Written on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 10:58pm by Paul Wolf | 2 Comments

How To Be An Effective Elected Official

In my experience as Chief of Staff to the Buffalo Common Council and in observing elected officials over the years, I believe most elected officials focus their time and energy in the wrong places. The Council, County Legislature and Town Boards are supposed spend their time on big picture policy making. Elected officials typically get wrapped up in solving individual problems such as dealing with broken garbage totes and barking dogs, instead of dealing with big picture issues such as economic development policies.

The roles over time due to our strong executive style of government have become inverted. The Council, Legislature and Town Boards, have become problem solving micromanagers and the Mayor, County Executive and Town Supervisors initiate and implement policy. In my opinion it is supposed to be the other way around.

In many ways elected officials are simply responding to the calls for help coming into their offices, and it is hard to say to someone go away as I have more important things to deal with. It is truly amazing what people will call elected officials about. The creation of the Citizens Service office in Buffalo’s City Hall has helped, as that Department is taking and tracking most complaint calls, but still old habits are hard to break, when a voter needing help comes calling. I suppose like many things the issue is one of balance between addressing individual problems and addressing bigger policy issues.

Read the attached two page article titled How To Be An Effective Elected Official and let me know what you think. As this is a work in progress, I am open to suggestions regarding editing and content.

Download effective_elected_official_article.doc

2 Comments

  1. RaChaCha says:
    January 20, 2008 at 3:06 pm

    We had this situation here in RaChaCha as well, with elected officials getting tied up with constituent problem solving, in part because the only other place to go with problems was the City Hall bureaucracy , and we all know how responsive a central governmental authority can be…
    So, one of the ‘big ideas’ which helped transform My Fair City under our previous mayor William Johnson was to create Neighborhood Empowerment Team (NET) offices (think mini City Halls) around the city to deal with quality of life issues such as garbage totes, barking dogs, property inspections, and public safety issues. In addition to that primary mission, these offices have also become de facto community centers. Now, city councilmembers can refer constituents to their NET office for most of these issues, and only need to get involved if the issue still doesn’t get resolved.
    How’s that for a transformative idea for adoption in Buffalo? It seems to me that it would be even more effective, and have more impact, in a city with such a large geographical scope as Buffalo, and a city where some sections or neighborhoods are already like communities unto themselves.

  2. BufffaloCitizenQPublic says:
    January 23, 2008 at 11:21 pm

    Amen!
    Let’s hope our elected officials have read the info and that
    they are already springing to action to get busy on some big ideas.
    However, it’s probably a good idea for them to concentrate only 50% of their time on the big one and 50% on the sundry concerns of constituents.

 

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