COLUMN: Members Of City Council Can’t Seem To Get Along. What’s The Problem?

MIDWESTERNERS HATE conflict more than we hate freezing rain, haughty vegans and screaming kids/ineffectual parents in the grocery store. We smile. We’re solicitous. We want to get along. We want other people to get along. The truth of the matter is, however, that Midwesterners can be passive-aggressive. We thank the phone solicitor who interrupts our dinner, then hang up and really give him what’s for.

This concept of Midwestern nice is what the local media play on when they wring their electronic hands and wail when there is conflict or open disagreement between members of City Council. This is why at local candidate forums for Council candidates moderators ask how candidates will “get along” with others on City Council. It’s easier to pretend Council is populated by pre-school students rather than a group of adults who must be held accountable for the job they do allocating over half a billion dollars in taxes and revenue every two years they serve in office.

Midwestern nice has earned us a crumbling sewer system, roads that will loosen fillings and some of the highest paid city managers in the state of Michigan. Some voters, rather than face an incumbent’s voting record, focus on whether the incumbent is “nice,” or brings treats to gatherings. Midwestern nice is why, in large part, only 10 percent of respondents to the most recent Citizen Survey rated as “excellent” the value of services for the taxes paid to Ann Arbor, yet 94 percent of respondents said they would recommend living in Ann Arbor to someone who asks.

How does that work? Imagine saying this to a friend: “Come live in Ann Arbor. The value of services for the taxes paid is, well, meh.”

Holding elected officials accountable for what they say and do isn’t nasty or mean. The members of the Continental Congress did just that to King George III. When voters refuse to do their jobs and educate themselves about candidates’ records and stances on important issues, we end up with despots in office who could care less what the public says or wants.

The complaint is pervasive: state and local politicos are unresponsive. They ignore public opinion when crafting policies. Meanwhile, elected officials claim to represent the views of their constituents, to be the “decision-makers.” Turns out, the majority of local and state officials are, in fact, ignoring majority public opinion when crafting policy. The result is chilling. There is polarized policy being imposed on unpolarized voters all over the country, and Michigan ranks among the states where this happens most frequently.

Two professors from Columbia University who study how well elected state and local officials translate public opinion into policy, have determined that Michigan ranks fourth in the nation among states in which elected officials are most likely to shrug at what the people want, then make policy decisions to suit their personal, ideological and political agendas. Dr. Jeffrey R. Lax and Dr. Justin H. Phillips study “how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state-level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy-specific opinion, even controlling for other influences,” according to their paper published in June 2011 and titled “The Democratic Deficit in the States.”

The two profs uncovered a significant “democratic deficit” in Michigan.

So what can the average citizen do to get local and state politicos to stop “being over-responsive to ideology and party—leading policy to the polarized relative to state electorates?”

Matthew Yglesias, in his Think Progress blog puts it best: “…Voters know the President…and something about him. But very few voters are up to speed on state senate elections or what the difference between the State Treasurer and the State Comptroller is….For you in your personal life, the lesson is (as it often is) to get more involved with politics on a state and local level.”

The conflicts on City Council stem from the efforts of newly-elected members to expose and push back against cronyism and conflicts of interest. They speak out against inappropriate practices that were ignored with the mayor and others. Those who have benefitted from the rampant political cronyism and conflicts of interest during the Hieftje era would have you believe “problems” between City Council members are the result of an ideological divide perpetuated by political heretics. Then again, King George III would have had you believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence were traitors who deserved to hang.