Questionaires for Local Candidates
At the end of last week filing closed for candidates in local elections in the City of St. Louis for the Board of Aldermen and for the city-wide election of the President of the Board of Aldermen. Independent candidates can still file a petition (signatures required) by February 12th to run in the April general election, although I don’t see that happening.
Eight of the 14 even-numbered aldermanic seats are contested: the 4th, 6th, 12th, 18th, 20th, 22nd, 24th and 26th. I would have liked to have seen more of the seats be contested but this is better than in years past. I’m not going to focus on the remaining wards that are not contested as a questionaire to them it rather pointless I think, simply by paying a $328 filing fee they are guaranteed the seat for another four years.
So the idea is to send out a list of questions to all 20 candidates and then post their responses for everyone to review. I belive there are questions general enough for all the contested aldermanic seats as well as for the President of the Board of Aldermen. Of course, machine politicians traditionally avoid real issues and instead focus on individual constituent service (stop signs, dumpsters, etc) but we’ll see how it goes.
While I have not developed specific questions, here are some general topics for all candidates, in no particular order:
- Charter Reform
- Non-partisan elections
- City rejoining St. Louis County
- Regional planning agency
- Mississippi River Bridge
- Mass Transit (funding of, expansion of, types)
- Education (St. Louis Public Schools, Charter Schools, Vouchers)
- State Control of St. Louis Police
- Aldermanic Courtesy
- Use of eminent domain
- Tax credits, TIFs and tax abatement
- City’s zoning code
- Patronage jobs, machine politics
- Environment, U.S. Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement
- Campaign contribution limits
- Constituent communication
- Valet parking/Parking Management
- Role of the Planning & Urban Design Agency
- Preservation/Demolition Policy
- Parking for two-wheel vehicles (bikes, scooters, motorcycles)
- 22nd Street Interchange (located in 6th Ward)
My thought is to use a 1-5 format with say #1 representing “strongly agree” and 5 representing “strongly disagree.” I’d form statements slanted one way or another soliciting a 1-5 response from each. I’d also allow candidates to submit additional explainations for each topic — I have no space limitations.
I’d like to open this up to your feedback on general topic areas or if you have specific questions/statements you’d like to see posed to all the candidates. I want to keep this issued-focused and not personality focused. Still, questions relating to record are valid as these speak to policy perspectives.
Steve:
As a statistical sidenote, if you’re going to use the Lickert Scale model, remember that you ought to have a choice for “Don’t Know” or something like that so that when you run just a basic analysis and want to examine mean, median and/or range, you’ll be able to 1. note if any topic reached statistical significance and 2. clearly represent the n when persons choose not to answer. Otherwise if you run the analysis with missing data on some but not all questions, your results will mostly likely be skewed toward the majority of the answers which in essence may lead to invalid results from your tool.
I think your survey design could be beneficial in obtaining a “more accurate” (if not more valid) interpretation of the quantitative versus qualitative (how someone feels).
~mary
The only thing that I think this survey won’t really help with is the specific issues in each Ward. Some Wards have some pretty big issues right now, and that is really where people want to know where the stance is. This is a nice general coverage though.
Steve,
The question of aldermanic courtesy is not an effective question to be asking. As we saw last night both candidates had the same predictable answer to that question. In fact aldermanic courtesy is your answer to the question that we really should be asking. That is, how do we encourage aldermen to consider the cost and benefit of their actions in city wide terms, not just in terms of their ward? Questions such as the South Grand McD’s and bars on Cherokee st are larger than just the wards they are in.
Furthermore (and I know this is something you would’t want to address), if we are to put our faith in aldermanic courtesy then shouldn’t every neighborhood in the city be given to one alderman instead of two or three? Shouldn’t the ward boundries follow neighborhood boundaries, so neighborhoods can be more consistently represented?
A real tough one to answer honestly blends three of the issues you raised, the concept of the City rejoining St. Louis County, regional cooperation and funding for mass transit. The three are linked because the city needs the additional revenues suburban areas can generate, the suburbs need an alternative to the single-occupant vehicle that likely isn’t a bus on a fixed route, and without better transit serving both the city and the county, residents of the entire region will continue to face challenges from congestion and sprawl as they try to get to work and/or school. Unfortunately, the city is coming from a position of weakness on this issue – we’ve already approved doubling our transit sales tax to ½%, but it’s contingent on the county doing the same thing. Then, there’s both the challenge of finding sububan politicians to champion a potentially politically-unpopular issue and the reality that if it doesn’t pass (or make it on the ballot soon), service will need to be drastically cut back within the next couple of years to balance Metro’s budget (see http://www.post-gazette.com/transportation/ for a potential taste of the future). If or when that happens, combined with the challenges of completing the cross-county extension, salvaging Metro as a viable urban amenity, much less a viable suburban option, may be nearly impossible.
That is a long list and I would be surprised if you would get any more than a few real answers from other than a few candidates. Phrasing the pertinent question in each category will not be easy. For instance issue #3: For many reasons there seems to be a great deal of inbred fear of merging city-county and/or other municipalities. Apparently many St. Louisans, regionally speaking, distrust leadership (understandably) and believe constituent services will be lost if mergers are allowed. The finances of the region are being severely stressed due to our large number of governmental units relative to the population and thus duplicative services/expenses are substantial, and increasing rapidly. However, whether one is for or against combination is based on a multitude of factors and may be dependent on nebulous assumptions.
Steve,
For such a long list of questions I am surprised you didn’t submit one last night.
I’m somewhat surprised your choosing such an outdated method for guaging and understanding someones feelings and perspectives.
Why not figure out some politicopalooza? Figure out a date and time, figure out the format, gather two opposing candidates together and start blogging. Obvious pitfalls which I haven’t thought of but it could work.
You were the one who wants blogs in every ward right?
Of course the political types won’t use the blogs. They are afraid of them. When politicians begin to successfully use blogs for their candidacy, then blogs will become a factor.
Yes, it is quite a list. I’ve been looking at transit lately and I didn’t realize that neither EWGCC nor Citizens for Modern Transit are really looking out for the transit needs of the city and inner core of suburbs. Essentially the city has no representation at the transit table. Light rail is the focus of both of these groups. Light rail is a necessary component of course, but it means the next 500 million dollars spent on transit ad nauseam (it looks like 40 years or more at this point) is going to be spent on light rail. (Not to mention the proposed Southside extension does not serve the community, but that is another story)
Portland experienced literally billions in investment with a new streetcar line. Do any of the aldermen realize that there is literally no representation for the views of the people of St. Louis in either the advocacy organization CMT or the quasi governmental organization EWGCC? I would like to see EWGCC put forth a couple of streetcar line alternates along side the light rail line down Chouteau they favor and see what the public reaction would be. The mayor doesn’t get it, do the aldermen?
The issues are complex in all of your questions. Some questions do lend themselves to simple answers. Whatever the outcome, they will begin to understand there are citizens watching their every move.
I know it would require alot more work on your part, but I think that these questionairs would be more informative if you could break them up a bit. City wide questions and issues are great for the BOAP, but for members, some larger questions combined with Ward specific issues would be better. On the whole, I like your questions, but in light on some recent actions here are two more topics to at least ask BOAP canidates, if not all BOA canidates.
Gateway Mall
Urban Tree Planting
Blairmont
As for topics for the alderman. Remember in your converstions, when it comes to climate change and the environment, the largest barrier to the growth of alternative energy methods such as Solar Panels and residential windmills is the simple fact that AMERENUE does not offer Net Metering billing procedures. In 35 states it is mandatory by state law. Here it can be dictated by municipality, but no one in power wants to offend AMEREN because of there large HQ here, even the post dispatch will not mention this issue. All of this can be substantiated by Mr Pat Justis from the MO DNR. Please comment.
Though the list has some good discussion points of the city’s many hurdles over the next century, the bread and butter issues definetly cannot be discounted. Its not machine politics to have a busted/missing stop sign replaced in your neighborhood – it’s just common sense. And guess what? you dont have to work with the Alderman to get it done either, the city has some really nice people in their public services department that actually can get things done sometimes quicker than an overwhelmed Alderman.
I think that a discussion on the strategic plan for the city is definetly needed and I think these issues fall under that umbrella. Some are wide reaching (city county merger) while others could be addressed this year (education) and taken care of.
Steve – the machine keeps me warm and is nice to me, why would I want to break it?