Lots of people make annual New Year’s resolutions starting on Jan. 1, such as saving money, doing more volunteering, losing weight, spending more time with family, eliminating a vice or reducing a bad habit. Some of these are easier to achieve and last all year, while others fall by the wayside within the first week.
If you do indeed want to help your community more, we highly recommend making a resolution to run for public office.
Serving your neighbors is a civic duty and not nearly as difficult as one might think. City Council members are not land-owning retirees, practicing lawyers or former government workers, but often parents with kids at home or small business owners who understand what it’s like to raise a family here or run a small business in our tourist-driven Verde Valley while still making time to go to biweekly council meetings and work sessions. Service means a few hours of meetings in the middle of the week and weekends that are largely free.
If you’ve lived here longer than a year and think you have good ideas to improve our quality of life, you are wholly eligible to run.
If you’ve been agitated by traffic problems, or think we could do more to preserve the Verde River and protect water resources, boost local businesses, attract new employers, better manage growth or build more housing for our workers and their families, run for a seat.
If you spent any time complaining about your town or city online or to neighbors, if you want to see alternate routes built or actions taken to preserve open lands and create more parks for families and programs for residents, then by all means run for office and vow to work with local, state and county officials to complete these projects.
Reading our stories, you can see that Cottonwood City Council has a partisan split that results in contentious meetings and bickering. This is because too few candidates run for office, so anyone who runs gets a seat, leaving the current council with one official who barely understands how meetings operate and who has threatened to sue colleagues to get failed ordinances passed despite losing votes,
another who won as a late-entry write-in because no one else campaigned, a third who effectively bullied his way onto council
and a fourth who admitted to sexual misconduct and sexual harassment of female city staffers but whom his colleagues refuse to condemn for fear of losing a voting majority.
It’s sad that two of these folks replaced a dedicated social worker and highly-respected local lawyer who both departed this year, leaving their seats to be filled with back-benchers playing Prime Minister’s Question Time.
Surely a population of 12,000 can pick a better cast of characters to lead the wealthiest city in the Verde Valley. Sedona has the opposite problem — rarely any dissent.
Votes are almost always unanimous, but members still pontificate for hours for the cameras, thinking aloud in real time, never trying to convince anyone else on the dais, all voting in lockstep. Sedona tends to have a few more candidates running than the number of seats available, but rarely is there any diversity of class, age, family status, wealth or ethnicity, which reinforces the myopic, homogeneous views of a single political clique.
Submissive conformity without dissent is a failure of liberal democracy. So is petty partisanship for the sake of partisanship rather than bettering the community as a whole.
Camp Verde, Clarkdale and Jerome — you’re doing it right. Your councils have diverse opinions and a wide and representative demographic blend of officials. Can you come teach Sedona and Cottonwood how to do it properly? Considering the ideological split in our electorate and wildly differing ideas, we should have robust and diverse councils.
If you’re in the minority or believe you speak for a silent majority, then you have an obligation to your values and your neighbors to run for elected office. There are residents like you, reading this editorial, vowing to get more involved in the community and choosing to serve.
Candidates have until April 8 to collect the minimum number of signatures required. Campaigns can be run on the cheap for a few thousand dollars, and there are plenty of donors willing to give to have a better community. We will be interviewing candidates for our schedule once they have declared in order to give everyone a voice. Coupled with ads in our newspaper, a simple website and good ideas, it’s easy for a good candidate — like you — to get elected.
