Charlottesville Tomorrow election guide

I took the time this evening to read the City election guide I received in the mail from cover to cover. What a G R E A T service to the community - a big shout out to the folks at Charlottesville Tomorrow! Please read your own copy (or find it online) to get a good feel for each candidate and then V O T E next Tuesday.

Statements that jumped off the page to me (one for each candidate, to be fair):
David Brown
Q: What do you see as the primary responsibilities of City Council?
A: "One is setting policy and providing direction to the City...But secondly and just as importantly, is being sort of the conduit between staff and the public. I think that - sometimes I think people feel inhibited from bothering City Council when they have a problem or an issue or they think there's a neighborhood issue or a neighborhood problem or something they think needs to be addressed and they're inhibited from contacting City Council. I actually feel like that that's our big role, a big role for us..."
Comment: I watch City Council meetings and I don't see a whole lot of inhibited residents coming to speak, do you??? If you do not FIRST ask residents if they've taken their concern to the appropriate City staffers, then the message residents get is that endruns around staff are the way to get things done in the City. The clear message you send is that your staffers must not be competent or attentive enough to handle resident's concerns directly without your assistance. Is it any wonder that other candidates talk about City Council micro-managing? Sounds incredibly disfunctional to me!!

Holly Edwards
Q: What are your overall transportation priorities for the City of Charlottesville?
A: "...the bottom line, I think, is that the goal should be to revolutionize the transportation system. Reduce the barriers for people that do have cars and increase the incentives. For example, sometimes the scheduling can be a disincentive for people. Create pedestrian pathways, and I like the sound of having biking boulevards and to create commuter lanes."
Comment: AMEN.....bring on the revolution!

Barbara Haskins
Q: What do you see as the primary responsibilites of City Council?
A: "It's sort of an obvious thing that we have disparate constituencies in the city and so City Council is supposed to represent all of them...I think the tension and the responsibility for City Council on the one hand is to do this right and to trust their advisors. On the other hand, though - and this is the subtle part and the judgment part - there're also dialectical forces of business as usual, protecting sacred cows, protecting turf, and so there are going to be recommendations that appear that in fact are not so much based on expert opinion as inertia or turf protection, so City Council has to somehow have the collective wisdom, or the emergent wisdom, to figure out when it's one and when it's the other, because they're very, very different and you end up wasting a lot of money for the latter but not for the former..."
Comment: Very sage analysis of how things really operate.

Satyendra Huja
Q: What are your overall transportation priorities for the City of Charlottesville?
A: "My most important priority is to improve the transit system...another thing I also support is a streetcar on the corridor from downtown to the [Route] 29 North through the University and Barracks Road, because I think it will provide a good way for high-density corridor development."
Comment: You get props from me for understanding that the streetcar is primarily a catalyst for denser development and secondarily a cool transit mode.

Peter Kleeman
Q: What is your top priority for action by City Council if you are elected?
A: "I think we really need to refocus. City Council needs to look inward and say, 'What is our appropriate role in guiding the City?' We really need to, I think, take on that role of being the board of directors, redefining what it is that City Council should be considering, how it brings issues forward, how it spends its time, basically, and how much it will delegate to professional staff...City Council has recently been evaluating how well a particular project fits our vaguely defined comprehensive plan...Now clearly, council has a role in that. But I think it really needs to take those conversations as a way of refocusing what the guidelines are for the Planning Commission or the Board of Architectural Review and say we shouldn't have to be reviewing each and every one of these things. We should be setting better guidelines. All the people that we appoint or hire to do the primary decison making in those areas and then come forward and defend why it is that this is a good idea and if there's no good reason to the contrary, I believe council needs to have the confidence that the people that they hire and they appoint are doing a professional job; and if they're not, they could be replaced. But if they are doing a professional job, their judgment should be taken into serious account."
Comment: Sounds like leading through empowerment to me, good for all parties involved.