Happy Election Day, everyone.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As people across the country head to the polls, we know what will be\u00a0on their minds: proposed revisions to municipal charters.\u00a0 Will Baltimore create a Department of General Services<\/a>?\u00a0 Will the Commissioners of Miami-Dade County get an $85,000 raise<\/a>?\u00a0 Will Philadelphia combine its Parks and Recreation departments<\/a> into one?\u00a0\u00a0Esoteric though the questions may be, their answers will have a\u00a0substantial impact on the how these local governments function for years to come.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Philly, the separation between the Fairmount Park Commission and the Department of Recreation has long been a source of frustration and inefficiency.\u00a0 A 2004 strategic plan<\/a> tried to redefine their\u00a0roles, but in 2008<\/a>\u00a0the lines of authority remained blurred.\u00a0\u00a0Today, it’s up to the citizens of Philadelphia to fix the problem — because their elected representatives don’t have the power to do so.<\/p>\n In the\u00a0midst of New York City’s term limit saga, it’s easy to get the wrong idea about municipal power.\u00a0 Though the Mayor and Council of New York City\u00a0can\u00a0give each other another crack at\u00a0their offices (over the repeatedly expressed will of the voters, no less) the same actors in Philadelphia can’t even merge two related agencies.\u00a0 They can only put the question on the ballot.\u00a0 I suspect that the average Philadelphian would be as surprised to learn what his government couldn’t do as New Yorkers were taken aback to learn what their government could.\u00a0 And there are many more cities in Philadelphia’s position than there are in New York’s.<\/p>\n Direct democracy may once have\u00a0looked like a bulwark against\u00a0urban political machines, but today it’s a curiosity and a\u00a0hindrance more often than not.\u00a0 When voters are not invested in the ballot questions before them,\u00a0their votes are\u00a0necessarily arbitrary.\u00a0 And they\u00a0can produce some strange results.<\/p>\n Just ask California.<\/p>\n — JB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Happy Election Day, everyone.\u00a0 As people across the country head to the polls, we know what will be\u00a0on their minds: proposed revisions to municipal charters.\u00a0 Will Baltimore create a Department of General Services?\u00a0 Will the Commissioners of Miami-Dade County get an $85,000 raise?\u00a0 Will Philadelphia combine its Parks and Recreation departments into one?\u00a0\u00a0Esoteric though the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1950,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1950"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/forum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}