BY JAMES WERNIKE|
Los Alamos

I want to thank Lisa Hampton for her thoughtful response to my recent commentary, and David Hampton for his timely letter encouraging residents to serve on County boards and commissions. Both have been important influences in my life, and I became involved in County boards in the first place because David convinced me that showing up and participating matters.

My original argument was never that residents should stop serving because boards are useless. It was that if fewer residents are willing to serve, Council should ask why before changing the Charter to rely on fewer residents serving.

Lisa argues that complexity makes a third term valuable because members need substantial time to understand these systems, and that eliminating party restrictions would allow the “most qualified and dedicated” applicants to serve.

If it takes six years for a citizen to understand the system, then perhaps the system has become too bureaucratic. If our response is simply to give people more time to accept “this is how we do things” as an answer, then we’re treating bureaucracy as something citizens must adapt to rather than something government has an obligation to make accessible.

As Lisa correctly says, caring about community wellbeing is not partisan, but deciding how to improve that wellbeing is inherently about trade-offs. People can share the same goals while disagreeing substantially about the role of government, allocation of resources, unintended consequences, and which policies will actually work.

Democrats hold six of seven Council seats despite comprising only 40 percent of registered voters, illustrating how plurality voting can give one bloc near-total control. Political monocultures tend to perform poorly, and the NCS surveys do not suggest that one-party dominance has worked so well that we should weaken democratic safeguards. I would much rather see us going in the other direction, adding proportional representation and ranked choice voting to the ballot.

The respectful disagreement Lisa and I have is exactly the sort of thing our Charter should encourage and David’s examples reinforce why I care about this issue. If boards can influence important policy and persuade Council to change course, then who serves on those boards matters.

I gladly join David in encouraging residents to serve. Apply for a board. Attend meetings. Learn how government works. Make public comment. Lose a vote and come back anyway.

But also ask difficult questions and challenge assumptions. Why do boards have vacancies? Why do members need years to understand the system? Board service matters too much to confuse making vacancies easier to fill with solving the participation problem.

Letters to the editor represent the opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or editorial stance of the Los Alamos Reporter. The Reporter assumes no responsibility or liability for the factual accuracy of statements made by contributors.