I was thinking a bit more about the situation described in my post here yesterday. It struck me that there’s an undercurrent that needs to be named.
The members of the city council, or at least the leadership, assume the mayor, in selecting members to be appointed to Honolulu’s rail agency (HART) does not find the best people available and then trust them to make the best decisions. Instead, the council seems to assume that the mayor’s appointees are going to do the mayor’s bidding, first and foremost.
And this is, it appears, based on the assumption that their own appointees will follow the council’s agenda, rather than engage in legitimate discussions and debates to reach the best decisions.
Hence the insistence that the council appoint the same number of voting members as the mayor, thereby maintaining their own bargaining power when dealing with the mayor.
So the whole process is focused on the balance of political power and not on making the best public policy decisions.
Am I being too cynical?
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There hasn’t been a single good decision about rail, so being too cynical is impossible.
You ask if you are being cynical. No, and I would take this one further step. It appears to me that the council leadership is mostly interested in making the mayor look bad – not in what is best for Honolulu.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Yes, you nailed it, and that’s the problem. Tax payers/citizens are the losers, and no doubt why so much money is wasted, along with per decisions.
It is difficult to conceive the possibility of being too cynical.
And yet the balancing of political power is at the heart of how a free nation functions. So why be cynical? Realistic, maybe, but not cynical.