Category: Local

Endorsing Laura Belnap

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School board elections tend to fly under the radar compared to other elections in Utah. I suspect that at least part of the reason for that is that they are non-partisan so candidates aren’t affiliated with a party (at least as far as their campaigns are concerned) and the parties aren’t involved in promoting the campaigns of any candidate for those offices. I’m not going to make any argument about whether that is good or bad, but I feel confident that it is a natural consequence of having these be non-partisan. As a voter I have generally felt less informed about School Board candidates before they are elected and the records of Schoold Board members after they are elected than I do about candidates and holders of other offices. Because of that traditional lack of feeling informed I have decided that despite being busy and foregoing other endorsements this cycle I am going to make this endorsement of Laura Bellnap for State School Board.

Laura Belnap stands head and shoulders above her opponent in her understanding of the way to address the issues in our education system in Utah. She recognizes the importance of keeping parents informed and involved to ensure that their children get the best available education. She recognizes the value of technology from an educaitonal perspective without blindly thinking that technology alone will solve all our problems. She is also able to see the value of Common Core along with the pitfalls of it where too many people see only one side or the other.

It is because I expect that many voters are in the same boat I have often been in with regard to school board elections that I consider it important to share my perspective when I feel that one candidate so solidly stands above the other in this important race.

Tags civic participation, Education

Local politics State

I’m In

Well, I’ve been struggling with the question of whether I should run to replace Jim Nielson in House District 19 since he announced that he won’t run for another term. Apparently Mike Leavitt told Mitt Romney about it and Mitt took the time to share his thoughts:

With that encouragement how could I not take the leap. I’m glad that Mitt is using his iPad to dispense so much wisdom. The people of House District 19 will be the beneficiaries of it.

Thanks for your support Mitt. On to victory!

culture Local politics State

Thoughts on Caucus System Reform

Post author By David
Post date June 12, 2013
No Comments on Thoughts on Caucus System Reform

Curt Bentley has an excellent post in which he discusses the issue of reforming the caucus system. I really appreciate the methodical approach he has taken to examine the issue. I completely agree with each of his guiding principles and while I suspect I am more comfortable with the caucus system in its current form than he seems to be, I also want to see it strengthened through some reforms that will make it better at promoting voter participation and issue-centric campaigns. I agree with his assessment of what the caucus system does well and with his conclusion that dumping the caucus system entirely is not the way to go. As for his assessment of what the caucus system doesn’t do well, I have some thoughts I’d like to share and I sincerely hope that Curt and others will share their feedback on those thoughts.

Tags caucuses, civic participation, primaries

Local politics State

Strengthening Our Caucus System

Post author By David
Post date May 30, 2013
3 Comments on Strengthening Our Caucus System

Image by Cherie Priest

I really appreciated Paul Mero’s take on efforts to change our caucus and convention system. Unlike Mr. Mero, I’m not well enough connected to be invited to take part in private meetings regarding how to change Utah’s caucus and convention system. On that particular issue that is the largest of our differences.

Like Mr. Mero I have been annoyed at the misinformation that I have seen spread by and among delegates with extreme positions on a number of issues – HB 166 among them. Like Mr. Mero, I have tried to pay attention to the efforts to change the caucus/convention system but I have not found those proposed changes to warrant any particular support from me. The core of where my views align with those expressed by Mr. Mero are summed up in the following quote:

Yes, I’m sure some delegates have stated that they don’t want increased participation in the political process. But, to be fair, most of those voices are more concerned about how blissfully ignorant most Utahns are about the world around them than those voices are about consuming political power. So, yes, these delegates do believe they are better informed and for good reason – most of them are! Not all of them have the right answers, for sure. But it’s a bit disingenuous of my friend to chastise any serious citizen for wanting her candidate to be elected or her policy to become law – for heaven’s sake, that’s exactly what everyone wants!…

If reformers want their candidates elected to office, they should make a case that appeals to the most responsible citizens who take time to engage in a democratic process that has served this state since its founding.

Tags candidates, caucuses, civic participation, conventions, primaries

Local politics

Perceived Electability and IRV – A Case Study

Post author By David
Post date January 11, 2012
No Comments on Perceived Electability and IRV – A Case Study

As a followup to last night’s special election to fill Dan Liljenquist’s term as State Senator, I noticed some interesting things based on my interactions with other delegates and my review of the actual results (round-by-round, not just the final tally).

First let me provide some metrics that some people might be interested in – we had 264 delegates eligible to vote in this election. Of those, 258 showed up and received credentials but only 257 cast ballots.

At the meeting there was discussion about the practice in IRV voting of still only choosing one candidate – more generally that can be applied to choosing anything less than all the candidates. We can’t really know for sure how many people put less than all 8 candidates on their ballots but in the last round 7 ballots were discarded because they did not include either of the remaining candidates – Todd Weiler and Randy Shumway. This means that the election was finally counted with 250 out of 264 possible votes.

Now on to the issue of perceived electability.

I had the sense before the voting that this would come down to a two-way contest between Todd Weiler and Randy Shumway. That was based on what I had observed of the campaigns and what I had seen and heard from various delegates. The interesting side note to that was how many people I heard speaking favorably about Tim Hawkes but wondering whether he could win.

When the results were announced my instinct that it was a two-man race was confirmed as evidenced by who the last two candidates were. When I saw the full results from all seven rounds I discovered that my impression of Tim’s widespread appeal showed up strongly in the voting. From the very first round it was actually a three-man race. Todd had the lead in every round (in fact, until the final round Randy did not receive more votes than Todd received in the first round) but the top three were always Todd, Randy, and Tim in that order. Tim had 58 votes and the fourth place candidate had 16 votes. All the candidates below Tim combined for 43 votes in the first round. The fact that many of those who liked Tim questioned whether he could get elected bore out in the phenomenon that in the first 6 rounds – until he was eliminated – Tim gained more votes than any other candidate. By the time he was eliminated, Tim was only 4 votes shy of Randy.

Tim and Todd seemed more similar than Tim and Randy as shown by the fact that most of Tim’s votes went to Todd. That leaves me to wonder whether there were 5 of those who supported Todd as their first choice who chose Tim second based on the perception that he could not win. If so and they took that perception out of their calculations Tim would have beaten Randy for second place.

My best guess is that this phenomenon is based on widespread misunderstanding of how IRV voting works. Based on how I have heard people talk about it, it seems that many people think that their vote is counted less if it is not their top vote – they think their vote is wasted if they do not guess correctly who is going to win. They seem to instinctively feel that having a second choice vote hurts their first choice candidate rather than recognizing that their second choice candidate can never receive their support unless their first choice candidate is already eliminated which only happens if their first choice candidate was viewed less favorably than their second choice candidate.

I suspect that the voting patterns would be different if people understood that IRV gives them the opportunity to rank all the candidates rather than being dependent on how all the other voters vote if the person they first voted for is not one of the top two vote-getters. They don’t need to see how others voted in the first round before deciding where to throw their support in the second round.

Tags 2012, Instant Runoff Voting, Pursuit of Liberty

Local politics

Special Election – Senate District 23

Post author By David
Post date January 10, 2012
No Comments on Special Election – Senate District 23

Tonight is the night that county delegates will vote on who should finish the term for Dan Liljenquist. I have noticed over the weeks of campaigning – especially in the last few days – that many of the good ideas that have been promised by one candidate or another are being adopted by other candidates. These adopted positions may be talking points or they may be candidates recognizing a good idea and deciding that they are willing to adopt it on its merits (I think it is usually the latter). Regardless of their reasons there is one idea that I have decided to hold the eventual winner of this special election accountable for. Those who have made this promise already are going to be higher on my ballot than those who have not made or adopted this position.

This one key promise is that a recognition that representation is a two-way street. Whoever wins this special election must demonstrate their understanding of that fact by proactively maintaining open lines of communication with their constituents. I wrote about this a couple of years ago and have been very happy to see multiple candidates speaking to this aspect of holding office. This must include them communicating to constituents in asynchronous ways (websites being the most widespread method for this currently) and regularly being available for synchronous public communication (open houses or townhall meetings being the methods I have seen used for this by others).

Just as those who have made this promise already will be higher on my ballot than those who do not, the first and most crucial step that the winner can do to earn my support for future terms – whether I supported him or not and whether he made this promise or not – it to keep this promise that has been made by multiple candidates in this campaign.

Tags 2012, Davis County, Pursuit of Liberty

Local State

The Straw Man of Teacher Pay

Post author By David
Post date March 1, 2011
No Comments on The Straw Man of Teacher Pay

photo credit: 2create

I saw a post on Facebook, and later an email, with a title about how overpaid teachers are. The post went on to show mathematically that teachers are not overpaid by any reasonable measurement. Teachers and their unions would certainly appreciate the logic in their favor but the real value that I found in the post was not simply the numbers presented but the example that the post provides of using numbers to keep the debate uninformed. While it showed very convincingly that teachers are not overpaid (either literally or in relation to the service they provide) it masked the complexity of the issue by ignoring the crucial questions of how much we spend on education (it’s much more than teacher pay), whether we can afford the cost (whether or not the cost is a bargain), and what other alternatives we could explore to address the real issue (which is how we make sure that our children have a decent education available to them).

First let me list a few numbers (and their sources) that I would like to use in illustrating what was unsaid in the other post. I would like to thank Becky Edwards for helping me obtain the current numbers for the state of Utah that I am using. (Becky is currently the Representative for House District 20 in Utah and a member of the House Education Committee.)

The post compared teaching to babysitting and, using that assumption, concluded that parents should be perfectly happy to pay $20 per day for 6.5 hours of babysitting for each of their school aged children. Using that $20/day figure they calculated that teachers would be making over $100K per year. I don’t expect to use that $100K figure but wanted to include it here to briefly illustrate the conclusion of the original post.
The post also claimed that the average teacher salary was only $50K per year. I will be using that number because it seems reasonable and convenient but would like to state that I have made no attempt to independently verify its accuracy or its source.
The state of Utah currently spends $3.34 Billion on elementary education per year.
The state of Utah currently employs 32,473 elementary school teachers. (As far as I can tell that does not count administrators and other staff.)

It is easy to see that teachers salaries are only a part of what we spend on education. Multiply 32,473 by $50K and we get $1.62 Billion or 48.6% of our education budget. The other 51.4% goes to other education costs. Note that none of this education budget even includes the various book fairs, walk-a-thons, and other fundraisers that schools are perpetually engaging in. If the issue were simply a matter of teachers salaries we could easily pay them more. The fact is that less than half of our education cost is teacher salaries. Whoever originally wrote the document was probably thinking of all the fuss in Wisconsin where the Governor and the Republican members of their legislature are pushing legislation that would take away the collective bargaining rights of teachers for things other than salary – that should give us a clue that the real problem is not teachers with exorbitant salaries but rather unsustainable long-term benefits such as pension and health care costs.

I recently read an article about how dire the fiscal situations of state and local governments are in this regard (of course that is more than teacher salaries or even education) and the obstacles that stand in the way of fixing the structural problems that prevent something as simple as a salary cut or a tax increase from solving the issue:

. . . in most places, state legislators are overmatched by savvy public-employees’ unions and by pension-fund managers wedded to the status quo. Their influence explains why, though 18 states enacted some sort of pension reform in 2010, very few will offer real, long-term relief to taxpayers.

I feel very fortunate that my own State Senator, Dan Liljenquist, had the position and expertise to make sure that Utah is one place where we have enacted reforms that effectively address those structural imbalances. (To learn more about Dan and his efforts to make sure that Utah has a sustainable fiscal future read the article or visit his website.)

I also recently talked to a friend of mine who is a Democrat and a public school employee. I thought it was very telling to hear him bring up the subject of what was happening in Wisconsin and express his hope that the governor and the Republicans there would be able to win this fight and break the teachers union. His perspective was that unions only effectively protect the incompetent educators. He contends that the educators who are good at what they do are hampered by the fact that unions make it nearly impossible to fire ineffective educators or to pay effective educators based on their merit. While he believes, as I do, that there was a time when unions were a necessary tool to ensure that owners of various industries did not exploit their workers the fact is that the unions of today are more often the bullies. The contracts that teachers unions negotiate burden taxpayers with costly benefit packages while taking their dues out of the anything-but-excessive salaries of teachers and then they cry foul when taxpayers suggest that they should not pay part of teachers’ salaries when those teachers are spending their time on union activities rather than classroom activities.

The conversation with my friend illustrated the wide variety of alternatives that need to be considered in order to address the education issue. Simply throwing more money at the issue will not solve it. We need to look at ideas like merit pay, year-round school, reduced class sizes, increased parental involvement, etc. Some of those ideas seem promising to me, others seem neutral or even counterproductive. One idea I have not heard suggested anywhere that sounds very promising to me is grade clustering. Having a teacher teach, for example, three grades would allow for much more continuity in the education of each student. If the teacher still had a class size of thirty they would only have ten new students in one year that they would have to get to know and they would have more flexibility to have students work with older or younger peers based on their shared personal ability-levels. This would also allow parents to work with a single teacher for an extended period of time so that they could collaborate more effectively rather than working with a virtual stranger for the entire school experience of at least their first child. To buy into this we would have to accept the fact that teachers are not interchangeable automatons where there is little overhead involved in switching teachers every single year throughout a student’s academic career.

The $3.34 Billion Utah spends on education represent a substantial part of the roughly $12 Billion state budget – a budget that must also go to pay for so many other services that we collectively expect our government to provide such as higher education and various types of public safety and welfare services. Anyone who says that we should devote more money to education should make sure to offer some examples of where the state should get more revenue or what state services should have their budgets reduced to free up the money they want to give to education. It is also perfectly fair to ask whether there are areas in the $1.72 Billion in education spending that does not go to teacher salaries that is wasted. Do we pay administrators too much or employ too many administrators? Are we using our physical resources effectively?

Regardless of what side of the debate someone is on, it does no good for anyone to hold up the Teachers’ Salary straw man and proceed to beat their opponent in effigy.

Ongoing Local Discussion

photo credit: dorineruter

I’ve shared some ideas (and will be doing whatever work I can to see that they get implemented) about how to make caucus meeting accommodations that are better suited to having productive and effective caucus meetings. I realize that having comfortable accommodations does nothing to address the issue of having ill-informed or single issue participants.

I don’t know the numbers (I doubt anyone does) but many people were elected as state delegates this year based solely on their position on the senate race. It’s possible that some of the county delegates were elected based on their positions on one specific race or another. As I pointed out before the caucus meetings, there were at least four races for each of these delegates to vote on in my precinct.

Tags caucus, Elevated, reform

Local State

Davis County GOP Convention

Post author By David
Post date April 12, 2010
No Comments on Davis County GOP Convention

I wanted to share a few thoughts from the Davis County Republican Party convention from Saturday. It was fun for me as the first time I have attended such a convention with the ability to vote. Because I have spent so much energy researching and considering the Senate race and other races that will be decided at the state convention (such as my Utah House district) I did not feel as prepared for this convention as I would have felt if it had been the state convention this weekend. Thankfully I had some good friends there who were better prepared. After talking with them I was able to make decisions on races where I felt under-informed before (I’m sure we did not all vote alike) and to feel even more confident in my choices on the races where I had felt prepared and informed.

I was mildly impressed with the statistic that 97.7% of delegates made it to the convention but considering that they (we) were elected only 18 days ago I would consider anything under 95% to be disappointing. I can’t wait to see the attendance at next year’s convention. Then I would be pleasantly surprised if we got 75% attendance.

I have come to the conclusion (again) that conventions could operate more quickly if we could reduce the amount of generic campaigning such as having current officeholders speak if they have nothing more to say than we are fed up with the actions of the other party and we’re going to take back the presidency/House/Senate/governorship/state legislature (whichever ones apply). We could also save time by skipping the speeches that say nothing more than give ourselves a pat on the back for the great things we have done in {whichever of the above we control currently}. (That might also save some hospital bills.) For example, my reaction when Orrin Hatch spoke was that even when he said the rift things he completely failed to convince me that he cared about anything more than getting to stay in the Senate.

If all speeches were focused on “here’s what we are or should be working on going forward” the time would be more valuably spent.

Tags 2010, Davis County, Utah

Local

Caucus Accomodations

I think it is a sign of how casually we view our caucuses that parties can do so little to make them successful. It is a sign of the apathy of the general population to the political process that party leaders really have no idea how many people to plan for and a sign of how unconcerned the parties are that they do not make significant effort to adjust to conditions as they are known. Let me take my precinct caucus as an example.

Our precinct had 91 people sign the rolls. I’m confident that this failed to count people who came and then left because of the cattle-chute conditions. (I know of people who came and then left but I cannot confirm how many of those signed the roll.) Those who stayed were packed into a room that was designed to seat perhaps a dozen students at a local junior high school. I’m sure a firemarshall would never allow more than 30 people in a space that size even if the desks were removed. It was not even a regular classroom.

Many people who stayed were out in the hallway where they could not hear from the candidates for the various positions nor the questions that were being asked. All they could do was pass in their ballots.

I am told that our precinct was in the same room in 2008 when only 56 people attended. (I was not living in this precinct until shortly after the caucus meetings that year.) The party leaders did not adjust the accomodations despite the fact that they were clearly inadequate two years ago and despite the fact that there was a great deal more poliical energy in the state before the caucuses this year than I have ever felt in the past.

In many places I know that caucus meetings have been held in neighborhood homes. While that may provide enough space in many cases, few homes could really accomodate the crowds we had this year in many places and even if they could, I know some people who do not feel comfortable in a private residence for this kind of official community meeting.

Knowing that parties often do not have a good idea in advance (like they should have this year) regarding how many people will show up, they need to hold caucus meetings in locations that can accomodate large or small groups. Schools might sound ideal for that but few schools can really handle more than two large groups individually and the junior high where I was had ten precincts attending. Parties should break their precincts out into more locations using schools, churches, city halls, and community centers so that they are able to keep people close to home and have space to accomodate unexpectedly large groups when necessary. I can’t say for other churches but virtually any LDS chapel has rooms to house at least two large groups comfortably. I would imagine that many churches of other denominations can also house mutiple good-sized caucus meetings. If we were to add these locations along with libraries, city offices, community centers and other such locations we should not need to feel like cattle headed for slaughter when we attend precinct caucus meetings.

Ideally I would love to see one meeting location in each precinct where both Democrats and Republicans hold their caucus meetings. If the emphasis were on “neighborhood” rather than “party” they might even say the pledge of allegiance together before splitting for their separate meetings.

Tags caucus, reform