Asking the right questions of the right candidates

Mark over at The Moderate Republican blog comments on local elections in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

Anyway, the trend I've really noticed in all of the races is how candidates will promise things that they'll persuade another governmental body to do, once they're elected. In other words, a library board candidate might be selling promises of what the city council will do for the library, once this person is sitting on the library board.

It is interesting how people and the media are so focused on particular issues that they don't distinguish who they ask solutions of.

Take the races here in Glens Falls (NY). One of the big issues locally is what to do about the Civic Center. The sports arena is being subsidized by the city to the tune of nearly a million dollars this year.

Citizens and the media ask candidates for mayor and Common Council what they’ll do about the Civic Center’s fiscal hemmoraghing. This is fair enough since the arena is owned and operated by the city.

Most candidates propose regionalizing the Center’s operations, sharing ownership (and thus costs) with the neighboring towns and the three local counties, all of whom derive economic spillover benefits from events at the arena.

But people ask questions about the Civic Center of city candidates to the COUNTY board of supervisors. This doesn’t make sense since the Warren County doesn’t, at this point, have any say over the venue.

So for a candidate to the county board to talk about regionalization is a vacuous promise, since the initiative must come from the city government.

What a candidate to the county legislature should be asked is HOW he or she would convince the rest of the board that regionalization would be a good idea.

What incentive will officials from the rest of the county have in taking on part of this nearly $1 million (this year alone) drain? The county and neighboring towns already receive whatever economic windfall the Center generates (sale taxes, spillover entertainment dollars, etc), so why would they choose to accept the large subsidy burden while gaining no additional economic benefit from their involvement with the building?

This is the sort of question county candidates from the city should be asked. But they are given a free pass whenever they propose the Mom and Apple Pie ‘regionalization’ utopia. Sure, we in the city would love for others to magnanimously help us heal our self-inflicted wounds, but it doesn't work that way. Governmental entities work under the principle of englightened self-interest and thus proposing Civic Center regionalization need to understand this if they are to have any hope of selling the idea to our would-be Saviors.

The devil is in the details and no one seems to have much of the latter.