{"id":5926,"date":"2014-06-17T20:09:21","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T20:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/?p=5926"},"modified":"2014-06-17T20:09:21","modified_gmt":"2014-06-17T20:09:21","slug":"changing-a-political-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=5926","title":{"rendered":"Changing a political culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Maury Meyers’s death in Beaumont this week reminded me of how one politician — in this case a mayor — can seek change in a region’s political culture.<\/p>\n

Meyers did that during his two tours of duty as mayor of a significant city along the Texas Gulf Coast. He sought to instill a more business-friendly climate in a city that had been perceived as “anti-business” because of its strong union influence in local politics.<\/p>\n

I am not anti-union by any stretch of the imagination, but the city did languish at times because of the belief that its population was inherently unfriendly to Big Bidness.<\/p>\n

Meyers, who grew up in New York, came to Beaumont and entered the public arena with a fresh outlook that shook up the status quo.<\/p>\n

Many communities occasionally become stuck in the old way.<\/p>\n

Amarillo is an example.<\/p>\n

For too-long a time, the city’s governing body took a hands-off approach to economic development — or even certain elements of public safety. In recent years, that notion changed with a city council (which used to be called a “city commission”) that decided to make a public commitment to downtown redevelopment and also to try cracking down on lawbreakers who ignore red lights’ command to stop at intersections.<\/p>\n

The downtown redevelopment initiative — including a tax increment reinvestment zone and its commitment to working with a developer that’s supposed to spearhead the work — remains a work in progress. The red-light camera surveillance program is more established, even though critics still complain about its effectiveness. Government, it turns out, does have a role to play in developing a community.<\/p>\n

Maury Meyers wasn’t the archetypical political trailblazer. I’ve watched others shake up the norm in uncomfortable ways. My hometown of Portland, Ore., had a mayor, Neil Goldschmidt, in the early 1970s who put the brakes on new highway construction and committed the city to redeveloping a first-class mass transit system that would enhance downtown’s growth. He succeeded wildly.<\/p>\n

The larger point here is that individuals, or small groups of elected officials, can make a difference.<\/p>\n

Cities need more forward-thinkers like Maury Meyers.<\/p>\n\n

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Maury Meyers’s death in Beaumont this week reminded me of how one politician — in this case a mayor — can seek change in a region’s political culture. Meyers did that during his two tours of duty as mayor of a significant city along the Texas Gulf Coast. He sought to instill a more business-friendly … Continue reading Changing a political culture<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[276,572,2961,3250,3672],"class_list":["post-5926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amarillo","tag-beaumont-texas","tag-maury-meyers","tag-neil-goldschmidt","tag-portland-ore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}