Bellwether: The Political Evolution of Erie - Our Hope

Season 1 Episode 22 | 28m 31sVideo has Closed Captions

Explore how the politics of Erie changed over the decades during Chronicles on WQLN.

Erie is often cited as a litmus test for the political outcomes of the nation. How did Erie earn this reputation and how have the politics of Erie changed over the decades? Chronicles is an immersive docuseries exploring the history of the Lake Erie region. Watch and learn as local history comes to life with engaging storytelling and powerful videography during Chronicles on WQLN PBS.

07/10/2023

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Chronicles is a local public television program presented by WQLN

Bellwether: The Political Evolution of Erie - Our Hope

Season 1 Episode 22 | 28m 31sVideo has Closed Captions

07/10/2023

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

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Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Springhill Senior Living, support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas B. Hagan. We've seen how elected officials can receive public criticism, a job hazard that requires a thick skin. You're not ever going to make everyone happy, but you follow your own moral compass, and I'm okay with that. For the next two and a half years, I'm going to continue doing that, no matter how much noise is out there. It's like walking into a daycare and 12, 150 kids are screaming running around a gym. Do you pay attention to that?

I don't know what little Billy and Susie are yelling at each other, and I don't care. We have also seen that despite the best of intentions, there have been degrees of hypocrisy within our elected officials. And you know, it's people-based, and that's what we have to do is take care of the people. Hundreds and thousands of issues come through this office, from an individual with a particular issue that we work through constituent services to solve every day, to these major things like the fire and EMS crisis. You're calling for an ambulance, and it shows up 20 minutes later that might be 15 minutes too late. An issue that surely everyone can support in the interest of caring for the people. You know, I got to be honest here, they're not really looking very favorably of the EMS authority that he's been talking about. It's just because the folks on the East County were really not that broken. West County has different needs and different problems. Well, thankfully, programs can still move forward, even if they aren't universally supported. I almost lost my reelection to county executive because of the community college. There was that much of a backlash going on at that particular moment on the community college. And people's perception was that, well, we have four universities in our community, why do we need a community college? They didn't even understand that it's a completely different model, and it's another piece in the education continuum, that we were the largest populated area in the country with that one. Literally just went to the graduation for the community college, and I went up to the president, I said, "Sir, I guess I ought to eat some humble pie today," because I didn't think you'd get here.

I pushed against it. But this decision to serve the public can come at a penalty. Well, I think I knew that the campaign for a third term would probably turn fairly nasty fairly quick. And I thought a lot of it would have been around the pandemic and my handling of it. And for me, part of it was I just didn't want to go through that.

You know, I didn't want to put my family through that. I'd been through a couple of brutal campaigns.

It takes a lot out of you, and I just wasn't really willing to do it again. That was a piece of my decision. It sucks.

There's no way around it. Politics are brutal.

They're gut-wrenching.

They're dehumanizing. And if you don't stay focused on why you got into it and you don't build a solid team of support around you, things like this will destroy your personhood.

They'll destroy your personhood. You know, once you've decided to run for public office, you just have to become an open book. And people want you to be an open book.

I mean, even if you don't want to be, they're going to find ways into your personal life. And that to me is really unfortunate because there used to be a very much of a dividing line. And that seems to have eroded. December 31, 2016, my son Aaron's birthday, my son Darren was killed at Bovley's time. Eighteen months later, my son Calvin's killed in a home invasion. And you want to talk about sacrifice. I've had to grieve publicly.

I've had to grieve not only for myself. I've had good days when I go in the store and other people, citizens. You don't know me.

I like the work you're doing.

I heard what happened to you since they started. I'm a mess.

I'm still in Calisley.

Wife's in Calisley. Yeah, you want to talk about sacrifice?

We've sacrificed. September 31, 2016, my son Aaron's birthday, my son Darren was killed in a home invasion. There's the popular misconception that all politicians are in it for themselves. A lot of people go, oh, you guys get into politics for the big money and all the perks and expense accounts. And I'm like, I'm waiting.

You know, we make 53 cents an hour and all the paper clips we can use. Everybody within a committee here, the Republican Committee, it's a purely voluntary position. Nobody receives any compensation. A lot of folks have the misconception that we are funded by the DNC or funded by the state party or that this is a paid position.

These are volunteer positions. All of our committee folks are volunteers, the folks that staff our office on a regular basis. But council members are paid, right? We were only making $6,000 for the whole year. That hardly covers your gas to go to the meetings and, you know, the things that you have to do outside of the actual legislative piece. But I will tell you, they put in a lot of hours and they put in many, many more hours than they are compensated for. So when I got sworn in and I got elected, my first order of business was getting a pay resolution put in because $6,000 40 years ago was a lot different than $6,000 today. And when you have council members looking over budgets and we're talking about big money for certain salaries and we're making $6,000 for the whole year and we have an X amount of hours that we put in a week, if you're doing the job correctly, based off of your community events, all your public meetings, based off of the community just reaching out to you because you're an elected official, they feel as though they're entitled to every moment of your free time, even if you're at work at your other job. And I think the city would be better off if our council people were full time council people receiving a full time wage. I think it would make the job that they do easier because folks would be able to focus more on the task at hand instead of it being some time for some people the second or third job that they have. City Council adjourns at 9 0 8 p.m. If you're looking to get rich, this isn't it. My salary happens to be right around for serving on county council, happens to be around $10,880 annually, which probably would equate to about 30 cents an hour if I were to calculate it. You have to deal with a lot of adversity and you know the compensation oftentimes doesn't equal that. Not only are many elected officials not duly compensated, but the demands of the job often mean personal sacrifices have to be made elsewhere. When I ran for county executive, I was able to pivot a lot of my private practice clients initially, but then I ended up having to leave private practice because it wasn't fair to them because I wasn't as available as they deserve to have. And so even for my kids, I was missing games, I was missing practices, I wasn't at birthday party events for family members, I wasn't as available for my friends. So your world shrinks at the same time your platform is getting bigger. So suddenly way more people knew who I was, but the amount of people that I could lean on or that I could show up for was down to a handful. Not paying our council members, does that cause problems? Yeah, it's an issue I discuss with students sometimes and I guess there's a trade off there. I mean on the one hand having such low pay discourages some people from even bothering to try and the people who do get these jobs are only being paid 6, 10, 12,000 dollars part time for something that seems like full time work and with a lot of expectations and some of them will get discouraged and say I'm not doing this anymore. On the other hand if you pay for instance City Council, every City Council 50 or 60,000 a year you're going to hear the obvious complaints, you know the taxpayers, oh this is a waste of money and blah blah. Oh it has a huge effect on it because when you have, not only do we do the council business, we're liaisons to every department in the county so we have meetings after meetings after meetings. And if you're employed like I am during the daytime, you have to leave your job if you don't have a job where you know most of us have jobs where we're off the clock when we're doing that. And so it takes food off your table. So you really have to believe in what you're doing I guess or look for it as a resume filler, but it's not a politics, it's not a spectator sport. You get bloody and it costs, and it costs not only to run, it costs to be there. And the thing is most people see you on TV they think you're getting that same 75, 80 thousand dollars that Mill Creek and Harvard Creek are getting. And you should because you're doing a half a billion dollar budget to their 60 million dollar damn budget. Why do those people run for office? My predecessor voted against the community college, and I felt that he voted against his constituency, the people that he represented. And the moment he cast that vote, I knew that I was going to challenge him in the next race. I started out as a community activist and organizer.

So for me it was just like getting people involved in the conversation I would have a lot of people who would be really upset and really annoyed by how things were and they couldn't really articulate themselves to address those concerns, let alone know where to go. And I would go to city council meetings and speak about the needs of the community, myself being one of those community members and already having knocked on doors and spoken to other community members knowing that they support these issues and them not hearing the message. And it made me realize that they couldn't hear the message because it didn't pertain to their story.

It didn't resonate with them or their community. They weren't necessarily experiencing what my current community was experiencing, what the majority of your community was experiencing. So it emphasized the need for more people like us to be up there advocating wanting to change these issues. So what does it cost to run for office? You have some candidates who raise so little money that they don't even have to submit a campaign finance report and you have others who have raised and spent upwards of $30,000 for a city council seat. So that's very challenging.

And so when you talk to candidates about what they might need to run, it really is a question about their comfortability with one, asking for money and two, understanding how to spend the money because you can squander $30,000 pretty quickly in a campaign. For me, I knew that people spend money to get elected and that made me feel dirty because in my community, $10 is a lot of money. And for you to ask somebody for $10 of their hard earned money, you're asking a lot. So my first run, I was able to successfully get $2,500. When I ran in 2020, I was able to get $9,500 roughly, just was asking for small donations.

Whereas I seen people take out personal loans, donate their own money. You know, some people put in a lot of money into this and it could range depending on how bad you want it. It's a dirty game to be in politics, but money is important.

You need literature.

You need yard sign. There's no way that you as somebody who's working a full time job can get to every single voter in Erie. You know, I mean, to me, I'm in this last campaign, I had to put over $55,000 of my own money in, you know, I mean, who in their 30s has 55 grand to lay out on the table and say, I want this office, you know, and then have to come up with another half a million bucks to even be competitive against a special interest candidate that's nationally fundraising. That is a lot of money. So some candidates are lucky enough to have their own resources to put into their campaign. We're seeing that right now in our county judicial race. We have two candidates that have put in around $100,000 into their race.

And we have a third candidate who didn't put any of their own money into the race, but have raised $50,000. Where does this money come from? You have to you have to work hard to get elected and you have to convince the people you're the right person to represent them. What you see happening today is candidates taking small amounts of money and usually done over the Internet and on social media. For me, it was to be able to have fundraisers and invite them so that my fundraisers were $25. Today, when you go to fundraisers, they can be $150. So there was a lot of effort put into that. So money is part of it.

But I think you raise the money really because of campaign costs. And even then, as it is now, is media costs. And they were expensive. There was no question about it. So you had to do spend that money wisely. Fifty years ago, forty years ago, even twenty years ago, we still had traditional mass media where you had newspapers, you had radio, you had TV.

Those were your major touch points for information. Today, with things like your cell phone or laptops, mobile devices, you have instant access to anything at any point in time. Whether that's the 24/7 news cycle or that's the golf clubs I was looking at on my way here or before I came here. And that access to information has changed. The first time I ran for City Council, I used all three sources. I used newspaper, I used television, and I used radio. And I think out of those things, they each had their effect. But I think one of the most effective things in a kind of set of pattern for me for the rest of my campaigns was print. Was print with the newspapers because there you could give your thinking, your positions, your agenda. Newspapers are shutting down because they can't afford to continue to print because nobody's buying it. There are about two papers lost a day on average. Basically half the journalists from the early 2000s to today nationwide. And we're now, I think, at 1200, little 1200 plus for dailies operating nationally. Between the Erie Times and the Dispatch Herald, the other main daily paper, I believe it's 2000, the two papers combined. The editorial side, writers, editors, about 90 people when the papers combined in 2000. That's probably dwindled to 15. And that is what scares me the most is the print media not being out there and telling the stories. Because even as elected official, I know that we need somebody, as they say, watching the hen house. But if it's really important, surely it'll get covered by the mainstream media. I've come to think of cable news is not news. Cable news is entertainment where journalism sometimes happens. This is not journalism.

This is not news. It's entertainment that also employs some journalists who sometimes are allowed to do journalism. Well, there's always social media. It just seems to be that more and more people get their news from social media, which again, we're talking about how news is being used for entertainment. Well, now dump it into these algorithms, which will just automatically take you down these insane paths and into more and more and more misinformation. You know, we've elevated voices in society, the wrong voices, to where now you have someone that's completely uneducated, doesn't understand an issue, doesn't understand the complexities of an issue. But if you say it loudly and you say it passionately enough, it gets the likes, it gets the follows. And, you know, it kind of creates movements, you know, that are complete misinformation. How could you trust that landscape? Again, my advice to everybody is don't get your news from social media. People aren't engaged.

People don't know that if you go to any township supervisor meeting, school board meeting, city council meeting, and there's a room full of empty chairs, and a couple of people are going to come up at a zoning thing or a pothole thing, or, you know, most people are not proactive. They're reactive, right?

And so they're reacting to a thing. And that's when maybe it'll motivate you to go, we're much too busy to be bothered on a Tuesday or a Wednesday night to go there for all of an hour to know what's actually going on. Nobody knows. People who want to do things and want quiet and silence and secrecy, that's one of the things that motivates good news operations. They want to get in behind that and tell that story. It's a staggering blow, and it reflects the nationwide drop, basically half the journalists from the early 2000s to today nationwide. And we're now, I think, a 1200, little 1200 plus for dailies operating nationally. But they play such an important role in a community. You talk to folks about why they don't know more or don't study more or find out more information about our candidates, and oftentimes that comes down to how much time they actually have. And I think as we think about the future, it's also important to be introducing those young folks, whether it be an eight-year-old, a 16-year-old or a 20-year-old, to the political process and the way that we do this so that they stay engaged with the process. And if Donald Trump is coming here or Joe Biden is coming here, people are engaged. They want to see these people because it's national. Then when you go to the local, it's like, oh, that's no big deal. And I think that the participation drops off because of that. And again, local elections don't have the same kind of money being thrown into this as the national. So they don't have the media coverage as they would normally have. They don't have the radio coverage, you might say, or TV. And even they don't have the money oftentimes to pay volunteers. You know, volunteers are so important. It gives the candidate not only help and assistance, but I think it gives a candidate confidence that people actually want to support you and trust you and believe in what you're saying. And so that's a very big part of any campaign. The more that you're able to highlight organizations and people and this amazing community that we live in, it helps us all live in one shared reality, which is what we've lost recently. Yeah, if you're not scared, you're not paying attention. I mean, it's truly frightening. I mean, A.I.

can you could have Joe Biden say anything, Donald Trump say anything. And it looks absolutely true to the person on the other side of whatever device they're on. In neither party, Democrat or Republican care as long as that pendulum swings in their direction. We need to be careful of things like deep fake videos and photos. I mean, you're able to create some pretty crazy things right now. And the most disappointing thing I learned about politics is, is it doesn't even have to be true. It doesn't have to be true. The laws of accountability and political campaigns, I mean, they just don't exist. It could quickly become a situation where you have no idea what is true and what is false. And I mean, especially in a place like Erie that does have a lot of tough choices ahead of it. We have to live in a shared sense of reality and we have to be informed about the facts. I think we need to become more media literate. We are entering an era of extraordinary technological kind of change. The closest comparison would be the late 19th century, where politics was partisan, nasty, brutal, sometimes violent. So we've been here before, but we've not been here before with AI, which is going to really test Americans and our ability to manage this. I mean, it's trite but true, right? Ben Franklin leaves the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Apocryphally, he meets this woman on the street and she's like, "What have you done?

" And he said, "Well, we built a republic if you can keep it.

" We have to give relief to this country and we have to figure out a way of doing it. And I think it has to begin at a local level. You know, Tip O'Neill said, "All politics is local.

" The United States is just becoming a little bit more ideological polarized. It's almost like we've been transported back almost 100 years, where America in many ways looks like America did in the early 20th century. We're all in the same boat.

We're all rowing the same boat together. We're all suffering from the same ills. And if we can't learn how to at least 30% of the time to row together, we're not asking for 100%. But on 30% of the issues, we should be able to find common ground. I think the young people's growing participation on the higher level elections is really great to see. But we need to somehow help them to understand that those other election years are just as important and in many ways more important to their daily lives. And they don't see that.

They think about the big issues, whether it be gun control or women's rights or you name it, one of the big issues. Those are all decided on a federal level for the most part, some on the state level. But there are issues happening in this community every single day that affect their lives. We don't invest smartly in our communities to empower people, to have pride, so that their children can have pride, and then we're failing every day. How well we do, I think, is something that will only be measured historically. At this moment, I'd say we're probably getting an F on our report card. It's not left-right, independent, green party, left-but, you know, it's not. It's conversations, it's civic discourse. If we don't make space for it, people will keep brushing it off. So, no, our city isn't perfect.

Our county is facing issues. But if we care enough to engage, we could catapult this into something great on the lake. It's something our elected representatives are already fighting for. But it's something we should all be fighting for. It's not, "Can you afford to be in Erie County?"

It's, "Can you afford not to be here?

" And that's the message we need to send to the world. I would bet on Erie rather than bet against it. And mainly because of the lake. And what that offers, not only as far as economic opportunity for businesses to come here, but waters becoming in short supply across this world, not just this country. And people are going to be searching for available resources of fresh water. And that has to be a huge step forward for us. Maybe not 10 years from now, maybe not 20 years from now, but sooner or later, that's going to be a real important factor for us in how we grow. I can tell you, we keep looking to the future. And it's not just the next three to six years. It's really the next 20, 30 years. We want to make changes that are going to stay in place and help the city for many, many years to come. And that is changing the future of Erie down the road. And if some of these people who have been beat down can still get up and show up, then what's my excuse? And what's my excuse? And so I have to, I have to hold hope. We have to have crazy optimism.

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Chronicles is a local public television program presented by WQLN