Taylor's Platform Reported in Salado Village Voice

The Salado Village Voice gives each of the candidates in the three local elections...Village Alderman (restricted to only those within the official Village limits and not including me), School District (a much wider district) and Library Board (mirroring the school district board map.) In other words, you have to care about the school board and/or library board to even show up. Anyway, I digress. The point of this posting is to share with you the comments I wrote in response to the questions posed by the Village Voice. I was limited to 100 words and it was one of the toughest writing assignments I've ever tackled, primarily because I think that these are the wrong questions to ask.

None of these questions give the candidates an opportunity to share their values or decision-making strategies. These questions do not tell us why someone is qualified to be on the board. (Unless you think that one who checks out lots of books MUST know how to run a library.)

None of these questions challenge potential board members to articulate a vision for the future and a strategy for addressing the growing challenges that rural libraries face and the amazing opportunities technology can bring (under the trusted mantle of the library) to our remote regions.

None of these questions ask us to describe our strategy for keeping our citizens apprised of the encroachment of land-grabbing towns and how to effectively embrace the growing population of rural dwellers/city workers.

None of these questions talk about funding strategies, sustainability, innovative programming, future growth, economic development, growing tourism, sense of place, civic initiatives, etc.

None of these questions provided a means for me to paint the grand and glorious landscapes that I believe can be the picture of our library. None of these questions asked me to share the 14 points so eloquently stated by the Project for Public Spaces that I shared in an earlier blog.

No, these questions did not do any of the things I hoped they would...things that could provide our voters with good decision-making information about how to best exercise their democracy. But at least I learned (I think) how to take the wrong question and turn it into the right question with limited verbage.

Does that make me the worst kind of politician or is that a positive thing to do?