A distinction that matters

When someone new moves to a small town like ours, something interesting often happens. They want to meet people, so they talk to everyone. They want to contribute, so they get involved. They notice what's missing and try to build it. 

That’s a good thing. 

They also come without the assumptions of residents who have grown up here. While knowing the way things have always been done is valuable, and knowing who has done what in the past is valuable, neither supersedes the value of vision, energy and skills that often come with new people in our community who find new solutions, identify opportunities never considered and engage others standing on the outside looking in who could be the difference between getting things done and having them stall out. 

Those who grew up here often default to what they know: the same models, the same networks, the same ways of doing things. Their thinking becomes constrained in ways they don't even recognize.

And that distinction matters enormously when we're choosing who governs us.

Consider what happened with sewer rates in Miami. The town had gone years without properly collecting fees; it was a quiet fiscal failure that compounded in the background while everyone carried on as normal. 

Looking out for your neighbor is a virtue. Looking out for a town of many neighbors — its residents, its businesses and its future — is a skill set. They are not the same thing.

Love for this community is common. The skills to run it are not. Knowing how to read a municipal budget, negotiate a contract that protects taxpayers, hold a developer accountable to their commitments, or anticipate where deferred maintenance becomes a crisis — those don't come from caring about a place. They come from experience. 

While residents don't always see good governance happening, they feel it in their property values, their safety and the long-term health of the town they chose to live in.

Assume every candidate loves this town. Then ask who has the skills to run it.