With the 2022 Takoma Park local elections complete, and my 7 years as a City Councilmember now at an end, I thought I would share some thoughts about my time on the Council. I’ve posted over 320 of these blogs, but I trust readers won’t mind one more.
MANY THANK-YOUS
I’d like to thank the voters and residents of Ward One for giving me the honor of serving on the Council, and for engaging with me in what amounted to a 7-year conversation about governing our community. We didn’t necessarily agree on everything, but Ward One could always be counted on to ask questions and offer opinions which helped make me a better representative.
One refrain I’ve heard is that being a Councilmember is a “thankless” job. That wasn’t my experience -- the truth is there were plenty of supportive comments, and I felt very positive about my relationship with residents and the job itself. Especially when I could step back and consider how much it meant to be given the opportunity to help my friends and neighbors, and to work for the betterment of the community I love. Whatever the short term challenges might have been, I subscribed to the comment my boss at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development used to say: “I may not like my job every day, but I definitely love it every day.”
I’d also like to express appreciation to all the candidates who ran for Mayor and City Council, and to offer my congratulations to those who won their races. While our short campaign season and the low bar to entry for candidates are welcome differences from the norm, it’s still a major undertaking and commitment for those who take the plunge, and they deserve our thanks. In addition, I’m thankful for the City staff and my Council colleagues, who collaborated with me, challenged me, talked me out of bad ideas, and even made it fun once in a while.
Finally, I wouldn’t have been able to run for and serve on the Council without the help and support from my wife Paula Kowalczuk, who was an ever-present source of positive advice and assistance. She made sure I kept the daily ups and downs of local politics in perspective, while putting up with the often intrusive City Council schedule. I’m very grateful for all of those contributions, and everything else she has done for me in our 40 years together.
A FEW LESSONS
It’s common for a valedictory statement to feature a list of “achievements,” and I’ve prepared a document along those lines which also includes unfinished issues on which I’m hopeful the new Council will focus: http://www.councilmemberkovar.com/blog/2022/11/22/city-council-highlights-2015-2022. Beyond all the ordinances, amendments, and other initiatives described in that piece, I felt like I learned something new every day working on the Council, about myself, the community, and our political and governmental systems. Below are a few insights which I believe have broader relevance for the City.
Inclusion. All City residents -- no matter when they moved here or what their living situations are -- deserve responsive treatment from the City government and their Councilmember, and the opportunity to share their views. I worry that when people say “I’ve lived here since ___ and I think…” or “I pay property taxes and I think…” it may signal that renters or more recent arrivals are somehow less entitled to speak up about local issues. While the historical perspective long-time residents can bring to bear is very valuable, citing how long one has lived in the City can, depending on the context, appear exclusionary. I welcomed input from Ward One residents regardless of when they moved here. Similarly, renters contribute to property taxes indirectly (some portion of tenants’ rent is used by landlords to pay their taxes). So, again as I see it, it’s primarily whether someone resides here that should give them a platform to speak out, and I encourage everyone to keep that in mind in public debates.
Communication. I’ve interacted with residents in a variety of ways, including office hours, email exchanges, phone calls, community meetings, in-person talks, group emails to neighborhood lists, community events, small gatherings, social media, and public comments at Council meetings. But this is an area where we have to keep striving to improve and expand, and at times perhaps my own efforts fell short. I’d stress, though, that when residents don’t get the results from Council they would prefer, that’s not the same thing as not being heard. Often the Council has listened carefully and simply reached a different conclusion. So I urge residents to draw a distinction between on the one hand having made your case and not seeing the votes go your way, and on the other not being heard. This is especially important given that some residents are literally not being heard because they don’t speak English well, which is something we need to do more to address.
Civility. People are passionate about local issues -- that’s true everywhere and it may be “more true” in Takoma Park. I wouldn’t want residents to check their passion at the door and limit themselves to dry technical expressions of their views. On the other hand, most issues before the Council are more practical than ideological. To me, if you’re part of a group doing battle with, say, Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, by all means pull out all the stops. But when the debate is with neighbors you may see at the Farmers Market over the weekend, I think we should maintain a certain level of civility.
It can be easy to absorb the message from the national political scene that no holds barred advocacy is the path to success. And that can get magnified by the seemingly impersonal nature of emails and social media. But those trends are corrosive to public discourse, and I urge people to express their passion in a civil manner, which as a start could mean avoiding making written comments about others which you wouldn’t say to them in-person. Furthermore, residents sometimes send positive messages to Councilmembers via individual emails, after a critical comment by another resident has been shared with an entire email list. That’s something people ought to consider balancing out a little more with the new Council.
Voting on the Council. Those of us given the honor to serve as elected representatives exercise our judgment, guided by our consciences. But there’s a bargain -- we should let people know how we’ll vote in advance, or at least share the factors we’ll consider in making up our minds. I’d add that I don’t believe a simple count of pro and con opinions offered by constituents is the way we should determine our votes. What happens if the pro/anti ratio reverses the following week? Rather, we should take into account the comments we receive from all sources, along with our understanding of City priorities and resources, and then on balance, make the best decision we can (understanding that if enough people are unhappy with our votes, they can pick someone else to represent them in the next election).
Seeking Compromise. What should Councilmembers do when there’s a vote on a proposal they don’t support, at least in its current form, or maybe at all? I hope those who watch the Council have seen that my approach has been to seek improvements when possible through the amendment process, and then decide whether the changes are sufficient to warrant a yes vote. Sometimes they may still not be enough. But my view has been that if my colleagues support changes I propose which at least move the ball down the field in terms of improvement, then voting yes on the final product usually makes sense, even if further changes may be needed later.
I assume we all disagree with Barry Goldwater’s (in)famous maxim that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” We probably disagree even more after the events of January 6. But we should keep in mind a corollary devised by a friend of mine: “ideology without pragmatism is no virtue”. As I said, local issues tend to be non-ideological. But they can morph into strict ideology if people aren’t open to compromise. So I’ve tried to follow the guidance from my former boss Congressman Frank, who said elected officials should seek the best result they can in any given situation, while also taking steps to help ensure they have better choices the next time.
SOME THOUGHTS ON SERVING IN A REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
I’ve had the good fortune to work with some amazing progressive elected officials. That work often involved providing background information, or, in public statements or appearances, representing these leaders’ views rather than my own. Occasionally I gave “advice” on how they should vote on legislation. A Capitol Hill friend once told me about a memo he prepared with vote recommendations for his boss (a U.S. Senator) on amendments to an upcoming bill. But on one amendment -- due to the various pro and con arguments -- the memo said it was “his call.” The Senator’s response, unsurprisingly, was that they were all his call!
For me, after several decades of being on the other side of that line, when I first had to cast a vote on the City Council, I found myself briefly wondering if someone was going to advise me on how to vote. But of course it was now “my call”. And in making the call, it’s certainly crucial to take into account the views of one’s constituents, but in a representative democracy as noted above, the decision on how to vote ultimately lies in the judgment of the elected official. That’s humbling because the voters have ceded the responsibility to their representative to make vitally important decisions which directly affect people’s lives (in my case, nearly 3000 residents). Anyone who doesn’t see that as a precious burden is probably in government for the wrong reasons.
But based on what we’ve seen in recent years in this country, democracy isn’t just precious, it appears to be more fragile than we realized. So we need to join with our awesome Congressman Jamie Raskin in fighting to preserve democracy at the national level and everywhere else it’s under threat. Meanwhile, I think it’s also important to celebrate the amazing example of democracy we have here in Takoma Park, and to keep working to improve it. I hope some of what I’ve said above can contribute to that goal.
Thanks again to Ward One for letting me share in the governing of our wonderful community.
Peter Kovar, Takoma Park Ward One City Councilmember, 2015 - 2022