“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” —James Joyce, “The Dead,” Dubliners

Dear Bono,

Now that U2’s residency at the Sphere in Vegas has successfully concluded, it’s time for you to get really creative—by returning home to Dublin to prepare to run for mayor.

I know, I know—Dubliners don’t actually elect their mayors, so you can’t run. At least not yet. Which is precisely why they need you there.

You’re the best candidate to bring real local democracy to your home island, famous for its fierce nationalism. If you championed local democracy there, the world might well take notice—and build the strong local governments that humanity will need to survive.

You know as well as anyone, from your globe-trotting to fight poverty and HIV/AIDS in the Global South, that the world’s national governments aren’t up to protecting us from our planetary problems—climate catastrophe, pandemic, war, poverty, economic crises. National governments are too busy making things worse. Meanwhile, our international institutions remain too weak and fractious to accomplish much of anything.

That has dumped all the world’s problems in the laps of local communities and their governments. But they lack the authority and resources to tackle big challenges.

Ireland, sadly, is a poster child for poor local government. While many people think of the Emerald Isle as a place of charming well-governed communities, the reality is that your home country is governed almost entirely from the center. On the Local Autonomy Index, Ireland ranks at the bottom of Europe, ahead of only authoritarian Hungary, Putin’s Russia, and Moldova, which is partially occupied by Russia. A Council of Europe report on Irish governance found that your national authorities determine all kinds of fundamentally local decisions—down to the location of bus stops.

To borrow from your best songs, in those Irish municipalities where the streets have no name, or where residents might want to tear down the walls that hold them inside, a local government can’t do much without asking the national government’s permission.

Dublin, as a result, has perhaps the weakest government of the world’s great cities. Like other Irish municipalities, the city does elect councilors, but they can’t do much. The city can’t hire staff without the national government’s support (which is why Helsinki, a European capital of similar size, has 38,000 staffers compared to Dublin’s 6,000). Dublin also lacks the money and authority to handle governmental basics like road planning, building adequate flood defenses, or even enforcing laws on illegal parking and “dog fouling.”

The good news is that cracks are opening in this wall of centralized power.  During the pandemic, Dublin managed to convene a citizens’ assembly—made up of a representative group of Dubliners selected by lottery—that recommended structural changes to strengthen the city government. Their recommendations included establishing a full-time city council and a directly elected mayor who could serve up to two five-year terms.

Under the plan, Dublin’s government would gain control immediately over 15 policy areas—including housing, homelessness, transportation, the environment, and emergency response—and add further local authority over policing, water, and education in the next decade. Crucially, the assembly proposed giving the mayor’s office the power to borrow and to levy local taxes.

Advocates say that such a mayor would need a strong personality that could unify Dubliners, and have such a compelling voice that the national government would have to listen to demands for local autonomy.

You’ve got a pretty good voice—Billie Joe Armstrong described your singing as “50 percent Guinness, 10 percent cigarettes, and the rest is religion”—which is why you’d be the best choice.

Unsurprisingly, the national government has blocked the citizens’ assembly’s proposals. But the fight is not over. It’s just moved southwest to Limerick, population 102,000.

Limerick, via a local referendum, managed to secure permission for a pilot program to elect its mayor directly. The election is June 7, the same day the Irish vote for councilors in all 31 local authorities, and for their representatives in the European Parliament.

The Limerick mayor’s race has been a closely watched campaign, with 13 candidates representing every color in the political spectrum, and every significant party. The power of Limerick’s mayor won’t come anywhere close to what the citizens’ assembly proposed for Dublin, but candidates are promising to advocate for greater local control over housing, health care, and various quality-of-life issues.

If you returned to Dublin, you could lead a campaign to adopt the citizens’ assembly recommendations. For leverage, you could push a local referendum for a mayoral pilot like Limerick’s. If you won, it’d be hard to see how the national government could withstand your calls for more local authority.

Remember, if you succeed, you won’t just get to be mayor. You’ll get to build a new city government. You could draw experts and ideas from every corner of the globe. You could give the earth a model for 21st-century local governance.

You’d also be the perfect person to bring together local governments around the world—and the still relatively weak networks of cities that now exist—into planetary institutions that could solve those big problems.

Yes, it would mean a lifestyle change. But locals in Killiney, your seaside community south of Dublin, say you were home quite a bit during the pandemic. And yes, as mayor you couldn’t tour as much as you do now, but at 63, it’s time for more rest anyway. You wouldn’t have to break up the band. The Edge would make an aggressive housing director.

Sure, you’ll face criticism and have bad days as mayor. But as Joyce wrote in Ulysses, “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

Come home and run. You might finally find what you’re looking for.

Le meas,

Joe Mathews

The post Bono for Mayor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Democracy was first built on a lot of loose rock.

Can democracy now be rebuilt on that very same ground?

Recently, I spent a long afternoon on a dusty and rocky Athens hill called the Pnyx for the first meeting of a novel assembly inspired by the past.

It was the most audacious and beautiful democratic event I’ve ever witnessed.

The Pnyx rises just west of the Acropolis. There, the ancient Athenian Ecclesia, consisting of local citizens mostly chosen by lot, gathered more than 100 generations ago to make all important government decisions. No assembly had met there since 322 B.C.E—until that warm early fall night.

This new People’s Assembly was open to anyone, unlike its ancient Athenian predecessor, which excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. Indeed, the 92 attendees I counted were roughly split between men and women, and included people from more than 15 European countries, plus a few visitors from other continents.

But the transformational potential of this People’s Assembly goes far beyond inclusion. If its members can establish their assembly in the governance of Europe, it might change everything we think we know about democracy.

“Citizens of Athens, citizens of the world,” declared Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek scholar who helps lead the assembly and is chair in global affairs at the European University’s School of Transnational Governance, “we would like to invite you to change yourselves.”

Around the world, democracy is seen as a system in which the public, through elections, chooses its representatives. But the People’s Assembly wouldn’t consist of elected politicians. Instead, it would be composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery processes that ensure that the body is a demographic mirror of the people it represents.

These wouldn’t be just the people of one city, or one province, or even one nation. The People’s Assembly would be a transnational body, with members selected by lottery to represent all of Europe. There’s no body like that on Earth.

But what truly sets apart the idea—and what would make it revolutionary—is its permanence.

Assemblies chosen by lotteries have become increasingly common around the world, especially in Europe and Japan. But almost all of these assemblies are temporary bodies. They are convened to answer some big question or reckon with some thorny problem. They meet for weeks or months or even a year or so. Then they issue their plan or recommendations—and dissolve.

The People’s Assembly would never go away. Certainly, its members would change frequently, often after just months, with a new lottery to refill posts. But it would become a permanent feature of the landscape, its own branch of government.

It also would signal that the age of the elected politician is fading. Politicians are already an unpopular group almost everywhere—corrupted, incompetent, ineffective. Democracy by lottery is appealing because it offers a model to allow citizens to check politicians, and perhaps one day to replace them.

A move away from elected politicians, and toward representatives selected by lottery, also would mean a greater diminishment of elections. Ironically, eliminating or reducing the frequency of elections might be a way to save democracy.

In many places, elections no longer reinforce democracy. They are too compromised—by diminishing social trust, by money in politics, by the outsized power of parties and interest groups. Their outcomes often lead to conflict, violence, even war. And elections are routinely used by authoritarians and dictators to gain popular legitimacy.

Which is why a successful, continent-wide People’s Assembly would likely inspire the creation of more such permanent bodies—at the national, provincial and local levels in Europe and elsewhere. In turn, the spread of such assemblies would require changes in political infrastructure, new modes of lobbying, and new kinds of technocratic agencies to support lottery-selected representatives.

How might government and democracy be different in an era of these assemblies? Camille Dobler, a veteran facilitator of assembly processes at the Paris-based Missions Publiques, answers that question in a word: “trans-localism.” By that, she means a fusion of transnational and local governance.

Which makes sense. Assemblies by lot, from those Athenians gathering 2,300 years ago to the new versions today, are fundamentally local tools. Because it’s easiest to assemble with your own neighbors. But in a deeply networked world facing planetary problems of climate and health and war, there is a need for transnational governance.

So, we are likely to see new networks of local and national assemblies that collaborate through transnational bodies, like the People’s Assembly. How such collaborations might best work is one of the most urgent governance questions of the future.

It’s easier to foresee the failure of current democratic structures than the journey to the next forms of democracy. There is so much to figure out—new systems, new demands on everyday people, new modes of collaboration.

So, the people and organizations behind the People’s Assembly have announced that they are embarking on a “Democratic Odyssey” to talk to people across Europe about how they want their assembly, and the future, to work. Next fall, they plan to return to Athens to reconvene the Assembly, and begin its formal work.

“We are ready to get our boots dirty,” Nicolaidis said while standing on that rocky hill.

The post On a Rocky Hill in Athens, a ‘Democratic Odyssey’ Begins appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The people of Los Angeles need you, their power-hungry representatives, disgraced by a tape of your racist insults against nearly every demographic in town.

Why?

So they can have the pleasure of firing you themselves!

Sticking around to be fired could galvanize change in city governance. Because resignations can’t cure what ails Los Angeles and its governing body. Nor can reforming the city council within the existing charter.

Abolition is the only real solution.

Which means both your 12 other colleagues and your entire institution need to go, too. Now is the moment to dissolve the Los Angeles City Council, which has never been anything more than an embarrassing and powerless failure.

Unless we want more of the racist politics caught on tape, unless we want more of the conflict over redistricting that inspired your awful conversation, we don’t need a city council.

The people of Los Angeles can do the job themselves.

The tools and the concept now exist. L.A. is perfectly positioned to be the first city in California to replace its city council with a citizens’ assembly.

Elections require big money that can compromise politicians. A citizens’ assembly, by contrast, is chosen by lottery. Los Angeles can design lottery processes to make sure the assembly is representative of its city by race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, national origin, class, neighborhood, and just about any other factor we like.

L.A. would be a Californian and American pioneer in this, but not a global one. Paris just established a permanent citizens’ assembly; a Belgian province also has one. Countries from Japan to Ireland have established such bodies after breakdowns in trust in public officials, with the goal of addressing difficult issues from abortion to climate change.

L.A., by switching from an elected council to a lottery-based panel, would be doing more than just advancing democracy. It would be jettisoning a broken system.

What you heard on that tape of the three council members and Los Angeles County Federation of Labor Ron Herrera wasn’t just four powerful people spewing hatred. You heard what a thoroughly broken system sounds like.

The Los Angeles city council has never been representative of the city. It’s simply too small for that—with 15 members for 4 million people, L.A. city councilmembers have far too many constituents (more than 260,000 each) to represent them all properly. Global cities of similar population typically have more than 100 council members.

The city council has always been a weak player in L.A.’s complex and progressive governing structure, with its many boards and commissions. The council is even weaker than the mayor, whose powers remain limited, and the city’s department heads, who live in fear of their unionized employees. It doesn’t help that this weak council exists within a weak city government: This is California, where voters have spent decades centralizing tax and budgeting power at the state level.

Holding so little power, city councilmembers spend much of their time doing what they did on that tape—talking shit and playing games. Martinez, de León, and Cedillo were plotting and whining not about the city’s problems but their own seats, their own power, and how the redistricting commission was drawing their own districts. They talked frequently on the tape about wanting to have more big “assets” in their districts—by which they mean wealthy companies or institutions that would have to give them money for their campaigns, and favors for their friends.

Councilmembers not captured on the tape play these games, too; that’s how they get into office in the first place. That’s why you’ve seen them respond not with pledges to change how they behave and do business, but with condemnations, and calls for their colleagues’ resignations.

With a citizens’ assembly, the games stop. There will be no redistricting process because there will be no districts. There will be no need for scheming meetings with union bosses who politically control the city council. And there should be no racist rhetoric or racial conflict over council elections, because there wouldn’t be any council elections.

The lottery replaces the elections. A representative sampling of the people become the legislature. Transparent, public meetings replace secretly recorded backroom discussions. And more people can participate—the assembly should have at least 200 members.

This can, and should, happen fast. Good government groups should file a charter amendment to abolish the city council and replace it with a citizens’ assembly right away. Citizens need to push the new mayor to recognize the structural failure, and commit to holding a special election on the charter amendment early in the new year.

Then, the people of L.A. will have the opportunity to live a dream and fire their failed politicians, so they can take up the work of local democracy themselves.

By staying in office until you’re fired, Kevin and Gilbert, you can serve as inspiration for this change in governance, reminding Angelenos why we don’t need you or the system that made you—and why local democracy is one of those things that everyday people should do for themselves.

The post Los Angeles Doesn’t Need a City Council appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That future arrived with an unsexy name—the Petaluma Fairgrounds Advisory Panel, a version of a type of democratic body that is gaining popularity from Japan to Ireland. In Petaluma, they called this a “lottery-selected panel.” Its more common name is “citizens’ assembly.”

Citizens’ assemblies are composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery, rather than elected officials. The assemblies offer a potential path around problems that discredit democracy in California and elsewhere: the money that corrupts elections, the lobbyists who own politicians, and the polarization that makes complex and contentious issues too difficult for elected governments to solve.

Petaluma’s leaders decided to try a citizens’ assembly to avert a community-wide fight over the future of the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds. The property, at the city’s geographical and cultural center, is home to the annual five-day Sonoma-Marin Fair and its famous centerpiece event, the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest.

The site also hosts a speedway, two schools, emergency shelters, a popular Mexican food spot, and many other valued pieces of Petaluma. So, when city officials made clear that they wanted to rethink the future of the fairground, people in Petaluma worried that their traditions, livelihoods, and favorite tacos might be in jeopardy.

That led to conflict between the city, the fair, and the obscure state agency to which the city leases the property. How to avoid more fighting and expensive litigation?

Petaluma’s answer was to spend $450,000 to hire America’s leading experts on citizens’ assemblies, the Oregon-based nonprofit Healthy Democracy, to bring the people into the process. Officially, the citizens’ assembly would be charged with answering this question: “How might we use the City’s fairgrounds property to create the experiences, activities, resources, and places that our community needs and desires now and for the foreseeable future?”

The process started with a mailing to 10,000 randomly selected residential addresses in Petaluma, inviting people to participate in the panel. A few hundred said yes. From that group, Healthy Democracy used a computer program to create 1,000 randomized potential panels of 36 people, each representative of Petaluma by age, gender, race/ethnicity, location, housing status, educational attainment, and experience of a disability. (At the city’s request, Healthy Democracy aimed for slight over-representation of previously underrepresented demographics.)

At a public event in April, organizers selected one of those panels by lottery—number 811—to become Petaluma’s citizens’ assembly. When 12 of the 36 panel members did not confirm their participation, the organizers conducted another lottery, generating another 1,000 possible panels. On May 4, they followed up with a “reselection” event to fill the 12 open positions.

The future of democracy takes time.

Unable to find a location at the fairgrounds itself—its various venues were already booked—the panel met first at a community center and then at Kenilworth Junior High. Over three months, it would hold 81 hours of meetings.

This wasn’t volunteer work. Panelists received a stipend, equivalent to $20 per hour of deliberation, as well as child care and elder care, reimbursement for transportation costs, laptops, and language interpretation and translation.

The panel needed every minute. It reviewed complicated documents (from the lease to the city’s general plan) and summoned many stakeholders from a “menu” of more than 100 for question-and-answer sessions (the menu itself was drawn up by 14 local organizations who were themselves selected by lottery).

Anyone could sit in the “observers’ gallery” to watch the proceedings, which were also livestreamed on its YouTube Channel. But because participants are private citizens, some things were confidential. Healthy Democracy did not permit visitors, including me, to take photos of panelists, and did not give out their last names.

The meetings were more detailed, with more actual content per minute—and less political throat-clearing—than any city council meeting I have seen in this state.

I was struck by how careful the Healthy Democracy staffers were to stay out of the discussion. They politely refused to answer questions from panelists about the fairgrounds (content being the exclusive province of the panelists themselves). And they would not highlight areas of agreement or point to consensus, as mediators often do in community meetings. The staffers even used games of chance to keep elements of the hearings random; panelists drew from a deck of cards to determine the order of who asked questions of visiting stakeholders.

They also left these ordinary people to do an extraordinary amount of their own writing. The panelists—unable to delegate to staffers, as politicians do—produced three reports. The first, called “Principles,” detailed the body’s own values, criteria, and methods. A second, called “Pathways,” outlined 120 broad visions for the fairgrounds site that the panel heard or developed.

The third and final report offered specific recommendations for land use at the fairgrounds. The panel ultimately took a cautious approach to reimagining the site, seeking to preserve the fairgrounds’ most popular elements. Five “Key Points of Agreement” had 90 percent support from the body. Four preserved the status quo: maintaining the practice and history of agriculture at fairgrounds (before it was a North Bay suburb, Petaluma was the “Egg Basket of the World”); having a farmer’s market; keeping the fair and its ugly dogs; and continuing to operate an emergency evacuation center during earthquakes and wildfires.

A fifth idea, urging greater noise mitigation, was a response to fairground neighbors (in a related note, the panel expressed only mixed support for keeping the speedway for motor racing). The group was cool to novel ideas, from building a YMCA on the site to returning fairgrounds land to the Miwok people for a sweat lodge.

The panel had struggles. Its schedule got scrambled because of rising COVID numbers. Four panelists dropped out; others complained that, even with 100 hours, they didn’t have enough time to ask all their questions. Some stakeholders wanted a more detailed vision from the panel, rather than a list of recommendations.

There are questions about what legal impact the panel will have. In some other countries, citizens’ assemblies can put their proposals directly on ballots, for voters to implement. The Petaluma panel’s work could inform a citywide ballot measure, but the group itself has no legal power to force that.

Still, city officials and other stakeholders told me that the process, and the reports it produced, have defused conflict and created a more positive atmosphere for negotiations.

Panelists who agreed to be interviewed, on condition that I use only their first names, said the process has power because it begins and ends with the citizens themselves. “I participated in government-community processes where you have to go up and lobby a committee of officials,” one panelist, Robert, told me. “I think this works much better, and I would like to see more of it.”

The post In Petaluma, the Future of Democracy and the Fate of the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest Are Intertwined appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’ve made herculean efforts to address the complexities of California’s long-running homelessness crisis. So have other state, federal, and local officials around the Golden State.

But while you’ve all made real progress—from instituting the use of hotels as temporary housing to securing billions in new funding—you’re not much closer to ending the crisis than when you first took office. The costs are mounting—impacting the wellbeing of the unhoused, threatening public health and sanitation, and eroding the trust and cohesion we need to solve big problems.

Homelessness has become a white-hot political issue from Los Angeles to Lassen County, dividing too many communities. In a new Berkeley IGS poll, two-in-three voters rate your handling of homelessness as “poor” or “very poor.” And it’s not just you. The people of Californians are telling focus groups that they don’t think any elected official can solve homelessness.

All of the above are reasons why you need—right now—to ask the people of California to solve the problem themselves.

How?

The answer lies in a tool of popular democracy that is little known in California and the U.S., but has become a common method for addressing the thorniest and most desperate problems in other parts of the world. It’s most often used when governments and other civic institutions find themselves unable to address a crisis that has divided society.

The tool is called the citizens’ assembly.

In essence, it’s a temporary government of regular citizens convened to study a problem, come up with a plan, and then take action to enact it.

Ireland used citizens’ assemblies to resolve divisive conflicts over abortion and same-sex marriage. Finland employed one to address its most divisive issue—regulation of snowmobiles—and North Macedonia held one to deal with the problem of vaccine hesitancy. And France convened a citizens’ assembly on energy and climate change after the so-called “yellow vest” protests revealed bitter disagreement over climate policies.

While citizens’ assemblies are little known here, they aren’t entirely novel. Petaluma has been contemplating a form of citizens’ assembly, a policy jury, to determine the future of the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds property. Not long ago, your columnist proposed an international citizens’ assembly to help govern the complex series of crises at the U.S.-Mexico border.

How might such a process be applied to homelessness in California?

To be effective both legally and practically, the California Citizens’ Assembly on Homelessness would need official authorization from both you and the legislature. Such an assembly would consist of California residents chosen by lot from a pool of everyday people—but through a process designed to ensure the body’s membership is representative of the state in geography, race, ethnicity, political party, and gender.

It would be wise to have one population overrepresented in such an assembly: those whose lives will be most affected by its decision making. While getting elected to the legislature without a permanent address is nearly impossible, one democratic virtue of the citizens’ assembly is that it could specifically include a significant plurality of people who are currently unhoused, or have experienced homelessness in recent years.

The citizens’ assembly would also need power—including the right to subpoena witnesses. And it must have a budget large enough to bring in technical experts to help the citizens, both in understanding homelessness and in organizing the assembly itself. The Committee for Greater Los Angeles and the Weingart Foundation, which recently conducted extensive focus groups on homelessness with Angelenos, would be natural allies in organizing such an assembly.

Most of all, the assembly must have the authority to turn its ideas and recommendations into laws and constitutional amendments. You should make sure that any laws proposed by the assembly will be automatically introduced in the legislature, and that any constitutional measures proposed by the assembly will automatically be placed on the statewide ballot.

The mechanics of such an assembly might sound complicated to you, governor. The people who organize these things might make your head swim when they talk about details—geeking out, say, over the notion that functionally, a citizens’ assembly is really two assemblies: one group of citizens to study the issue and create an agenda for change, and a second group to draft the actual proposals, laws, and ballot measures.

Critics will dismiss the assembly not only as too complex, but also as too novel, and too multi-faceted. They’ll urge you to keep the homelessness portfolio in your own hands, to call special legislative sessions, or to draft new funding or ballot measures yourself.

Don’t let them rattle you.

And don’t let them tell you that everyday Californians don’t understand homelessness. At this point, homelessness is so prevalent that public knowledge of, and experience with, the problem is deep. Which makes this an ideal case for a citizens’ assembly.

If the legislature balks at funding such an assembly, I suspect you’ll find that California’s philanthropic community would be willing to step up. And many of our major public universities, having pledged to deal with homelessness under the rubric of social justice and community embeddedness, are likely to provide experts, technology, and students for such an enterprise.

Indeed, the best case for a citizens’ assembly is that it would galvanize Californians, drawing widespread attention and creating a common statewide forum for figuring out homelessness.

Right now, our homelessness responses are divided—by local jurisdictions, by a set of overlapping state programs, and by political campaigns that see homelessness as a wedge issue. A citizens’ assembly could bridge those divides and be a unifying force.

And since the assembly would gather in public—both online and in person (be sure to reserve a building big enough to contain the audience that might want to watch the proceedings)—it could provide a model of how, in polarized times, Californians of every stripe can hash out their differences, and find better ways forward.

Yes, it’s possible that the assembly would fail. But that would leave California no worse off than it is right now. And if the state convened a citizens’ assembly, and that body made a huge impact on the homelessness crisis, California would become a true national leader on housing the unhoused.

And on democracy itself.

The post Let the People of California Solve the State’s Homelessness Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.