We're taught in grade school that democracy isn't a perfect system, but that it's the best system to determine the will of the people. The publicly-funded Valley Metro Light Rail in metropolitan Phoenix, scheduled to open in December 2008, is an example of democracy in action at the local level, and now at the national level since Phoenix Mayor Gordon wants US taxpayers to subsidize it.
Democracy isn't perfect at determining the true will of the people and the history of the referendums to fund the Valley Metro Light Rail shows some of the difficulties our democratic system encounters:
- In 1989, Maricopa county voters got it wrong, they said no to a sales tax to fund light rail by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent.
- In 1994, Maricopa county voters got it wrong again when they rejected Proposition 400, another attempt to fund light rail.
- In 1997, Phoenix voters got closer to getting it right ; they were evenly divided, but the proposition to fund light rail failed again 50.2 to 49.8 percent.
- In March 2000, Phoenix voters finally figured it out and approved light rail funding 65 to 35 percent.
In 2003, nine years after the original county-wide vote ended in failure, a resurrected Proposition 400 was planned for the 2004 ballot. Since the voters don't always get it right, at a December 7-9, 2003 conference in Tempe, AZ, politicians, contractors, and transportation lobbyists met to compare notes on how to market light rail to voters to make sure the voters would get it right this time.
The politicians included former Phoenix mayor Skip Rimsza, Mayor Gordon's former boss and predecessor, Peggy Bilsten, former city council member, a Tempe city council member, and various government bureaucrats from other cities with transportation initiatives past and pending. Conference attendees were told, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again ... they’ll come around eventually.” Strategies to divide and conquer and keep putting up referendums until they pass, and lessons learned from past referendums in other cities were presented.
Unlike its 1994 predecessor, in 2004 the marketing worked. Maricopa County voters passed Proposition 400 by a 58-42 percent margin and established funding for several future projects including highways and mass transit.
As we all learn in grade school, democracy isn't perfect at determining the true will of the people. What we aren't taught in grade school is that the real question is not, what's the true will of the people, but the will of which people?
Timeline of Light Rail in Metropolitan Phoenix
1989: ValTrans - Regional rejected
1994: Proposition 400 - Regional rejected
1996: Proposition 400 - Tempe passed
1997: Proposition 1 - Phoenix and Scottsdale rejected
1998: Question #1 - Chandler rejected
1998: Qualify of Life Tax - Mesa passed
2000: Proposition 2000 - Phoenix passed
2001: Proposition 402 - Glendale passed
2004: Proposition 400 - Regional passed
2008: Mayor Gordon ask for US taxpayers to help Phoenix with revenue and infrastructure problems
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1 comment:
I agree with you that democracy is not all that it’s cracked up to be, especially when we entrust it to politicians, whether in Washington or in our own cities. As one of them (Tip O’Neill, the 55th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives) famously remarked, “All politics is local.” What he should have said is “All politics is loco.”
As for Madeleine Albright’s indefensible rationale for the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the U.S. and British governments, resulting in the death of 500,000 children, I am reminded of Theodore Roosevelt’s justification for the slaughter and forced removal of Native Americans from their lands. In The Winning of the West, he argued that “the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples” was necessary for the advancement of the American continent; otherwise, he claimed, it would be “nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.”
Similarly, speaking before the Peel Commission of 1936-1937, Winston Churchill justified the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land. He maintained that no “wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Thus, Madeleine is merely one of the wielders of power who subscribes to the notion that “the ends justify the means.”
Your blog is good; it makes me think. It also reinforces my belief that “change” is an illusion—“the more things change, the more they remain the same” or, as Lampedusa spins it, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (The Leopard).
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