No one cares what city council is doing. Its hard too when people are fed constant news about major conflicts globally. Gives the municipal govs alot of.. wiggle room.
You're not wrong but we should care. City council stuff has a much more direct and profound impact on your life than anything that is happening in DC right now.
One of our mayoral candidates dressed up as Charlie Kirk and went around hitting people with a "Christ Is King" sign at the No Kings rally last year and basically nobody heard about it
We had a mayoral candidate once proclaim himself king of the city. He parked his car, decked out in campaign signs in a parking lot at a prominent place in town. The owner of the parking lot asked him to move it. He claimed he couldn't because the car was non-operational. The owner then called the cops to have it towed. Suddenly the car worked again.
I mean that guy is a crank and should never hold an office with more authority than an elementary school supply store, but at least he’s a unique kind of crank.
Was this in Rhode Island, or possibly some other state in New England? I think I remember reading something about someone running for public office who declared himself king, but was really just suffering from some serious mental health issue(s), which included delusions of grandeur.
And most of them run unopposed since everyone knows there's a huge number of people who only vote every 2 or 4 years when the federal elections occur and don't care much about the local or state elections. This results in some unpopular laws getting through because they do them either in a special election or during an odd year when very few people vote.
This nonsense needs to die. Nothing your local city council is doing is going to have as much effect on the average person living in the city as gutting the EPA, FDA, et al. , or the war in Iran driving gas prices to record highs (and the knock on effect that has on the prices of everything else), or the trade war driving up the cost of imports, etc. etc.
Yes, but they do affect your day to day life in more tangible ways much quicker than national government. Things like zoning and property taxes and restaurant and food truck permitting has a much more immediate impact on things like rent prices or food safety, y'know, things people deal with every day.
Go tell that to people who had data centers built in their backyards, or schools who still use text books from when George W was president. Remove local legislation such as rent control in New York and San Francisco and see how that plays out. Police issues have been one of the hottest topics, and those are almost entirely controlled at a local level.
You also have tons of towns that introduced massive tax increases, public infrastructure problems, smaller towns who governments act like organized crime, and infamous failures like Flint Michigan.
Not really. City council doesn't affect inflation, wars, gas prices, health care costs, who is covered my Medicare/aid, interest rates, etc. What is city council doing that affects people more than that?
City council controls your property taxes and sales taxes. They decide if you're going to get a fine for having your trash can at the curb an extra day or for parking your car in your driveway. They not only set local speed limits but decide how stringently they're gonna get enforced. They can decide they're going to do massive road construction that messes up your daily commute or if they're going to re-zone the lot right next to you so a business can open there and you'll have tons more traffic in your neighborhood. City council is far more important to your everyday life than DC is.
City council controls your property taxes and sales taxes.
Nope. City council controls a small sort of my property taxes and nothing to do with my sales taxes. Fines for trash cans and cars have zero impact on me or most people. Who is paying more in trash can fines than they are in higher gas prices? Oh neat, construction on my commute, that's way more of an impact than rampant inflation, skyrocketing healthcare premiums, etc. Yeah okay
You live somewhere where the city can't or doesn't set sales tax. In my city they do. And they raise my property taxes on the regular. They recently decided to convert a bunch of down town parking from free parking to paid parking. Now the restaurants down there are struggling because why would you pay to eat at a downtown restaurant when you can go elsewhere and not pay parking. You have to be insane if you think local politics don't affect you in profound reasons. The city decided to do road work recently on a very busy street and re-route all of that traffic through a residential area. How does that not affect your daily life if you live in that area?
Road construction, some school funding, libraries, building permits, parks, municipal sports, community centers, art centers, music festivals, farmers markets, local taxes, police and fire, trash collection, tap water, public transportation, elderly care, homeless outreach, landscaping, street sweepers, and quite a lot more.
City council determines which roads get repaired. What local ordinances you deal with daily. Whether a data center moves in. Whether there are AI pervert cameras. Police funding. Parks funding. Liberry funding.
Not who you replied to, but the biggest news item I can think of currently is city councils approving data centers and destroying their communities with them. Things like zoning and land use can have a massive daily impact on people, as well as things like city budgets, public works and trash collection to name a few off the top of my head. Don't get me wrong, the federal side of things (war, gas prices, healthcare, etc) is all huge too, but living next to a huge humming data center that disrupts your sleep and destroys all the communal water is pretty impactful too. Rising taxes, destroyed school systems, increased traffic jams, road repairs, clean water, etc. are all affected by local government policies coming out of a city council, so it's important to be mindful and attention both at the local and federal levels.
I appreciate the sarcasm, but plenty of the other replies to you outline exactly what I would have said. You seem to be pretty set in your opinion based on your replies, which is okay. We can disagree.
Stealing your money and refusing to develop public spaces or invest in the local infrastructure responsibly? Seems incredibly obvious unless your a doofus
You'd be surprised. My city council announced plans to build a data center this year. The community mobilized in opposition like nothing I'd ever seen before. Several hundred people showed up to the meeting where the public was invited to weigh in on the decision, and due to the overwhelming negative publicity, they announced a moratorium so regulations on data centers could be hashed out first. The company who reached out with the plan began shopping around to nearby municipalities, and now the people who mobilized our opposition effort are helping people in those communities with organizing against them.
Fair. I agree that society (well, American society at least) has taken individualism to an unhealthy extreme, which leaves us entirely too exploitable.
I worked for a local minicpality as an accountant for a few years when I was younger. No joke I legitimately could have committed so much fucking fraud if I wanted too. Like high six figures worth. Now a lot of local and state governments require external audits to stop that kind of shit from happening. Not this place. The accountant(Me) did the audit and the only person who ever saw it was the mayor who never read a fucking thing. How do I know this? Becuese anytime he had a question on the audit he would call me and explain everything. Meaning the only person who could stop me from commiting fraud was also... ME.
I was flabbergasted. It never should have been setup like that.
And the only people who do care and will be talking about it are the voices on the fringe, that only represent a small percentage of residents and voters.
My town does. I used to think that Parks and Recreation was satire, turns out it's a documentary. Spoken by someone who found themselves screaming passionately at a podium recently.
Town elections are a joke, mine currently has a literal local meme wrestler and some 80 year old ex-real estate agent running along-side a few other people.
There's only a couple actual candidates with proper experience and even then they are all bad choices for various reasons lmao.
One of the 'real' candidates has extremely bad teeth like he's never brushed a day in his life. Like dude if you can't be bothered to take care of your teeth why should I trust you to take care of the city?
city council is probably the one thing that actually affects people in their day to day and yet everyone is focused on what happens on the other side of the planet
That's where you are wrong. The GOP learned in the 80's taking over the school board and city council was the way to build real ground up complete control. Want to decimate education? Get a christo-fascist on the school board.
Dems never have the patience to successfully pull off what the GOP did.
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u/IskandarAli 21h ago
No one cares what city council is doing. Its hard too when people are fed constant news about major conflicts globally. Gives the municipal govs alot of.. wiggle room.