For the past 40 years, I have had the pleasure of working with thousands of local elected officials. I have managed campaigns for mayors, county supervisors, city council members and school board members. I’ve worked with elected officials to pass local tax measures to improve facilities, transportation, healthcare and public safety and I’ve conducted seminars and trainings for elected officials throughout the country. I’ve met with, consulted with and spoken to elected officials in some of the largest and smallest communities in the nation.
Elected officials vary from being very good to being absolutely terrible. Even the most committed well-intended struggle through their first term of elected office trying to do the best they can. Virtually all elected officials go through a steep learning curve that seems overwhelming. Many will admit privately that when they were first elected, they were ill prepared for the demands of office.
A year after being elected to office a former client confided to me that she was frustrated and overwhelmed with the challenges of elective office. She was intelligent, hardworking and had been a very good candidate. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” she told me. “Somebody ought to write a book about what it is like to go from candidate to elected official.”
That conversation started me on a path to see what resources existed that could help her and other local office holders. The more I looked, the more I was disappointed. While there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books and articles providing advice on how to get elected, there is relatively little information about being effective once elected.
I was surprised how many other elected officials also expressed doubts and frustrations about their own effectiveness. They talked about the lack of support, training and mentoring they received, saying they came into office ill equipped for the job they were elected to do. They want to do a good job. They want help. They told me they wanted something straightforward and easy to read that could help them think through professional and personal conflicts they were facing. City managers and superintendents wanted a guide they could use to help newly elected officials transition from being candidates to effective members of an elected board.
I originally thought this book could be of help to anyone at any level of elected office. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that while there is a lot of attention on national elections and members of Congress and the Senate, most of the people who get elected to Congress or offices at the national level are, by the time they are able to successfully run for these offices, so compromised, conflicted or controlled by the political parties or other interests, that no advice to them could be helpful.
The focus of this book is local elected officials for it is at the local level, where most of us interact with government — through services like police, fire and 911 calls, through zoning rules and regulations, through public schools, street cleaning, parks, libraries and community colleges, and through paying local taxes, fees and fines. The people who choose to serve the public at the local level – school boards, community college boards, city councils and hospital boards, and others are critical to well functioning and healthy communities and to our democracy. The quality of our communities and our system of government depends on quality people running for and getting elected to these offices and being effective once they get elected.
Since we rarely elect “perfect leaders”, our democratic system is structured so that ordinary, even flawed people can be successful, if they work at it. The goal of the book is not an attempt to make people perfect, but rather to inspire, challenge and offer some practical advice.
One of the elected officials who reviewed an early version of this book said it was filled with a lot of helpful “common sense.” This book centers on common sense because I have seen that too often, elected officials operate without it or they lose it once they take office.
How many times have we all wondered, “How could these people ever have been elected?” The truth is that elected officials are flawed just like the rest of us. But with effort, study and hard work they can be better. Following the advice in this book will help.
-Larry Tramutola
