The pain in Campaign

The challenge of running for office as a democrat in Utah County is in discovering who the "swing" voters are. I happen to know that among the registered republicans, there are quite a few "closet democrats" who just wanted to have a chance to vote for something (as in, vote in the Republican Primary). There are also a number of disenchanted republicans who are looking for a way to change the State Legislature and just need to know there is an alternative to the incumbent.
So how does one find these potential supporters?
Walking the district -- going door to door to introduce myself to the neighbors. And that's what I have been doing this summer.
My door to door campaign is one of the reasons my blog entries have been so sparce this summer.
I enjoy the experience of meeting people and visiting with them at their doors. It does, however, have its dangers.
One Saturday, I stood at a door, campaign flyer in hand, and admired the floral wreath hanging there as I waited for the owners to open the door. As it opened, the jarring startled three or four bees who had been nestled in among the flowers of the wreath. They flew out and into my face and one stung me on the cheek when it hit. The lady of the house accepted my flyer as I grimaced and stuttered my greeting, "Hello, my name is Deon Turley and I -- I've just been stung by a bee!"

The Educrat

A newspaper recently carried letter to the editor that commented on the large numbers of opposition candidates vying for a seat in the state legislature. Noting that many were from the teaching profession, it warned against the election of “educrats” who wanted to take over the legislature.

Certainly there is a strong showing of the education community in the field of candidates this year. I see it as a natural response to the legislature’s arrogant disregard of constituents' support of public education.

I was, however, fascinated by the term “educrat”. It isn’t found in the dictionary and the word itself sounds like something spat on the ground. Who would want a title like that?

If having a commitment to public education makes me an educrat, it is a label I'll gladly accept. If recognizing the need for excellence in institutions of higher education in the state, and wanting to fund them sufficiently makes me an educrat, I admit to it. If efforts to provide everyone literacy training and educational opportunity would make me an educrat, sign me up.

Statistically, Utah is the youngest state in the nation. Families are large and school-age children make up a large percentage of our population. Young people left to popular media, television and advertising, won't find training for informed citizenship. Preparation for their emergence into responsible adulthood requires a large investment.

It is well-established that education is power – not only measured in earning capacity but in ability to control one’s own life. We want our children to understand how to function in an increasingly complex world. The educated citizen is more likely to tell a good idea from a bad one, a trustworthy steward from a swindler. Parents play the greatest role in raising their children. Most families rely on public schools to help them teach their children to become independent, thoughtful individuals.

Our society also invests in the future through education. Public schools should prepare children to become productive, informed citizens. We all benefit when doctors know how to operate, architects can design a building well, and engineers create planes, trains, and cars that get us where we need to go in a safe manner.

The training of teachers has never been better. They are being prepared to teach a wide range of children with various individual challenges, family circumstances, and cultural backgrounds.

The administrators of public schools and state institutions of higher education shoulder responsibilities that are comparable to CEO's of large businesses in terms of employee management, legal navigation, contract negotiations, capital investments, and the logistical maze of governmental requests, requirements, and restrictions.

The biggest difference between schools and business enterprises is that business generates its own income; public education must rely on public revenue controlled by elected officials.

Our state legislators show their commitments by what they are willing to nurture, support, and entrust.

Nurturing the education community means giving them manageable class sizes. The current student to teacher ratios in Utah are among the highest in the nation. This means our students get the lowest levels of individual attention of any group of public school students in the country.

Supporting the education community means providing the funds necessary to do the job. That hasn’t happened in our state. Public school employees in Utah are among the lowest paid in the nation. Per-pupil funding of education continues to place Utah at the bottom of the stack, relative to every other state in the nation.

Trusting the education community means allowing parents, teachers, and administrators at the local level to control their budgets and curriculum. In this year's legislative session a big part of the increased education funding went to specific state-defined programs. School officials who see, at close range, the needs of the students and employees, are constantly shuffling budget categories to meet the requirements of earmarked funding.

The effects of this neglect take years to emerge but they are showing up now. Scores that show preparation for post-high school training are dropping and measurements of technical understanding among Utah's population are showing a decline. This trend must stop. To scrimp on education is to leave the next generation unprepared for the challenges of a complex world.

We must be willing to nurture, support, and trust the education community. Our legislature could use a few more educrats who will do that.

The Balancing Act of Privatization

There is a move afoot to privatize operations that are currently performed by government agencies. After all, the competitive market and capitalist ideals have built the American economy and powered business initiative and productivity. Government workers have a reputation for inefficiency and lethargy, knowing that they will draw a paycheck no matter how they perform on the job.

While I can see the need for many functions of government to be provided by private industry, there is a balance to be achieved.

Services that are seasonal or intermittently needed are good candidates for out-sourcing. Imagine if the local public school district had to use government employee architects and carpenters to build a school. In addition, options would be limited, if elections were held using only the sort of balloting machine that some government agency had produced that year.

Some things should not be left to the private sector. The livability of a community relies on free access to certain amenities. Property owners would not be motivated to provide libraries, parks and playgrounds that are open to the public. Similarly, maintenance of public spaces, for example, parks or the grounds of public buildings or custodial care of buildings, might be privatized but work of this sort tends to be full-time employment, and it makes sense to employ maintenance workers that provide continuity of the care.

There is a danger in privatizing too much. When elected officials must award contracts to private companies, conflict of interest questions mushroom and campaign contributions from businesses vying for contracts would surely be seen as “kickbacks”. Before I would entertain proposals of widespread privatization of government services, I would demand ethics reform of the state legislature, especially in regards to conflict of interest and campaign finance.

Financing the Work

Was I surprised, when I first began to consider this project of running for office, how much the campaign itself would cost? Yes, indeed!
So the first thing you do is say, "How does everyone else raise that sort of cash?"
I knew that Mitt Romney had the resources to pay for his campaign -- or a lot of it. That isn't my situation.
Calling upon businesses or political action committees to contribute seemed the last thing I wanted to do, since that would send the message that I would be able to return the favor when their interests came up in legislation.
The ones whom I want to represent are the people of my legislative district, my neighbors. It takes confidence to approach a neighbor, especially one who you know is struggling to makes ends meet, and say, "It is so important to you that I be elected that you should help to pay for signs and pamphlets." As hard as this is, it is equally amazing when people respond and pull out a checkbook.
Many people don't get it. They haven't been asked to support a political candidate. It has hasn't been necessary in Republican dominated Utah County. There are enough willing businesses and PAC's to get the job done for republican candidates.
But others recognize the relationship of money and representation.
When it is difficult to get out of my comfort zone, memory of the $25 check that came as a surprise gets me on my feet.
This campaign may be a long shot but these $50, $20, and $5 contributions are feeding my resolve.

Looking behind the legislation

Now that the dust from this year's legislative session is settling, we are left to inspect the results.
1. The tax on the most expensive snuff tobacco is lowered and tax rates are now set by legislation per ounce. So no matter how the price changes on the stuff, the taxes will be static. It will take an act of the legislature to up-date it. This doesn't make sense to me.
2. The amount of time that citizens have to collect signatures for a referendum on legislation has been shortened by about six weeks, by act of this year's legislature. We witnessed the herculean task to place the voucher issue before the voters last year. Regardless of my opinion on education vouchers, I really like the rights of citizens to petition government. I am still trying to figure out why this bill was a good idea.
3. I am also a big fan of citizen's access to the courts. This year, the legislature passed a law that took away the right of most home owners to sue the builders of their homes for slipshod workmanship. I spoke with a frustrated subcontractor who lamented that this would affect the reputation of all the trades in the building industry. The ones who suffer the most from this legislation are the homeowners stuck in a ramshackle house. The ones who benefit are the developers who sweep in, sweep out, and sweep up.

Tied to each of these pieces of legislation, are lobbyists who are making generous donations to the campaigns of many of our legislators. It is not difficult to see who is being represented.

Answering Education Questions

I recently received email from a neighbor who said that he felt that since he didn't have children, he shouldn't be taxed for public education. He also favored the voucher program, which the legislature passed and subsequently was overturned by referendum.

The two statements were related but not necessarily complementary. If we only taxed families with children, we would certainly not be able to afford the current level of funding for public education, let alone the additional costs of vouchers. My response to him was long but perhaps this forum is a good place to record my perspective.

I believe that quality public schools are a priority because they ensure an educated citizenry for the future of democracy. The taxes we pay are not tuition for our children any more than the taxes are user fees for the library or the parks or the freeways. Not everyone will use them but everyone benefits from the fact that the services are provided in our communities.

I don’t know what your occupation is but say you manage a fast food restaurant, or run a print shop, or an insurance company. You might discover that you “use” the public education system because it is supposed to prepare your employees to be able to do basic mathematics, to communicate, or to think logically. Whether or not I am an employer, I want my police officers, my cable guy, or my store clerk to be trained – and trainable. So I benefit if the public school system is working. No, I don’t like to pay taxes any more than you do but I think that the alternative would be worse.

There are many areas of government that support other segments of the population. We hope we don't ever need the service of a school for the blind but we support it because we are charitable. Loyalty to the community often trumps freedom to support only those areas of government that serve us individually. And we take on the projects that protect or care for our neighbors.

The voucher issues seem to linger and unfortunately are very divisive.

The problems I had with the education voucher legislation of last year were these:

1. The appropriation for vouchers would be another budget category-- one that goes to support private schools, when public schools are already underfunded relative to education funding in every other state. This appropriation would be called additional education funding though, and legally could be pulled from the education Trustlands revenue.

2. Voucher proponents claimed that the parents would have greater choice. However, the tuition voucher would lower the expense of private school tuition only if the school chose to accept the child. The children who would be accepted would not be the “at risk” students, the learning disabled, the ESL, or behavior problems. And it is unlikely that the low-income parents could provide the transportation or the parent involvement that private schools require, let alone the remainder of the tuition. I visited with a college student who described the urban public schools in Baltimore. She said she wished they had vouchers available so she could have escaped them. Our schools are not currently as bad as that. I believe that vouchers would have hastened the descent of our public schools to that situation and widened the gap of social classes.

2-B. I call it 2-B because it might be an alternative scenario to #2 above. The private schools set the price of their tuition based on a free market system. They will charge what the market will bear. If they are not particularly interested in growth in the number of students they serve, they may find that they can raise their tuition by the amount of the voucher, and the families who were willing to pay at that level before will still be able to pay. This gives them more revenue with the same affluent population. But the increased revenue is tax dollars.

3. In areas of the state where there are no private schools within hundreds of miles, the families would have the tax burden of benefits to the urban and suburban private schools.

4. Lastly, not all private schools would be willing to accept tuition vouchers because they don’t want to bow to government requirements. And the legislature would be anxious to show that the schools accepting tuition vouchers were held accountable. Their way of doing this is to subject the schools to the same testing requirements or teacher certification. Many private schools don’t want the expense of this intervention.

I know that there are private schools that fill a need. I wouldn’t stand in the way of those who want to provide them or patronize them. I also don’t object to appropriations such as the Carson-Smith scholarships for autistic children who are not served in public schools. But I have this attitude that tax-funded public education is the basic education that is provided to prepare the next generation for responsible citizenship. Public schools must take everyone that comes to the door. Private schools don’t have that responsibility. Private schools should not be given the public funding.

On a more personal level, I choose to have my children experience public education because it puts them in an environment where they learn to work with those people who make up their community. Their education is enriched at home and we as a family try to contribute time and talent to enrich the education experience for others at the school as well.

Well, now you have the long version of my voucher opinion. Admittedly, some of it consists of speculation, but then, so did the opinions of those who favored vouchers. A system as widely applied as the Utah proposal that was over-turned, has never been tried. No other developed country in the world has a system of education vouchers for private schools. It would be an experiment. For the reasons I gave at the beginning of this message, I am not anxious to be the state to see whether I am wrong.

Effective Legislators

There is an organization whose purpose it is to judge the effectiveness of legislators. While there might be many aspects that go into defining a “good” legislator, the single criteria for being “effective”, according to this group, is the number of bills an individual sponsors that pass. So, the more laws that make it into the Utah Code, more effective our legislature is. Of course, no elected official wants to be seen as a “slouch”. Is there any wonder that citizens are increasingly dependent upon lawyers to keep them on the right side of the law?

I wonder if there might be an organization out there which would take on the task of identifying the legislators who are most effective at stopping the passage of needless or downright bad legislation.

What's for dinner?

Every once in a while it's time to clean out the refrigerator. There are Ziplock bags of this and Tupperware containers of that – some of the contents of which are beginning to show their age. So we sort out these containers. This one is definitely a “keeper”-- just what we want and need for dinner tonight. That one (Piu!) goes into the trash.

The legislature has the responsibility to do a similar exercise. Bills pile up going into a session in January and the sorting begins. Committees evaluate them first. If they merit approval there, they are sent to the House or Senate for debate. Both chambers must declare them worthy of adoption, after which, the Governor has an opportunity to validate the choices, and (Bingo!) we have the latest set of laws and regulation. In other words, “Dinner is served.”

What happened this year was interesting. Education is a hot topic in the state as well as the legislature. Lawmakers are being hounded by their constituents to adequately fund public education and the institutions of higher education, for which they have responsibility. The number of bills dealing with education was daunting but the committees began their work of sorting back in January. Some bills were debated in one legislative house or the other; some passing, some tossed out.

But the days were passing faster than the bills. By March third, votes on many bills that were essential had been postponed and still more, which were deemed of lower priority, were a long ways from being debated.

So some legislators came up with a brilliant, if unappetizing, idea. Take a big pile of education bills; pour them all into one stew pot, called an omnibus bill; and vote on them all at once. A time saving concept in the kitchen as well as the legislature! So in went the essential funding, along with the questionable programs, along with (What's this?) proposals which had already been rejected in committee or defeated by an earlier vote. What does it matter that some parts of the concoction were fished out of the trash? Would any legislator dare to reject the essential funding of education in an election year?

Law makers went home smiling. Everyone who sponsored an education bill got a gold star on the forehead for being an “effective legislator.”

What the public is served up now is a stew that brings in the increased money that educators need, but it sure smells funny.