6. Hire an ombudsman. (Quick definition: 'ombudsman' sounds like some sort of gardening term, but it's actually a Scandanavian word for someone who investigates complaints about an agency and who can be a resource and advocate for citizens who don't know where to go within a large and/or confusing organization)
Here's my thinking: Anyone will tell you that I can't go 10 sentences in talking about the city without using this phrase: "The cityhood campaign never ended." Well, obviously we've been a city for 10 years so technically the campaign ended. But the feelings and heightened emotions live on. The level of scrutiny remains intense, just as intense as it was in the last days of the Rossi and Gregoire campaigns and the Bush and Kerry campaigns. People are very, very sensitive about every bit and little thing. Stories get told with great excitement. The smallest problem is a sign of wasteful government. The smallest change in the law is the biggest disaster for our community you can imagine. Etc...
All of this takes place on a community-wide level, but also on an individual level. For some of us, Lakewood politics sometimes feels like a profession. We get overexposed to it. For the regular man or woman on the Lakewood street, government is every bit as useful as his or her last encounter with that government.
An ombudsman would give the average citizen a point of contact: a person who would be expert in helping citizens find what they need. The ombudsman would also generate statistics about citizen queries and make recommendations about how to make services more customer-friendly. The ombudsperson would compile reports so we can quantify just how we are providing service.
In more established cities this role may not not be necessary. It is in Lakewood. Every poor encounter with City Hall can be turned into a long story about how cityhood was never a good idea in the first place. Such talk is really negative, the equivalent of a teen-ager beating up on himself or herself because they messed up in the big game or got poor grades. An ombudsperson would provide one guaranteed face to City Hall - a citizen advocate, as another city calls the job - and that would be invaluable in Lakewood's circumstances.
The whole ombudsman concept, I should add, comes from the world of newspapers. Here again, you have a bureaucracy that people fear and find foreign (one study found that people only report one out of every 10 errors that appear in newspaper stories). The statistics show that newspapers with an ombudsman who provides a point of contact and a source of review for newspapers are more likely to retain readers. My thinking is that if we provide an ombudsperson in City Hall, we are more likely to retain happy citizens.
Now, I should tell you that my brief summary here may not have done justice to the job. A friend read over the preceding description and said, "You're describing the job of a good receptionist." So let me add that I'm talking about situations more complex then average, like someone proposing something new and different for the city, or someone whose neighborhood problems are much more challenging than usual, or someone who just runs into a big problem. If you've heard people complain about city government, you'll know what I'm talking about.
The idea of an ombudsman isn't anything super-new: check out the Vancouver Web site or for a much larger version of this idea, the Portland web site.
7. Hold a ceremony to dedicate Freedom Bridge. Back in March, I was the first to suggest the council adopt the suggestion of the Tillicum neighborhood association and name the I-5 crossing at Berkeley into Fort Lewis as Freedom Bridge. But the bridge does not belong to us as Lakewood taxpayers. It belongs to us as state property. So that means the decision to name the bridge rests with the Washington State Transportation Commission. The city government written a couple of times to this state committee asking them to designate the bridge in honor of the servicemen and servicewomen who travel it. Some of those who have traveled that bridge have paid the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.
Look, it's been nearly a year. I have trouble thinking there is any active lobby out there to name that crossing Jihad Bridge or any alternative. We gave the state time. Let's just find some city right of way, put up some signs, name the bridge and honor the members of the military who risk their lives for us. The state government can catch up at its leisure, if it can surface from its sham