After nearly four months since I announced my candidacy for Oshkosh Common Council way back last year at the start of November, I have finally landed on one idea to sum up who I want to be as a Councilman. It isn’t a line that I came up with or a short series of values that need any elaboration. In fact, it’s something that I’ve been hearing from constituents and reading in the paper and online: we want more data-driven decisions.
As I took a closer look at my campaign at the end of February while I was taking a deep breath before the plunge into March, I realized that data was the thread throughout all of my platform points. We could talk at length about the data behind the growing mistrust of partisan politics, or the sound financial and environmental sustainability behind adaptive reuse of historic architecture vs. demolition and building new, or the streams of data that cite how the cost of housing is growing out of control, etc., etc., etc. I realized that these points are important to me because at some point I was swayed by data that informed my opinions.
The narrative over emotional decisions vs. data-driven decisions on Council is one with a long history. It’s come to a head again recently with the decision to finally make a change to the way we handle special assessments. Councilman Ford is an elegant elocutionist - one who I agree with more often than not. Fortunately for all of Oshkosh, present and future, he’s also a reliable author with blog posts, articles, and social media content that leaders in our community will be able to look back on for many years as future decisions are made siting past precedence and reasons why we went one way or another. He put this notion into context nicely last month, and I’ll quote some of it here,
“There is a narrative out there that the Common Council’s work on special assessments is an emotional reaction to people struggling with large assessments. I think there are a couple important factual points worth sharing…
…From day one on this I have said the issue is not that special assessments exist; it is that they are too high compared to our peers. How high? In 2022 Oshkosh collected $6,059,489 in special assessments. That is more than every other City in Wisconsin. Only 8 Wisconsin Cities (out of 191) collect more than $1,000,000. (Data is from the Department of Revenue: https://www.revenue.wi.gov/.../county-municipal-revenues...).
Oshkosh collects $90.54 in special assessments per-capita. That is 4th highest in Wisconsin. The current proposal was not my first choice. But this is how democracy works. I am not willing to ignore an issue that is objectively a problem as demonstrated by data, not emotion, because I did not convince my colleagues of my first choice. Failing to act to address an objective problem because it isn’t my most preferred plan would be the emotional reaction, and would allow the problem to get worse. That is not how I govern as an elected official, it is not about me, it is about 66,000+ Oshkosh residents. The best plan is the one that addresses the problem and is accepted.”
What we have here is a prime example of a data-driven decision. The discussion may stem from an outpour of emotion over a debated topic, but the direction of the decision was guided by overwhelming data showing how out of line we were compared to other cities.
This is the way that I will vote on Council. Certainly, there will be plenty of decisions made that are ripe with controversy and emotion - the kinds of decisions that make headlines in the Herald - but when it comes time to vote, my decisions and my feelings must be grounded in precedent, in comparative financial information, in the collective insights of many groups of people, in data, data, data. As a group of seven elected leaders responsible for 66,000+ residents, we must never allow ourselves to make a vote on feelings alone. A firm foundation for the governance of our City comes from data-driven decisions.
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