On not running for Mayor

The filing deadline for Mayor of my city is on Tuesday, and probably just the one guy is going to run for it again. This is disappointing because he's rather abhorrent, self-centered and anti-effective. I've occasionally given thought to running against him; the filing fee is only $5, and the last City Council campaign has made it clear that no one here is interested in running a modern, effective campaign. None of the candidates had even semi-competent websites in 2016, and no one was at all interested in discussing either policy or the weaknesses of the other candidates.

So between the general disdain I've witnessed for the current occupant, some of the ways he's alienated many of the most committed community members over the last few years, and the fact that no one here seems remotely prepared for aggressive play, I've been tempted to throw my hat in the ring. I don't think I could win, and to tell the truth I don't really want the job, though it pays well and I think I could do a much better job of it even learning on the fly. We have a deep need for policy changes here as we move from a developing outer-ring suburb to a quickly-urbanizing one, and as we deal with the issues that come from most of the city developing quickly in the late 70s and early 80s; a lot of our construction is hitting age milestones at the same time, particularly park structures and strip malls.

The current council clearly wants to continue their hands-off, do-nothing approach, and I think it's going to cost us in both the short and long term, as surrounding communities aren't afraid of leadership, and they're going to take the lead positions as we develop a more urban economy in our subregion.

But in the end, I just can't justify doing anything about it. My family pretty much hates the idea. And I have no shortage of things I really would rather be doing than running a guerilla campaign on a shoestring budget, however fun that might be.

I'm a little sad, though, because it's very much like giving up. I can see the direction my city is going to go under this council, and it's not one I feel like I'm going to be happy with in ten years, as we keep developing urban problems without any systems to do anything about them, and one of our leadership-focused southern neighbors inevitably urbanizes better than we do and we move from being a residential outer suburb of a two-hub metropolitan area to a dependent inner suburb caught between hubs. I've lived in one of those before (Hayward, CA) and it was no fun.

I don't really have anything better to do about that than vent about it here, I guess. And think about where we want to be living long term.