fault.

I cannot tell you what a difference it makes when actual voters show up at local government meetings. As a reporter, I attended far too many local government meetings at which I was the only non-official there. What that meant was that council members felt free to bar me from secret deliberations, demand I put public discussions "off the record," and refuse to let me see public documents.

But when actual voters were in attendance, it was much more difficult for them to justify such illegal behavior, and they usually didn't try.

Today, most newspapers can't afford to send reporters to every boring committee meeting - and believe me, they should bottle them as cures for insomnia - which means the elected and appointed officials on those committees are free to rip off the taxpayers - whether through extra payments to themselves, giving no-show jobs to friends and idiot nephews, or handing no-bid contracts to campaign contributors.

If you don't show up at those meetings to hold them accountable, then their corruption is your fault.

Show up at every single meeting. Get copies of your state's Open Records and Open Meetings laws, and carry them ostentatiously into the meetings. Challenge every attempt to make you leave or refuse to give you copies of the documents they are reviewing. Trust me - 999 times out of a thousand, their attempts at secrecy are illegal. Stand your ground, no matter what their corrupt "attorney" claims or threatens.

Have no doubt that YOU are the one with the power in that room. Every single elected and appointed official in your city or county works for you.

Don't ever let the fuckers forget it.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....