Sherie,
I keep thinking about your dilemma and some of the very real and similar
situations I have faced working in local government. I have two
observations I would like to share with the list. I am by no means an
expert, but do have about 20 years of watchin g that may provide another
perspective to some of the theoretical discussions that are occurring with
regard to this topic.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said we really have a
"representative" democracy and not true democracy (at least not consistent
with D'Tocville's (sorry on the spelling) vision. One of the things I
think representative democracy encourages is a lack of systems thinking
and an enhanced ability for individual's to advance their own agendas. In
local government, we constantly face conflicts between neighbors,
developers, businesses, etc. and NO ONE EVER SITS DOWN IN THE SAME ROOM
AND TALKS. What I mean by this is that everyone "lobbies" who they know
outside of the public forum. A public forum (meeting) then occurs which
consists of each side or sides telling their viewpoint to a seated elected
body who then listens, is supposed to have no t already made up their
minds, and then renders a decision. Time after time I have seen community
conflict handled this way. THERE IS NO DIALOGUE. Opposing groups do not
get the opportunity to look at an issue from a system wide perspective.
There needs to be a circuit breaker. When we reach these conflicts we
need a process to get the players sitting down together, systematically
working through the issue, not playing to the cameras. I thought that
learning organization tools could really help with this, but I am highly
frustrated and thinking of getting out of local government because we keep
repeating our old way of doing things. Part of that is the public
administration schools, what was taught 20, 30 and 40 years ago and that
many man agers and elected official are used to functioning in a much more
hierarchical structure. People in my field accuse the public of being
apathetic. I don't think they are. They come out in droves when it is
something they really care about. We just d on't have a way for dialogue
to occur and consensus to be reached when they do come out, a process that
everyone can access and knows is available when they want to DISCUSS an
issue. All we do is have very long, very contentious and very uncivil
public m eetings.
I used to think I wanted to be a city manager to try and bring this
circuit break in the process to a community. Quite frankly, I'm not sure
it can be done.
Thanks for listening.
Debbie Broome
-- Deborah T. Broome Assistant City Manager, Plano, Texas P.O. Box 860358 Plano, Texas 75086 Phone: 972-461-7122 Fax: 972-423-9587 e-mail: Debbieb@gwmail.plano.govLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>