Resolutions

Usually I spend the week between Christmas and New Years taking stock of the year ending. This involves the mundane, like putting together a preliminary list of charitable donations for the tax records and looking over the budgeting paperwork to see what can be changed or tweaked, as well as the esoteric, reviewing what I have accomplished or learned (for better or worse), and what might be done to improve. I let this mull for a few weeks and then come up with some general guidelines for the coming year.

New Year’s resolutions, especially those involving losing more weight and spending less money, fail for a number of reasons. However, according to John Norcross, a University of Scranton psychologist and co-author of Changing for Good, simply making a resolution is a good start. (In the January 2005 issue of Money he notes that those who make resolutions are 10 times more likely to change than those who don’t.)

My personal, mundane resolutions, tend to be very similar to everyone else’s. In the past 6 months I lost 10 pounds and can get into clothes that I had not been able to in a long time. While I still have trouble buttoning my pants, they are wonderfully, gloriously, loose in the leg and I don’t have the Frankenstein seam marks when I take them off at night. By the end of the year I’d like to be “a women who can tuck in her shirt,” as one weight loss commercial put it. On a less glamorous level, I plan to brush my teeth before I go to bed, or at least use an anti-cavity rinse, and to floss once more a day. I have bad teeth and don’t take good care of them. Last fall my dentist said I need $900 worth of dental work. That wasn’t the full cost, just my after-insurance part. That’s almost $3.00 a day for dental work, much of which I have deferred into this year so as not to completely use up the family’s deductible. So surely it is worth $3.00 a day to brush and floss one additional time.

I wonder if those newly elected or re-elected go through a similar process. My hopelessly naïve wish is that the legislature, as a whole, decide on a few overriding issues of importance to the entire state, and set about finding a resolution, or a short term fix, to them. Maybe party leadership can use some of that big pot of money they set aside for themselves, to make peace with each other somehow. What should they tackle? Here’s my short list of what the state considers problems, taken from newspaper articles and campaign literature: health care, schools and education, transportation / roads (public transportation in cities and road maintenance in rural areas), and public safety. There are others I wish the legislature would act upon and I will cover those in future blogs.

One resolution I think we the people should make is to revise the standard way of evaluating the work of our elected officials. The current emphasis on the introduction of laws is, to me, a strange one. How does introducing a series of laws make someone a good legislator? I’d almost rather my elected officials jump on someone else’s bandwagon and use their time for other things. Isn’t coalition building a more important skill than introducing bills willy nilly? Wouldn’t deleting outdated laws be as useful as introducing new ones? Frankly, I think we should start with just taking attendance. I’d like to know how often my elected officials actually show up for work when they are in session, which isn’t really all that often. In the state house, the “ghost voting” phenomenon where a legislator jams the voting mechanism with a paper clip or has a buddy vote for them, has received a lot of press lately. A state legislator who shows up for work and has decent constituent service is going a long way towards re-election.

Another frequently mentioned item is committee work. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable rhyme or reason as to how many standing committees legislators are on. I looked at the general assembly’s web site and noted that some legislators are on two committees and some were on six. Party doesn’t really come into play; people in both parties were on as few as two. What gives here? Are those on just a few committees given a lighter workload because they have other duties or because they are considered deadwood? I noticed Mike Veon was on only two committees, but so was Bill Rieger. Katie True seemed to be burning the midnight oil, as she is on several. Subcommittees aren’t currently listed nor are select committees, so maybe it balances out that way. It is hard for those of us at home to get a real handle on the “sausage making” of legislative work. It probably isn’t pretty and perhaps making it open to the public would only cause problems, but we are all too often just asked to take someone else’s word for what is important and what isn’t. I resolve to come up with a better way of evaluating my elected officials by the end of the year. Stay tuned for progress notes.