Down The Sewer Pipe – Politically Speaking

Words convey thoughts, ideas, possible polices or practices and great, if not extreme, care should be exercised by governing officials in the proper use of words.  All to often care is the last thing taken for a walk and odd, yet predictable, things can and do happen,

Comments made in private may prejudice others against you or indicate that your mind is already made up prior to the public hearting on an item.  Since all decisions are to be made in the glare of public debate you will need to declare your bias at the public hearing. Or it may lead others to declare their opposition to an idea, policy or practice that you may wish to have or affect in the future.  While it is all well and good to declare a bias it is not a very good idea to be impartial to the point where other s on a council or a board leave you out of the discussion.

Comments at a public meeting, regular, board, joint meetings with other governments or agencies can also have unexpected yet predictable results.  Keeping trees is normally considered a good thing.  So what happens if during a regular town council meeting a council member does a little “day dreaming”?  If the council member says “I would like to put saving trees on the next agenda and have a fee or fine to take trees down” then do not be surprised if in the next five days every tree in town becomes firewood or lumber.  After all you are talking about restricting liberty as applied top freedom.  A restriction of liberty will put you the elected official on the “bad guy” list.  So in an effort to use their freedom before it becomes lost tree owners city, town, county or statewide take the trees down.  I have yet to hear form any elected person on any government body a plan to pay people for NOT taking down trees.

Comments made in either private or public as related to government employees may cause additional expense.  If your jurisdiction does not have an union to represent them then treat them properly by paying for their insurance, include their families, providing salary adjustments, modest increases to keep up with inflation, giving retirement as training is expensive ad retention is a good thing.  However, if the elected “I know better because I run a business” official says, “we need to rain expenses and I thing we should cut (pick one) salaries, insurance, retirement”, The result will be that your jurisdiction employees will become part of some union.  The result is less money to do projects with and more toward the employee and you will be branded, rightly so, evil incarnate.

In each of these cases saying he wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong venue can, will, and does have effects that the elected official did not anticipate.  Outsiders correctly interpreted the direction things are going and in a worse case scenario someone becomes elected to your seat.

Then they can take your place going down the sewer pipe.

Sherman