Ah, Yes, the Water. The Cold, Cold Water.

Last night was the Meet the Candidates event/grilling in the run-up to our local election.  The event was very successful, the turnout was quite satisfying, and I think all of us made our positions clear.

We were asked a reasonable array of questions about various Village matters.  Everyone got to make his or her case to the audience.

There was a very distinct theme to the responses, more or less as predictable and as promised by the four who are not incumbents.  They all promised to "listen to the residents" (which all candidates promise to do, and all elected officials do), and they all criticized the current state of the Commission and its (in)attention (as the challengers imagine it) to the budget.  One candidate reassured us in response to a question a voter posed to her, to the effect of wondering whether she would take the same positions and approaches as a Commissioner that she does as a candidate, that she could be relied upon not to waver from her current path.  No matter what she encounters, or what she learns, she will not change her mind or her approach.

Those who are not now, and have never been, elected officials seem to understand that somehow, no one before ever thought of the idea of listening to residents/constituents.  And no one ever thought of how to confront a budget, with its limitations.  It never occurred to BP Commissioners to try to manage a manager.  It's an interesting perspective to adopt.  One of my friends who was there described the approaches of these candidates who have never actually had to deal with this kind of material as "pandering and naive."

Frankly, I think that's probably right.  Passing attention, from a great distance away, allowed authoritative conclusions about a range of difficult problems and dilemmas.  And there was largely little or no sense of what made those problems and dilemmas so difficult.

I took the title of this post from a comment made by one of the candidates, regarding the things she imagines herself improving.  Various Village residents have long complained about the water supplied to us from CNM.  Some complain about what they interpret as the purity and cleanliness of the water, and some complain about the pressure.  The candidate in question reassured us she's going to get to the bottom of this, and get those "two and a half inch" pipes replaced and/or enlarged.  As if no one ever thought about this problem, or tried to do anything about it.

If I get re-elected, we will still have two new, uninitiated, clearly poorly informed Commissioners.  If I don't get re-elected, we'll have three.  Presumably, they will start their tenures as they promised: persistently soliciting and "listening to" the thoughts and wishes of their neighbors.  And they'll certainly hear plenty of those thoughts and wishes, whether they still want to or not.  But they won't all be the same thoughts, the same wishes, and the same theories.  They'll conflict with each other.  If our candidates, two or three of whom will become Commissioners, really are pandering, and if their approach really does spring from naivete, they will get a rude awakening, fast.  It will feel like very cold water to them.  They'll find out that just as is true of the current Commission, and the one before that, and the ones before that, they, too, will soon be accused of not "listening" to their neighbors.  They'll find out that simple answers don't really address difficult and sometimes impossible problems.

They'll find out that a very limited-- frankly wholely inadequate-- budget can be tweaked a tiny bit here, and a tiny bit there, but overall, it will never serve the needs of this Village.  We had our best chance to help ourselves-- an early application for annexation-- but we blew it.  One candidate last night talked about maybe annexing some other tract.  But it isn't likely to happen, for exactly the reason our recent attempt failed.

The new Commission will have a choice, as all elected bodies have a choice.  That choice was represented by one of the questions posed to us last night: would you try to respond to what makes Village residents happy, or would you take a different, perhaps longer, view?  As I said last night, keeping the residents du jour happy has for decades involved not spending money on things like necessary attention to the log cabin.  Past Commissions ignored the man behind the curtain, and they oversaw a municipal headquarters that was decreasing functional, and in no way adequate to the need.  The current Commission, the one that ends next month, took the longer view.  And we made some 2015-2016 Village residents unhappy.  Those who choose to be unhappy can remain that way for the next few years, until the loan is repaid.  But many decades and even some generations of future Village residents will be very happy for what we are leaving them.  And in the meantime, we have dramatically improved our functioning, our appearance, and our sense of place.

As one of my friends put it, in a question that was not asked last night, we are improving the Village's "brand."  That translates variously, but most certainly including our sense of value, and our property values.