Transparency
For the last few weeks, I’ve been involved in the Prop 2.5 override campaign, specifically making the campaign’s website. The website is important because there are so many little details of municipal budgeting that people want to know more about, and it’s necessary to put it all in one place. A large group of people created the messaging for that site (which I copied and pasted). That required collaboration between elected officials and municipal staff members who swim in this information, often assuming knowledge, and residents who may not understand everything but just want to see their kids’ schools improve. Within that collaboration, we’ve had interesting discussions about transparency.
People often demand transparency of their elected officials, and I have tried to be transparent. There’s this blog, there are the City Council newsletters, and there’s the streaming of City Council meetings onto Youtube. My colleagues maintain their own blogs and mailing lists and have passed detailed budget ordinances that make municipal finance more transparent. Everything’s online. Outside of City Hall, we have a very nice podcast covering Medford, which most electeds have gone to for interviews. Most of us post regularly on social media. And yet, all of our communication efforts only put a dent in the problem, because no matter how much we try, the message about what is going on in local government never really goes far enough.
There are three barriers to transparency:
First, effort. Transparency cannot be passively achieved and requires a sustained effort over a long period of time. This is why newspapers have large staffs and need a business model. I make about $30,000 a year in this job. It’s a good part-time salary, but the amount of hours required to be an OK elected official — legislating, writing effective copy, answering emails, preparing speeches, meeting with staff, presenting ideas to colleagues, campaigning for election, showing up at local events — puts that, hour by hour, at less than or close to minimum wage. The ratio is even worse for School Committee members. (Though, if one wanted to be a bad School Committee Member or City Councilor and put as little effort into the job as possible, the hourly rates go up.) That’s not meant to be a complaint as much as it is to point out that we all have full-time jobs, too, and there are only so many hours in the day.
Second, complexity. Issues that are easy to ask about (“how are my taxes spent?”) are often complex and can’t be boiled down to ten words. For instance, many residents say they want budget transparency. If you Google “Medford MA budget” and click on the first result, you can see the budget. It’s there, online. It just can’t be simplified into an easy-to-digest paragraph, and the average reader wouldn’t really know what they were looking at without context and expertise. That’s the case with most aspects of municipal governance. Any City Councilor worth their salt eventually gets pretty good at explaining the math behind property tax rates and Proposition 2.5, or emphasizing the end result of a measure (“your taxes are going towards repaving the roads”) rather than the exact mechanism.
Third, noise. There’s a lot of noise in the information out there today, and people don’t know what to pay attention to or where to find what they want to know. Medford used to have a centralized, local newspaper, but we don’t anymore. The internet tore that business model to shreds, so centralized media platforms for local areas no longer exist. Today, if a person wants to be “plugged in” and know what’s going on in the politics of their city, they need to be active on several social media platforms, sign up for about a dozen mailing lists, and have friends that regularly pay attention to local issues. It becomes a hobby.
Related to all of this, a continuing barrier to transparency is misinformation. Misinformation is always part of the noise; it’s easier to believe a simple lie than a complex fact; and it takes far less effort to make up a lie than it does to research, digest, and communicate the facts. Combatting misinformation and seeing its negative impact has been a horrifying part of my term thus far on City Council, and it has been an ongoing challenge in the Prop 2.5 Override campaign, which is why we spent so long collaborating on the very detailed FAQs page. The only way to combat it is to continuously re-state the facts anytime misinformation pops up.
So, it’s an uphill battle. C’est la vie.
