Kuna Council Candidates: Not Best but WORST Practices
Today’s Idaho Statesman has a feature (at the back of the Sports page???) on the council candidates running throughout the Valley, and something very interesting is emerging: the battle to control Kuna.
While the races in Boise are pure Milquetoast (Bisterfeldt and Jordan are sure to win in a walk; Tibbs will give up his seat to cookie-cutter Thompson), Kuna fielded a slate of 10 candidates! It’s a real ding-dong fight to sort out who will control the resources of 13,000 people.
Anyway, the interesting thing that comes out of all this is that two of the candidates are running on the platform to somehow disallow business owners from serving on Kuna’s City Council. In light of an old construct called the U.S. Constitution, I am not sure how they plan to pull this off, but Corrina Stiles and Douglas Hoiland both oppose business owners sitting on the Council, according to the Idaho Statesman.
I attempted to visit both candidate’s websites to clarify their positions. Corrina Stiles, on her site, says this:
“When council members recuse themselves from decision making because of conflicts of interests, a small body of 4 is now even smaller. Is the answer to close city council membership to business owners, probably not. But we should indeed select council members who will not see a business financial gain or protection from decision making. ”
This raises the question of whether she changed her position when she filled out the Statesman’s questionnaire, or whether the Statesman got the story wrong. Maybe she’ll respond here and let us know.
As for Doug Hoiland, the 56 year old SOFTWARE DEVELOPER has no website so I can’t confirm or refute his position on business owners serving on the Council.
For the sake of argument and this column, let’s just assume that the both of these candidates have decided that because conflict of interests are so rife that it’s just not possible for people that own a business to serve on a city council. Might there be other opinions out there? Yes.
I just finished reading a book published by Harvard University Press, authored by University of Chicago Graduate School of Business Professor Sean Safford, entitled Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown. Hat tip to Idaho Department of Commerce Deputy Director Lane Packwood for the recommend; it’s a great read.
In the book, Safford writes a case study of two rust-belt towns, Youngstown, OH and Allentown, PA, and how they grappled with the changing economic conditions that hammered their industrial based economies beginning in the 1970s. Short story is this: while Youngstown got taken over by the mob and essentially died, Allentown attracted venture capital, grew its population, and is now thriving. Two cities starting with very similar resources end up in very different places. What accounts for the difference? Safford explains it as a matter of social capital.
Youngstown’s business and civic elite were one in the same. By the 1970s, when business began to collapse the third and fourth generation founding families of Youngstown’s economic engine retreated from public life, and civic life collapsed along with the economy. Allentown was a different story.
Allentown’s civic boards, rather than being interlocking directorates as in Youngstown, were opportunities to connect people that would not otherwise be connected. Managers from local economic powerhouses who had a vested interest in the place they lived (how novel) had replaced dilettante family members from Allentown’s big companies. Thus, civic boards remained viable and were ready to address the economic malaise that struck the Rust-belt with blunt force.
At the end of the short but powerful book, Safford arrives at one important conclusion for policy makers, economic developers, and their ilk:
“Incentives might be better directed to weaving company leaders into the local civil society. And in doing so, it makes sense to analyze the structure of that civil society and guide the leaders of key constituencies - economic, religious, social, and political - toward forms of participation that link up otherwise disconnected factions. One way to do this is to pay greater attention to the various advisory boards that mayors, county executives, and legislators control and use those as opportunities to create connections among communities that need to be connected.”
Alright, look. I am not an educational or social elitist by any means. I’m a guy that earned an M.A. from a regular old state school in Idaho, but here’s what we have here. A University of Chicago (one of the world’s top universities) professor argues that cities enduring economic change (like Boise) need to focus on connecting business leaders with civic organizations. Meanwhile, candidates in Kuna, where a whole 14.7% of the population has a college degree (about 10% below the Idaho average) are hauling off and saying just the opposite. I don’t know where Kuna folks get these ideas (see the picture above) but this guy (moi) is confident that they might not have this one right. Just sayin’.
Tags: Social Capital
Economic Development, Economy, Employment, Government, Recession, Social Science | admin November 1, 2009
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By sharon fisher, November 2, 2009 @ 6:03 am
Well, the really classic book on social capital is “Bowling Alone.” But yes, either way: the way to make a successful community is to get more people, and a wider variety of people, involved in the community. That includes business people.
Honestly, what I believe Kuna’s biggest problem is right now is that 83% of its workforce heads out to Boise every morning. That statistic comes from planning director Steve Hasson, who says he gets it from COMPASS. With that amount of commuting, we have fewer people supporting the business, social, and civic institutions in town, which reduces the social capital.
This whole thing is ironic because I think the current city council has the *least* amount of such potential conflicts in the past ten years. It’s true that Trina Stroebel works, or worked, with Larry Hansen, who owned Cowgirls. On the other hand, Larry recently sold out and moved, partly because he felt he wasn’t getting a fair break from the city council. Or is the contention that Trina will plan lots of parties, in order to drive business to her party store?
Kuna is a small town and its political roles are not full-time jobs. (Thank God.) As with state elected positions — the way Idaho prides itself on its “citizen legislature” — the goal is not for elected officials to have some sort of mythical no-conflict job, but for citizens to be aware of what the potential conflicts are and for elected officials to recuse themselves when appropriate.
Doug Hoiland’s wife, for example, is a schoolteacher, who taught my daughter. Shall we be concerned that, as a city council member, Doug Hoiland would unfairly favor schools? Or that his familiarity with the Kuna school system would make him more aware of potential issues?
Part of what appeals to me about Corinna Stiles *is* her job — not because I think she’d have less of a conflict of interest than other candidates, but because, as a disability advocate, I believe she’d bring more of that sensibility to Kuna and, as our population ages, make us as a community more conscious of that segment of our population and their needs.
By fortboise, November 2, 2009 @ 1:51 pm
As a some-time software developer, I was distracted by your ALL CAPS of Hoiland’s profession. What’s up with that?
The “ding dong fight” sounds interesting, but I didn’t learn as much (starting from zero) here as I’d hoped to. (I’m a Boise voter, “just curious.”)
By Chris Blanchard (@LGM1), November 2, 2009 @ 3:36 pm
fortboise - I wanted to be sure that the irony of a software developer with no website was not missed.
The take away from this post is that we often times come up with kooky ideas such as banning business owners from serving on the City Council when no municipality in their right mind would actually do something like that. Yet to these people, it seems like a perfectly sane idea. Then again, we implemented a county road department (ACHD) and that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world either. Worst practices are still worst practices . . .
By Corinna Stiles, May 1, 2011 @ 9:55 am
I guess what applies here is the “better late than never” mantra. I would have been happy to respond earlier had I been contacted or known your site existed.
To address your concerns - my law degree from a regular old state school in Idaho makes me keenly aware of the precepts of the U.S. Constitution, and yes, the Idaho Statesman got the story wrong. It’s unfortunate that when you reviewed my website at the time, that you didn’t pick up my actual platform: supporting new business, supporting managed growth, supporting city responsibility, encouraging citizen involvement, and encouraging accountable leadership. Since it was on the home page, I can see how you may have missed it.
My concern did not go beyond the statement you cited above. I know its shocking, but believe it or not, there are people who seek public office for personal gain. My effort was to get people thinking about the candidates and what they may or may not have to gain from being in office. Surely this isn’t a novel campaign approach. Further research would have shown, Kuna public offices have always been well represented by local business owners.
I think the take away is this - when you rely on sound bites as the basis for decision making or judgement calls, you place yourself in a very large demographic who makes uninformed political decisions. And unfortunately, sometimes even an education doesn’t prevent this.