Now I know getting the public’s attention is hard

Key Takeaways

As told to Charlie Ban by Kalamazoo County, Mich. Commissioner John Taylor

After I was elected, I found out people didn’t really know who I was or what issues I was fighting for. They generally vote along party lines and that was discouraging. I was a college student then, so I was pretty idealistic. 

The public didn’t seem to know their commissioners’ names unless they had done something wrong; that’s just the level of awareness we had 20 years ago.

I felt like we had a big victory over that after my first year. We were building a new jail, and I started asking questions about how we would lower the recidivism rate, what services we would provide and I finally got the sheriff to agree with me that these were real concerns. We were able to put some educational programming in place, and help people get certifications so they have employment opportunities when they were released.

It would have been easy to be jaded in the face of public antipathy, but I decided to just take one issue at a time, maybe two. Solve this, accomplish that and then you move onto a new issue. The most important way to get people to understand what was at stake was to make it clear to them what the county commission could do to change things.

Fiscal sustainability doesn’t really get people excited when you are planning for it, but they appreciate it when it pays off for them. Now we’re 130% funded after taking a long-term, conservative approach to investment in our defined benefit plan. We took whatever assumptions the actuarial tables gave us and we made them even more conservative, making that dollar stretch and stretch. Now we can lower the employee contributions and we can give a cost-of-living increase for retirees. 

We were able to make our parks system completely self-sustaining, with the help of some public-private partnerships. We’re boosting our overnight stays in the parks and that’s bringing in more money and increasing the use of our campgrounds. 

Now I’m trying to cultivate the next generation of people that come up and do this. There will come a time that I will want to do other things, and I want to make sure whoever replaces me will appreciate this opportunity for what it is. That means finding people who are here for the right reasons first, that they’ll stick around and not just see this as the next step, but seeing the opportunity for progress in this role. That means giving them the tools and understanding connections and helping them learn how things really move in our community so that they can be successful. 

I have to make sure they don’t get discouraged, but also don’t get overly optimistic. And what I have found is that character is not limited to ideology, and learning that, in comparison to the environment I saw when I was first elected because of the letter next to my name, means things have changed in those 20 years