The road to good government is paved by persistent citizens

Nov. 3 is in the rearview mirror, and Jan. 1 is on the not-so-distant horizon. In other words, elections are over but it’s not yet time for those who were elected to take office.

We’re on an important part of the road to good government.

The speeches and forums are over, the campaign literature is no doubt in the trash along with the election profiles.

But we, the electorate, as well as the leaders we have chosen, should not forget those words. If the trash has already been recycled, we should fire up our computers and look online (www.AltamontEnterprise.com) at the promises made.

We believe the campaign season is more than empty rhetoric and endless lawn signs. It gives candidates a chance to put forward their best ideas and it gives citizens the opportunity to question those ideas and state their own. Just look at the scores of letters we printed this past election season — each represented a citizen’s view on either the character of a potential leader or on the issues and solutions the candidate put forward.

Citizens must not relent now. A government of we, the people, never allows the people to rest. The candidates that were elected must be held to the visions and promises they put forth.

The reason the road ahead is tricky to navigate is that the pie-in-the-sky hopes (still useful as goals to strive for) must be grounded in the reality of execution.

It’s rather like the difference between cruising on an open highway in a racecar at top speed and carefully navigating traffic-clogged city streets in a practical station wagon.

Some of the campaign promises will be easy to follow and judge. For example, Vasilios Lefkadidits, who ousted the longtime supervisor in Knox, said he wants to make the town hall into a computer station with its wifi open for regular public use. This makes sense in a rural Helderberg town, much of which doesn’t have access to broadband Internet — a town that doesn’t have a library to call its own.

We hope he follows through on this simple but useful idea; we can imagine that the rest of the town board would support it, too, making for some fast-track execution. The planning should begin now.

A more far-reaching campaign promise was made in Guilderland by Peter Barber, the Democratic supervisor-elect. A long-time chairman of the town’s zoning board, Barber promised to make into law changes that have been proposed for Guilderland’s zoning. Councilman-elect Lee Carman, a Republican who will be new to the board and the top vote-getter in a close race, campaigned on a platform of making Guilderland more business friendly, so we hope the interchange between those representatives of the people will be both enlightening and fruitful.

Another practical idea was broached in a pre-election candidates’ forum for Guilderland Town Board members. Rosemary Centi, who, by this week’s vote count, eked out a win, coming in second in a close race, proposed that Guilderland set up a youth court.

This is a worthwhile proposal that could be executed in a straightforward manner and that we believe would receive support from the other board members. Again, planning should start now.

Models for the court exist in nearby towns. They allow youths who have been arrested for non-violent crimes to be judged by their peers.

This teaches responsibility to those who sit on the court, often former offenders themselves, and pass judgment. It also often results in meaningful sentences — community service in a shelter for the homeless, for example, as punishment for someone who has shoplifted. Such sentences teach lasting lessons rather than, say, a fine that might be meted out in a traditional court, with the tab often picked up by the offending youth’s parents.

Some campaign proposals, however, will not so easily be carried out although they may be equally worthwhile. In Westerlo, for example, three Republicans challenged the incumbent Democrats largely on the issue of transparency.

The Republicans’ campaign, in itself, was remarkable. For the first time in years, voters had a real choice. Since Democrats outnumber Republicans by 4 to 1, the board has been solidly Democratic for decades.

An issue fueling the Republican campaign was a landslide defeat in September of a $2.75 million bond vote, forced by a citizens’ petition, on whether to build a new highway garage and upgrade the town hall.

A chief complaint was that incumbent board members (had not given residents an opportunity to evaluate the proposal) met illegally with engineers for the project, not in a public session as required by the state’s Open Meetings Law.

Indeed, the incumbent town board member who kept his post said to The Enterprise during the campaign the meeting was wrong, and, as soon as he found out about it, he informed the town’s lawyer. The incumbent who lost his seat said during the campaign there was nothing wrong with the meeting, that board members were just taking measurements with the engineers.

Republican Amie Burnside, making her first run for office, was the top vote-getter. She, like her running mates, had campaigned on the need for transparency. We applaud this stance, not just because the state’s sunshine laws require it but because it best serves democracy.

Still, Burnside has a tough road to follow. She is a Republican alone on a board of Democrats. And she said she is planning to change a longstanding culture of government secrecy.

We urge citizens in Westerlo to pay attention — come to meetings, write letters to us just as you did leading up to the elections — and try to make government better.

That advice applies to citizens everywhere: Read the promises made during the campaigns in your town and work to make the ones you believe in a reality.
— Melissa Hale-Spencer

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