To the Editor of the Willamette Week:
I read your review of our state legislators, “The Good, Bad and Awful” and thank you for such an evened take. I think the article points out the problem I’m seeing with all levels of government, and especially statewide. We’re not able to handle the problems we’ve got with the system of government we’ve got in place. On the City and National level we at least have people working for us full-time, but at the state level we ask the impossible and the results are an indication that things aren’t right. We pay people peanuts to make important decisions infrequently. This leads to gridlock in budgeting, horse-trading, favoritism, and an uphill battle getting good legislation passed when its opposed by any industry that’s affected. Want to stop the banning of single-use bags? Hire 4 lobbyists and that will do the trick. Want to buy a legislator, that doesn’t seem to be that expensive for the timber industry, for instance.
It’s really high-time we think about changing the current system. One thought would be to move more in the direction of hiring people to manage our state for us. I’d rather my taxes go to the best managers and decision-makers out there and from your guide we can see that our money is not buying that – far from it. We have a complex collection of millions of people, millions of acres, health, education, and land-use decisions. Leaving this work to a part-time force of people with a wide-variety of ability levels and favors owed seems like the worst way to make important decisions that I can think of. Some might say, “well, this is our democracy”. I say, this is not good enough, especially considering the challenges ahead such as climate change. Our legislature spent an entire session deliberating over a lot of issues and came up with very little. How will they be at making quicker decisions in the future? I think it’s time to seriously consider a different system to manage our state, now.
Sincerely, Albert Kaufman
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