Voters across North Carolina have had a new tool this fall to help them gauge candidates for city and town council elections. A John Locke Foundation checklist offers a series of yes/no questions designed to help voters determine where candidates stand on a number of important local government issues. Dr. Michael Sanera, JLF research director and local government analyst, recently discussed the checklist with Donna Martinez for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Martinez: Why develop this checklist?
Sanera: We wanted to give candidates and voters a very quick and easy way to sort of review the activities in their city to see if they are on line with things that they should be doing, and also be able to check off things that they shouldn’t be doing. I think the key here is accountability. Here is a way that the average person and a candidate can hold their local governments accountable — accountable for transparency, accountable for their budget and taxes, accountable for wasteful spending on convention centers and restaurants and other boondoggles that many cities have gotten into. So the whole idea is to give them a quick and easy method of doing that, and then also refer them to much more detailed reports that we have written on all of these subjects.
Martinez: You say in the report that there is a clear philosophy that underpins all of the information and the issues that you write about in the report. Let’s talk about that philosophy a bit. At the top of the list is limited government. Why is that important?
Sanera: I think the overall philosophy here is liberty. The country was founded on the idea that government is to protect our rights, not to take our rights away. So that theme, that concept, has been lost in many city governments. Many city governments are out there responding to special interest groups, and in order to serve one special interest group, they have to take money, property, and other things away from other people in the community. So the loudest special interest group gets served. The rest of the people pay the bills and pay the penalties. Limited government is key to that. The founders, both nationally and here in North Carolina, argued that in order to guarantee liberty, local governments — all governments — need to be limited in what they do. And we’ve seen an explosion in municipal government all across this state. There is almost nothing that they can’t do. They’re into restaurants, convention centers, real estate development. In Raleigh the city government is one of the prime real estate developers. Where are the limits to government these days?
Martinez: And that gets to another one of your principles, which is sticking to the core mission.
Sanera: Absolutely. In order to guarantee individual liberty to people, we need to limit government to its core mission, and its core mission is public safety, water, sewer, trash — and some of those things can be contracted out in order to save taxpayers money. But when you have a city government that is doing everything and anything, often those core missions suffer. In Raleigh we see a city government that can’t stop murders in southeast Raleigh, that can’t do what it needs to do to guarantee the basic public safety of citizens in this city, and that’s going on in many cities.
Martinez: You also write about something that, candidly, I don’t read or hear much about at all, so I’m very curious about it. You say there is a need to focus on respecting the rule of law.
Sanera: Absolutely. That, again, was one of the key things that the founders objected to. The king was above the law. The king didn’t follow the laws of England, and that’s what the whole taxation without representation is all about. The king didn’t recognize that. The king violated their rights to have a jury trial, and so forth. So what local governments are doing is, again, stretching their authority in many different ways. The whole issue of land use and city planning is one where they stretch the law in order to satisfy what they perceive to be the needs of citizens, and in the process are trampling on individual rights. Eminent domain — Raleigh has been planning a mass transit line for years and years, and what they’ve been doing is seizing land through eminent domain for a rail line, which may never appear. And so those people that bear the brunt of that are suffering.
Martinez: Whenever we talk about the issue of local government, there is always a conversation, almost a debate, over what is a core service and what is not a core service — because that’s directly linked, then, to taxation and the burden on families living in that area. You write in your report about the importance of the right to the fruits of one’s labor. We don’t hear that much anymore either. Explain.
Sanera: Again, these are things that we want to be foremost on a city councilman’s mind. Because what happens is, they are being bombarded by every interest group at every meeting, at every coffeeshop they go into, and so forth — we need to do this, we need to do that. And so the idea of having the core mission first and foremost in their mind is critical because that helps them to fend off all of the special interest group pressures that they’re going to be under, and so the core mission, the definition of that, is critical. Again, public safety is the number one core mission, and when a city can’t protect its citizens, when it has to make cuts in a police department and a fire department when other things — the frills and the subsidies and all the other things — are being ignored, that’s a major problem. Letting people keep their tax money is key to this whole thing. That’s the fruit of their labor and they need to be able to spend that the way they think is right, rather than giving it to city councils and bureaucrats for them to spend.
Martinez: You can find the report at www.JohnLocke.org. It’s not only a report, but a handy pocket resource guide for voters and candidates.