Has anyone here served on town councils, school boards, or similar positions in local government? If so, how was your experience? What kind of political pressures did you experience, and was it more ideological or personal? What kind of issues did you work on, and how was policy decided?
I was elected to serve on a school board many years ago because I was very interested in trying to improve the quality of education. It was a totally frustrating experience.
We met once a month from 7 PM to midlnight or 1 AM. We spent all our time working on budgets, whether to replace or repair the old boiler, whether to expel pregnant girls, struggling with teachers’ salaries, how to get bids for various repair projects, etc. We never, ever got to discuss the philosophy of education or how to improve it.
Therefore, after a year I did not run for re-election. I doubt whether it has improve any since.
I’m on the city council, small town (pop. 200, no police, volunteer fire department, no grocery store, just a bar and a cafe, a post office, and a John Deere dealer).
In a nutshell, we meet once a month to decide how to spend the city’s money. We pay bills, contract for services, respond to concerns from residents, plan special events, etc. As a council member, I don’t get nearly as much flak as the mayor – people call him at all hours and expect him to do things like wash off a slide that somebody peed on or investigate a bonfire or tell someone to leash their dog or turn their music down or stop speeding. It’s not good to be the mayor.
Nothing “political” in the partisan sense. We’ve had some disagreements but most of them end with the city clerk or treasurer doing some research and telling us what the law says. 
Everything’s decided by voting – majority rules, mayor breaks a tie – sometimes with help from outside experts.
We don’t have issues so much as problems, mostly related to maintenance of the infrastructure – water quality, upkeep of city land and buildings, dilapidated buildings, illegal parking, people who don’t pay their utility bills, etc.
One issue is that we’re losing population and we have no amenities. That’s a common issue in rural small towns, and nobody seems to have a clue how to fix it, especially with a flagging economy.
In the almost four years I’ve been on the council, we haven’t done much more than maintain. We did manage to get the tennis courts repaved, and we’ve made some improvements in the parks. We’re very conscious that we’re spending taxpayer money, so we’re tight with it, maybe tighter than we need to be. We’ve had to pass up on some grants because we have too much money to qualify.
My boyfriend is now on the city’s committee that decides local grant funding for organizations. They meet I think once every two months and it’s the most depressing thing ever, because of course they have to cut everything. He can’t get them to not cut everything equally, though - in times of economic stress, he thinks you ought to let Shakespeare in the Park go for a year so SisterCare can get fully funded, but nooo.
It sounds like a lot of this work is billing for stuff that, it has been decided, Needs To Get Done. From the posts here it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of talk about changing ordinances or tax policy; is that accurate?
I forgot. (I’m on vacation – that’s my excuse.)
Yeah, we’ve done a lot of work with ordinances and policies. We’ve passed several ordinances relating to stray cats and dogs, abandoned vehicles, on-street parking when it snows, registered sex offenders, housing that’s not up to code – probably others I’ve forgotten. We research state law to make sure what we do is legal and we go from there. There are a lot of sample ordinances on-line. If we’re stumped, we ask our attorney.
We’re part of a small cities organization that gives seminars on things like tax abatement, condemning dilapidated property, etc. Those have been very helpful, and I’ll bet most states offer similar opportunities for small cities.
Very briefly a while ago. Appointed to town council to fill a vacancy. Did not run for re-election as part of my agreement when I got appointed.
Its not a terribly glamorous job. The town manager handles most of the day to day stuff. And he had a finance person to pay the bills. They just had to submit the monthly tally to us for approval.
I don’t know that there is ever a lot of political pressure from an ideological standpoint. In fact, the Republicans didn’t like each other very much and the Democrats didn’t like each other very much. Party labels were utterly meaningless. You had one Republican run as a Democrat because he lost his primary election and vice versa. One Republican told me he hadn’t voted for a Republican for President since Nixon, he just had to run on that ticket in order to win in his district.
Everything is personal. People would get primary opponents not because they weren’t Republican or Democratic enough for the party faithful. They would get an opponent because some old timer wanted his kid on the council or because they voted for Mr. Jones zoning application to build an in-law suite on his property. One time, they wanted to hire a part-time parks person. You had two Republicans voting to spend the money and three against while two Democrats voted in favor and two against. Why? Because the candidate was old John Smith’s son. The issue was not increasing taxes or fighting to improve local parks, but whether or not you liked Mr. Smith.
Not many major issues the council had to deal with. Lots of bullshit zoning or code variance applications. Sometimes the town solicitor would recommend an ordinance for legal reasons like limiting street parking on certain streets. Some local organization would always come with their hand out for a donation.
I haven’t, but I’ve watch our city council like a spectator sport - and wonder why anyone would. Many cities now put video of their city council meetings up on the internet. Watch some. If yours doesn’t, find a town organized like yours (there are several models of city organization) and watch theirs. Go to your city council meetings - around here, people who don’t go to the city council meetings don’t get elected.
Its a thankless job dealing with kooks.
Also, the neighbor is on the city council - has been for about six years. And has $50k in legal bills as a result. They pay him something like $8k a year for the city council job. Now, a lot of his legal bills are because he broke some campaign laws - not all of them though …but you need to be aware that there is a lot of exposure.