Local politics is absurdly corrupt in many cases as nobody pays attention.
The current mayor's father was also a mayor of Miami and was subject to intense fraud in his election campaign (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/05/us/fraud-ruling-invalidat...). They also hired a police chief recently who was almost immediately fired when he exposed how corrupt the city commission is (https://www.local10.com/news/local/2022/01/19/fired-miami-po...). The same city commission is being sued and investigated by the feds for extorting and trying to shut down a local business one of the commissioners didn't like (https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miamis-joe-carollo-sued-f...).
Our culture is so addicted to stimulation that we just don't want to spend time on something as boring and banal as a city council meeting.
My city council recently spent until 1am debating zoning regulations for California's new ADU law instead of doing the sane thing and just letting people build ADUs.
The city of Santa Monica broadcasts city council meetings. And both the items being adjudicated and the members from the public stepping up to the mic, are every bit as colorful as the brightest Hollywood blockbusters. I listened for years after leaving LA… KCRW Thursday evenings, grab some popcorn and enjoy!!
There's also the fact that if Santa Monica's politics are that interesting, then people are more likely to be disappointed with how boring their local politics are.
Tangential —- a lot of cities/towns stream city council and other committees on the internet.
Santa Monica City has around 100K population. That video has ~500 views and it's on the Internet. The public barely cares.
Garbage trucks provide a critical public service. Without them I would have to buy a different vehicle.
Maybe because zoning and permitting are a large part of the reasons why they can't find an affordable house in the area?
Of course I can. Off the top of my head:
City Council:
Lisa Herbold - neighborhood
Teresa Mosqueda - at large
Sara Nelson - at large, newly elected
Mayor:
Bruce Harrell - newly elected, replaced Jenny Durkan after one term. Was previously on the city council for 13 (?) years.
City Attorney:
Ann Davison - newly elected, replaced Pete Holmes who failed to advance through the primary after 12 years.
County Executive:
Dow Constantine - narrowly re-elected. Recently granted additional power to appoint the county sheriff.
These are the elected positions I vote on. I am also aware of appointed positions like parks, police, and city transit. I’m aware of the the parts of the council I don’t vote for.
I’m also aware of policy. Hazard pay for grocery workers. Attempting to stop catalytic converter theft. Fixing the bridge. Mask mandates. Public transit expansion. Defunding police.
I get a lot of my coverage of these events from the hyperlocal blog that covers my neighborhood. I have their number saved to text reports when I see them. They publish coverage of most local government meetings. I visit that site as often as HN.
What about Port of Seattle, Seattle Public Schools, King County Council, and King Conservation District?
But are you aware that most people cannot?
This reminds me of a strategy I once heard on how to assign weights to people's votes according to their knowledge. You want to assign a high weight to those with relevant knowledge and low weight to those with little relevant knowledge.
So how do you know who has good relevant knowledge? Rather than just collecting the response to a question: "How many beans do you think are in this jar?" you also ask the _meta_ question: "What do you think will be the average response to the first question above?" For those who perform well on question 2, you assign higher weight to their answers on question 1.
If you just average all the answers to question 1, you are likely to get a close approximation to the true number of beans in the jar. But if you assign weights according to performance on question 2, you can get an even closer approximation to the true answer.
I may have gotten some details wrong, but the idea is that if you are aware of your peers' level of knowledge about a topic, then you are likely to be knowledgeable about the topic yourself.
It's quite easy to end up having a 1:1 conversation with a serious candidates for local office. Just 2 weeks ago I donated $500 to a candidate for CA state assembly and the next day I got a call from the candidate thanking me for the donation.
And it's pretty easy to volunteer for various organizations involved in local politics and get access to the current supervisor or state assembly member who is aligned with that organization.
And public comment is actually just like it's portrayed on Parks and Recreation.
A few years earlier something similar happened to me when crossing a rural border station near Organ Pipe National Park in Arizona--the officer demanded I pay an "import tax" for the stuff in my car. (I was moving from DC back to SF, taking the more scenic routes wherever I could. The American border guards were sitting in lawn chairs a mile up the road.) I think I talked him down to $10 after 5 minutes of haggling, at which point his supervisor walks over, smiling, and tells him to leave me alone just as the money was about to exchange hands. The supervisor had been peeling an orange while enjoying the spectacle. I guess he must've been bored that day.
Now that's open corruption. And where there's any amount of open corruption, it's a good guess that hidden corruption is extremely pervasive. But if there's not such open corruption (and it's exceedingly rare if not non-existent in the U.S.), we can't make any wild assumptions about hidden corruption.
If you look at the data, actual corruption is quite rare in the U.S., relatively speaking. As mentioned elsethread, in global terms we're near the tippy top. It didn't used to be this way. Even open corruption was once not uncommon in the U.S. At the turn of the 20th century, as civil service reforms gained momentum across the country--municipal, state, and Federal--some elected politicians openly defended kick-back schemes as being democratic. But they lost. This removed much of the opportunity and incentive except when privately and discretely dealing with elected officials or public-facing servants (e.g. cops, inspectors, etc). Later, private rights of action that permitted people to sue municipalities, and the creation of FBI criminal units to proactively investigate corruption schemes even among high-level elected officials, helped to dramatically reduce remaining corruption by creating very real costs at all levels of government. Your example is literally an example of why the U.S. doesn't see much corruption--it comes with very real risks. The FBI and DoJ are still beyond repute when it comes to corruption, even if state-based enforcement officials still too often look the other way. Every politician sweats even the prospect of drawing attention from the Feds.
Instead, Americans now call "corruption" whatever policies and decisions they disagree with if they don't understand the motivations behind them. It's pure cynicism and, ultimately, fatalistic. (And being illegal doesn't ipso facto make something corruption either; no more than violating copyright turns you into a willful criminal.)
That doesn't mean things couldn't be better. Or that real corruption of the type normally implied by the term doesn't actually exist--the cited conspiracy among some LA councilmen is classic corruption, albeit not open. But like with the term "racism", in order to sustain the same prevalence of accusations people have had to dramatically expand the scope of the term when forced to defend themselves. That doesn't mean what's now being referred to isn't unfair, wrong, or otherwise illegitimate, but we've long since descended into word games. Which is unproductive as within this expanded set of problems, there are no common ways to address and resolve them (e.g. simple, across-the-board reforms or related measures); by equivocating we're hurting our ability to identify causation and meaningfully mitigate and remediate actual, substantive issues.
There are many ways you can legally bribe a politician in USA. Those bribes are passed in the open, there are even online trackers of those bribes. There are loopholes allowing corruption in other countries too, but nowhere else I encountered such acceptance to bribing politicians with corporate money.
My friend has about 4 speeding tickets (over 40mph over) that he gets away by talking to the right lawyer and paying for a "consultation".
Another acquaintance of mine bragged about his growth hack of selling his product to <public authorities> through donating to the campaigns of <elected officials>.
Didnt the head of Apple security also get caught giving large gifts to Cupertino police in exchange for concealed carry licenses?
You'd be extremely naive to think hidden corruption isn't pervasive in the USA.
On the other end of the scale you can imagine a paper democracy where all the top positions in government and state owned business are corruptly given to the leader's family, but everybody else follow the law, doesn't take bribes etc. It's still very corrupt, it's just a different kind of corruption.
The corruption I describe is pretty literal corruption at least in LA city hall. It's not policymaking, its literally quid pro quo. Jose Huizar was a councilmember when a developer handed him like 50 grand cash in a paper bag and purchased escorts for him in Vegas. Mark Ridley Thomas was also a councilmember when he got USC to give his son a degree and a position in return for a public grant. They were arrested by the FBI because they broke the law, not because Americans didn't understand the motivations of their policymaking. They did these things because there is a political environment present in LA county and city governments where this sort of behavior is commonplace, and local moneyed interests take advantage of that fact all too regularly.
It talks about local PD and politicians protecting individuals from consequences and sweeping their crimes under the rug.
Sadly it is more common than folks think, a similar thing happened at my HS (also in Ohio, a similar small town) in 2002.
For this and other reasons, after my dad's single term as selectman, he vowed never to be involved in politics again.