Blogocentric Formulations

Day 9: Mayoral Campaign Promises

*Written as part of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" 

Day 9 Prompt: What issues would you take a stand on, and what campaign promises would you make, if you ran for Mayor of your current town or city?

Even though I consider myself a resident of Los Angeles, when it comes to this prompt, I consider myself lucky that I actually technically live in a much smaller town in Orange County. I work in Los Angeles and live in Los Angeles... but I would not want to be responsible for managing Los Angeles.

One of the issues I care about most deeply is education. If I were running for Mayor of Los Angeles (or any other major city), I think that would probably be the one area that I would devote the most time and resources to fixing (especially in Los Angeles where the public school system is terribly underfunded and performing poorly). However, the school district in the town where I live is actually very good due to the fact that we share with an affluent beach town that brings a lot of revenue into the district. Of all school districts in the state with 21,000+ students, it's actually ranked in the Top 20 according to SchoolDigger.com (and 248th out of 782 total districts if you count all the tiny ones... like the #1-ranked Latrobe, which consists of only one middle school with 170 total students ).

Anyway, since we're talking about a smaller city (and keep in mind this is still Southern California, so by "smaller town" I mean a population of roughly 110,000

FUN FACTS: The city I currently live in had 109,960 residents per the 2010 census. With a total area of 15.7 square miles, that's a population density of 7,000 people per square mile. By comparison, Provo, Utah has roughly the same population, but spread over nearly three times the geographic area. Based on population density, our little coastal California city is actually roughly equivalent to the cities of Minneapolis, Oakland, or Seattle. No wonder property values are so high!

), my main campaign promise would be to maintain an honest and open approach to governing the city. Even though it would probably might result in losing the election, I would take a stand on the issue of political corruption and serving special interests. I would make every effort to allow regular citizens to be heard, and I wouldn't allow avarice, ego, or pride to cloud my judgment or prevent me from doing what's best for the city. In short, I would promise to be a respectable, honest politician (is there such a thing? ); someone that the people of my city could look at and - even if they didn't always agree with me - say, "That guy really cares about this city and is doing his best to make it a better place to live."

As I was doing a little bit of research on local politics for this entry, though, I discovered that our city is actually managed by a council-manager form of government, which is run by an elected five-member city council, who in turn select a mayor. The mayor, by and large, is considered a ceremonial role in our city, since the City Council actually sets policy and makes decision. So I could stand on principle and claim to "be the change" and all that... or, you know... I guess I could spend all day glad-handing and power-lunching with the city's upper crust/social elite.