Some will talk about the dangers of having weapons of various sorts and sizes available to individuals like Breivik and passionately implore for tighter controls and regulation of firearms or other weapon-making materials.  Indeed, we should be asking hard questions about when, where and why we create weapons designed to kill other human beings, and how we allow them to be used.

Some will talk about how this is a clear cut example that acts of terrorism are an ongoing threat and need to be safeguarded against using increased governmental or military power to fight terrorists and prevent attacks.  Indeed, we should be asking hard questions about whether current efforts to prevent acts of terrorism are effective, and what else could be done.

Some will speak of a lone madman who was mentally ill, and how we must find better ways to diagnose and treat mental illness of this sort before an individual’s darkness can turn into violence.  Indeed, we should be asking hard questions about how those among us who suffer from mental illness are treated and how they are helped.

But we must not forget that behind all of these interrelated paths to such awful acts of violence, there is a singular cause that no amount of weapons control, military might or psychological analysis can predict or prevent:

Somehow, this man was able to construct a worldview for himself in which it was permissible to murder other people because of their political views.

We might like to convince ourselves that creating or adopting such a worldview is not something that can happen to rational people.  But we know that our brains and our mental models of the world are pliable.   They can be shaped and reshaped easily, sometimes with almost trivial effort.  This is why television ads and billboards convince us every day to buy or do things we wouldn’t otherwise buy or do.  And we know that people from all backgrounds, all social classes, all levels of education and intellect can do awful, horrible, unthinkable things…if they just come to think about the state of the world in a way that necessitates those things.

In his long manifesto posted to the Internet, Breivik stated that “The time for dialogue is over.”  A simple and chilling statement, but one not too different from the sentiment expressed in social and political discourse happening every day in the US.

As the news media and 24-hour cable news machine tell urgent stories about seemingly great injustices in the world, thinking for us about how to delineate between what is clearly good and clearly evil without lingering too long on any facts or context, they enforce a worldview that suggests the time for dialogue is over.  (I’m looking at you, MSNBC and Fox News.)

As political parties create contrived and over-simplified arguments for why one candidate or another is essential to the future of the city, state or nation, and brush aside nuance or complexity in what effective governance might look like, they send the signal that the time for dialogue is over.

As religious and cultural institutions imply or suggest directly that because someone is of a certain gender, religious belief, sexual orientation or ethnicity that they are not fully worthy of some right or privilege that others are granted, and in fact may be inherently evil, they reinforce for their members or followers that the time for dialogue is over.

As communities trade away their public squares and opportunities for substantial conversation about the future of their neighborhoods in exchange for more opportunities for convenient shopping and individual instant gratification, we create places to live where the time for dialogue is over.

And when we no longer see any room for real dialogue, for meaningful, introspective, vulnerable, respectful exchanges about the way the world can and should work, we reinforce a worldview of “us vs. them” and begin to create that pretext for violence as the path to victory.  Maybe it’s not physical violence…maybe it’s economic violence or cultural violence.  Maybe it’s not a swift act of destruction, but a long slow whittling away of resources or dignity.   But when the time for dialogue is over, what’s left other than the leveraging of power and the exertion of force?

The acts of violence in Norway are to be condemned, the lives lost to be mourned.  But we must also recognize that this came about not because of a lack of gun control or not enough money spent on policing and anti-terrorism or a failure to stop a lone act of insanity.  They came about because our culture is creating and reinforcing a narrative about the future that allows for and even encourages exactly this kind of violence against each other.

Until we can imagine a new worldview that doesn’t end up at murder and oppression as a logical conclusion, that seeks to build shared understandings through genuine dialogue, and that values life over power and profit, we participate in creating a pretext for even more violence.

The article does a good job of summarizing the challenges of blight as amplified by rough economic times: property owners who might already struggle with maintenance and upkeep are even more at risk of letting a given structure or piece of land fall into disrepair when finances get tight and layoffs and foreclosures are looming.  With such a high percentage of Richmond’s residences being rentals, there’s possibility for further disconnect between the state of the property and the owner’s involvement in it.

My impression from the article and from the conversations I’ve had with city leaders is that Richmond is generally doing what it can to respond to the impact of decaying properties.  But it can be discouraging to know that the process of getting a blighted property owner’s attention is often drawn out over a long time and a lot of paperwork, not to mention expenditure of taxpayer dollars: wait for the property to be reported as blighted, flag it, mow it or repair it and bill the property owner, wait for the bill to go unpaid, place a lein on the property, and THEN there MIGHT be a financial incentive for some action.  This routine may bear the customary government trademarks of caution and glacial due process, but it doesn’t recognize very well the shorter-term impacts (financial and social) of a property falling into disrepair, and the ripple effect it can have on other areas nearby.

That particular concern is probably better taken up by neighborhoods and communities of neighbors than by municipal government, though.  When a given area has a strong sense of community or neighborhood identity, perhaps through the work of an active neighborhood association, it’s harder for any one property or resident to get left behind.  When people know their neighbors and understand what personal and financial constraints are at work, there may be more opportunities to lend a hand and stop a bad situation from getting worse in a way that more deeply impacts the whole neighborhood.  When we have vibrant and accessible public spaces, including a healthy downtown and surrounding arts and cultural districts, we have more opportunities to pool together our shared investment in the health of the city.

Of course, blight is a symptom of some other troubling trends as much as it is a cause.  Richmond can check off many of Wikipedia’s list of sources of urban decay:

It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or changing population, economic restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape…Urban decay has no single cause; it results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic conditions—including the city’s urban planning decisions, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of freeway roads and rail road lines that bypass the area, depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining, and xenophobic immigration restrictions.

As much as we should be working to address blight in Richmond, we need to also develop a holistic view of these underlying causes, and develop a long-term approach that not only focuses on revitalizing Richmond’s residential areas, but also on building a vibrant and self-reliant city as a whole.

The site has a simple display of those headlines that’s automatically updated as they’re made available throughout the day, and you can click on them to go read the original content on the source site – that’s about it. There’s a mobile-friendly version at http://m.47374.info/ and you can also easily see some recent local tweets from Twitter.  The site’s still officially in beta but I’ve gotten some great feedback from test users so far.

I created 47374.info because I was tired of looking in a lot of different places to see what’s making news in my community, or wondering if I’d missed something that was only announced on the very transient Twitter.  Some news sources have lots of content but make getting to it hard or leave certain key things out.  Other sources have a few juicy nuggets of relevant content once in a while but don’t make updates available via RSS feeds, so you never quite know how often to check back.

So with the magic of WordPress plus some custom Perl scripts, I’ve restored some sanity to my news-reading time.  For the first time in a long time, I’ve set a website (instead of a blank page) as the default “Home” page that opens when I launch my browser.  Over the last few weeks, it’s meant I’m more aware of community news, and I spend less time per day getting there.

Thanks to all of the local news/headline/event publishers that work to keep our community informed!

If you try out 47374.info and have feedback, drop me a line.

I’ve spent much of my time and energy over the last decade of my life investing myself in Richmond in one form or another.  I’ve written many words in this space about what I see as Richmond’s opportunities and challenges, and I’ve always enjoyed observing the local political scene.  Now, I’m taking my involvement to what I think is the next logical step given my talents and passions.

I don’t expect to write much about the campaign here; this blog will continue to be for my personal and unofficial musings on a variety of topics.  I have a campaign website setup, and I’ve got the twitters and the youtubes and the facebooks all ready for you to liketweet if that’s your thing.  If you’re interested in the campaign, my positions on various issues affecting the community, and how you can help move Richmond forward, please check it out.  Even a few words of support will mean a lot!

A panel of historians has found an “appalling” number of factual errors in a new fourth-grade history textbook used in many Virginia school districts, one of the experts said…The historical inaccuracies “are appalling in number,”…the book needs more than 140 corrections.

I hope they don’t throw them away.  This seems like a great opportunity to teach students in Virginia and beyond some important lessons about education (things I wish I’d been more cognizant of in the early days of my education):

1. It’s possible for so-called authoritative texts to contain blatant, significant errors and personal biases.  Just because something is in print doesn’t mean it’s correct.
2. It matters who peer reviews a publication.  If they’re not trained to look for all of the different kinds of errors that can occur, or if they’re just not looking at all, you might as well not have a peer review process.
3. The education system does not always work in favor of actual education, and sometimes it works against it.

I know they’re just 4th graders, but it would be so interesting to use the flawed books to teach a unit on how textbooks are produced, and the effect of factual and conceptual errors in widely circulated publications.

Wikileaks has brought to light a powerful and confusing kind of inner conflict for anyone who considers themselves a patriot, or at least a person who cares about the actions of the federal government taken on our behalf.

On one hand, various versions of The American Dream have always reinforced the idea that where there’s corruption, injustice or other malfeasance, and especially when it’s taking place within the government, it should be exposed and made right.  Who among us wouldn’t enjoy just a little bit having the “smoking gun” piece of paper to hold in the face of someone in power who claimed one thing was true when we knew something else to be the case?  I think there’s a basic instinct in those who are engaged in civic life to want to see that kind of justice (though I won’t try to pretend that for many, it’s anything other than rubbernecking).

On the other hand, I would bet that many people understand that if you accept that part of the U.S. government’s role is to engage the world on sensitive matters of diplomacy, trade, military conflict, political governance and human rights advocacy, then there is a role for secret-keeping in the affairs of state.  We all hold certain matters in confidence, and hopefully most of the time we do it because it we think it’s the right thing to do.  In an ideal world, a government acting on my behalf would only keep secrets from me when it’s the right thing to do for the greater good, and I would trust my government to do so.  The idea that someone might come along and make those secrets public without permission would offend my sensibilities as an affront to the necessary machinations of governance.  But obviously, this ideal scenario is far from reality, and history has shown that trusting governments to limit their own secret-keeping to “just the right secrets” doesn’t work.

So, what’s a patriot to do?

Well, if you’re someone like Sarah Palin or Joe Lieberman, you go straight to the most black and white interpretation of the situation as possible: Wikileaks is a terrorist organization, and so its funding should be cut off and its leader should be hunted, shot and killed.  Or you downplay it as unimportant to even think about, as White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs did: “Look, our foreign policy and our country is stronger than one guy with one website . . . and we should never be afraid of one guy who plopped down $35 and bought a Web address.”  (Psst, Mr Gibbs: I can get you domains for under $15 now, $35 is so late-90′s pricing!)

But sometimes, real engagement with civic affairs and other important things requires holding multiple complex and sometimes conflicting ideas in your head, and then really grappling with them.  Sometimes it means not doing the most politically expedient thing or the most strategically safe thing, and instead waiting to do the right thing.

I’m looking at you, Amazon.com and PayPal.  The next time anyone tries to argue that corporations aren’t amassing too much power in our culture and says “surely the government will keep all of that in check,” we can point to the decision made by these companies to cut off Wikileaks` service under pressure from U.S. lawmakers as a perfect illustration of how the government is happy for corporations to amass that power as long as they know that with a phone call from a Senator, they’ll do what they’re told.  It would be one thing if there had been some due process through which Wikileaks had been found to be committing a crime under U.S. law, but the U.S. government itself admits that it’s still trying to figure out if there are any charges to be brought, and yet these companies were happy to make a unilateral decision (as is their right under their “Terms of Use”) that no due process was necessary.  They were probably relieved to avoid the responsibility of taking some nuanced, complicated position on the matter.

Just so we’re clear on the distilled series of events:

1. Government covers up embarrassing secrets
2. Someone exposes embarrassing secrets
3. Government tries to take down that someone, at least by silencing them, if not killing them

It’s pretty standard fare for a Mel Gibson/Russell Crowe/Keifer Sutherland flick, but are we ready to accept that it’s our reality?

After thoughtful contemplation, you may arrive at the conclusion that Wikileaks should not be releasing these documents, and that’s fine.  But please ask yourself what process you think should be followed to (A) convince everyone that this is the case, and (B) take appropriate action as a result?

In other words, what if Wikileaks were releasing secrets that you thought absolutely needed to be made public?  Would you want to know that it could be stopped by a few phone calls from powerful legislators or a few covert missions from black-ops military units?

Finally, let’s talk about the most important part of the whole thing:  why couldn’t they name themselves something other than “Wikileaks”?  As far as I can tell, they don’t make any prominent use of wiki technology (like, say, Wikipedia does), so it just serves to confuse people who still have no idea what a wiki is or why one might be useful.  Maybe Wikileaks uses a wiki for their internal processing and organizing of documents, but that would be like introducing myself as “Toothbrush Man” just because I brushed my teeth this morning.

What is the world coming to?

I’ve gone from subscribing to the paper seven days a week, to just the Friday/Saturday/Sunday package, to just the Sunday edition.  Here’s why I’m going to finally let go of receiving a print edition altogether:

1. The print edition has been taken over by advertising. I understand that ads have long-been the bread and butter of a newspaper’s business model, and I’m willing to tolerate some reasonable proportion of ads to content in order to get the content.  But when the roll of paper that shows up on my porch is seemingly made up of 95% advertising and 5% content, I can’t justify it.  The resource usage is ridiculous given that I immediately recycle or throw away that 95%, and I just don’t like the sense that I’m primarily paying to support a conduit for advertisers to influence me, instead of for something that’s primarily a journalism product.  (For what it’s worth, the online edition has also been taken over by advertising, but at least there I can automatically block out the ads with software.)
2. The local news coverage is understandably but unacceptably thin. With a shrinking staff of reporters and more pressure than ever before to produce headlines that sell papers, I find the coverage of local and regional issues and news to be lacking (at least according to the standard I put forth two years ago).  When they do cover local issues, it’s rarely with a depth and perspective that challenges and engages me as a reader and citizen.  I believe the Pal-Item staff has great intentions and are working their butts off to cover as much as they can, but that doesn’t mean the P-I is sufficiently living up to its role as the local newspaper.
3. The Palladium-Item hosts some of the most toxic public conversations happening in our community. If you read any given article on the Pal-Item website, there’s usually at least one person (and sometimes many people) offering uninformed, insulting, immature or outright hateful comments.  The most egregious comment-makers are sometimes reprimanded or even banned, but it hasn’t changed the tone of the general conversation.  When I talk to other people out in Richmond about the Pal-Item website, our conversation almost always turn to the harm being done by the online discussions happening at pal-item.com.  On principle, I don’t want to help fund that conversation space any more.  It’s only fair to note that the Pal-Item also facilitates some very helpful conversations too via their “PI Live!” online interview segments – more on that below.
4. It’s not my job to support a struggling business for the sake of offering support alone. I’m sad about the decline of print journalism, and I’m especially sad that it’s declined so far in my town, which sorely needs a good local paper.  But I don’t think it’s my job to keep funding a model that isn’t working, just because I’m nostalgic.  I’ve stayed on with my subscription as long as I have somewhat out of guilt – “oh no, I don’t want to contribute to the downfall of the newspaper industry” – but it’s increasingly clear that that industry hasn’t sufficiently regarded trends threatening its existing business models, and it’s not my job to bail them out.
5. I can get the same information for free online. I’m Internet-connected to the point of lunacy, and so I can pull up the tidbits of Palladium-Item content that I’m interested in at a moment’s notice on one of the glowing rectangles I surround myself with all day.  Sometimes I even learn that information sooner via social networking sites and other community resources.

So, with all of those things considered, I can’t think of a reason to keep paying to have a roll of ads (with a sprinkle of articles thrown in) show up every week.

But make no mistake, I WILL give the Palladium-Item my money again – maybe even MORE money – if the conditions are right!  Some possible scenarios:

1. They find a way to bring in additional reporters or other staff to produce a more substantial and well-rounded news product.
2. They allow me to pay a slightly higher subscription fee in order to not receive all of the ads that come with the Sunday edition.
3. They make available an online edition that doesn’t have advertising at all, or that at least implements it much less intrusively and much more tastefully.
4. They charge a small fee for live viewing of community events and interviews with community leaders (and then make a time-delayed version available a bit later).
5. They more fully embrace citizen journalism and crowd-sourced content, while avoiding ridiculous copyright/licensing policies.

Print journalism will either reinvent itself, or it will fade away.  The Palladium-Item will either reinvent itself, or it will fade away.  In the meantime, I’m done with supporting the in-between option – it doesn’t work for me.

What about you?  If you’ve kept your subscription to a print newspaper, what factors support that?  If you canceled or never had one in the first place, why?

1. Watchdog journalism involves writing stories that hold public officials accountable for their actions or stories that help to right wrongs in the community, for example. In what ways could we improve in this area?

The Palladium-Item is to be commended for its consistent presence at government and institutional meetings, no matter how boring or routine they are.  That said, the paper often seems to be getting its stories out the door about important or controversial issues just as those items are reaching some sort of final decision point.

At some level I’m sure this is what many decision makers and news makers would prefer – their jobs are easier when there’s less time for the public to be outraged before it’s “too late.”  And it’s true that it’s still the responsibility of the citizenry to make itself aware of what issues are before, say, Common Council, and not depend entirely on the paper to note items of possible interest.  But I would be pleased to see the Palladium-Item try to maintain even more context on community issues that are under discussion, before they’ve reached a point of ostensible “no return.”

On the other side of the matter, there’s the issue of accountability once a wrong or disservice has been committed.  The general “media strategy” practiced by most public figures in this community when they’re involved in something controversial is “wait a few days and everyone will have moved on to something else.” They’re generally right that the collective memory of the community is subject to manipulation and distraction – hey, what’s that shiny thing over THERE….oh wait, sorry – and so we do need the paper to look back at how decisions were made and hold the decision-makers accountable.  It can be tough sometimes when the mindset of the reporter understandably becomes “how many more stories can I do about disingenuous plotting by council members to de-fund the Human Rights Commission, we already DID that one?”   But know that nonetheless, I think there’s a real thirst in this town for follow-up and perspective on those kinds of things, because they help us remember what we did wrong, and how we can do better next time.

And when election time rolls around, don’t just print the candidates` answers to questionnaires and their prepared responses at a debate – show us their voting record, their public statements (or noticeable lack thereof) about important issues, their actual contributions to the community (instead of their provided list of affiliations).  Tell us their story in a way that fits into the larger narrative of the community, and don’t take their word for it.

2. The Sunday edition of the Palladium-Item has, by far, our biggest single-day circulation. Past feedback tell us its the day our readers have the most time to spend with the paper. It’s also an important day to our advertisers because of the bigger audience it enjoys. What could we do to make that edition special for you?

When I sit down to read the Sunday paper, I don’t want to just read articles, I want to have an experience.  Yes, I want it to be like reading the New York Times.  I want there to be options, different subject mater, formats and voices.  I want to be challenged and amused and provoked, and then I want to sit back and think about that, and then I want to move on to another article or section and do it all over again.

The current experience of reading the Palladium-Item on Sunday is about a 10-15 minute process on average, and some of that is getting all of the advertising circulars separated out and thrown away so I can tell how much “real” content is left.  That’s not even enough time to get me through a cup of coffee and breakfast, let alone a lazy Sunday morning.

Okay, I know that it’s unlikely the Pal-Item is going to be able to ramp up content production to NYT Sunday levels.  And I know that short of a rich uncle depositing some bags of money in your laps, you’re physically limited by the number of staff you can afford to have working on that edition.  But if you have resources to expend on making the Sunday edition “special,” please make sure you focus on expanding your reporting and news analysis – that would feel very special to me.

3. We want our Web site to be viewed as a primary source for breaking news in our area. How can we make that happen? What would that look like on pal-item.com?

I’ll tell you exactly what it looks like: collaboration with other sources of local news to display their headlines and links to their stories on your site.  Yes, I really said that and no, I’m not kidding.  With your current staff resources, you can’t expect to always be the first news organization to break a story, and so you have to position yourself to still be the place where people come to read about breaking news, even if it’s not your content. If they know that if they go to Kicks96/WHON and G101.3/WKBV and Twitter and the EDC site and the Chamber site and WayNet.org and so on to find stories and information you don’t have yet, then pal-item.com will always just be one stop along the way for most users, not a primary source.  You need critical mass.

The nice thing is that the pieces are all almost in place for this to happen.  If you can collaborate with other news reporting / news breaking entities to insure that RSS feeds are readily available, you can build a “breaking news portal” with little technical effort.  Yes, they might build their own breaking news portal too, but that’s okay.  Really, trust me.

Also, crowdsource it.  Find trusted local readers (even if they have conflicts of interest and affiliations and biases) and give them the power to post information directly on your breaking news pages (or via their own RSS feeds, Twitter streams, etc).  Don’t moderate it, don’t filter it, or if you do, let other readers do the filtering and moderating along with you.  Yes I really said that, no I’m not kidding.

4. Traditionally, newspapers have had a leadership role in their communities, and that’s something we would like to continue here. How would you suggest we take a greater role in that?

As I think you and your colleagues know, being in a true leadership role is not something you can necessarily choose or create, it’s something that’s earned over time by consistent acts that bring something to the community with integrity and perspective.  The paper has one of the loudest voices in town when it comes to shaping the thoughts and conversations of our everyday lives.  If I were running the Pal-Item, I would ask every day, “does our news product and the work of our staff use our loud voice in a way that builds up the community, informs and challenges our readers with new and different perspectives they’re not getting elsewhere, and helps create or promote a vision for a sustainable, enjoyable future that can be enjoyed by all?”  If there are times when the answer is “no,” make changes and move on.  If there are times when the answer is “yes,” then you’re serving in an important leadership role, keep it up.

I know the values implied in this question are very different from the traditional journalistic imperatives that shaped a newspaper’s role in a town for so long, but times they are a changin`.

5. What can we do to improve customer service?

I’ve never had a negative customer service experience with the Palladium-Item.  That said, one weird thing you could resolve is the way you ask people to submit information or letters to you through your website.  There’s the filling out of a form and the cramming of text into a small text box, which is totally inconvenient if you’re submitting a press release that’s already been prepared as a PDF or Word DOC.  It’s understood that the Pal-Item staff use e-mail (and sometimes you print their addresses in the paper), so why not provide direct e-mail as an alternative to the weird form?

Also, take the lead in getting this community to use QR Codes.  Please? Thanks.

…

Thanks to Jason for asking for reader/public input on the paper’s operations and future.  If you have your own thoughts on what the local paper needs to do to stay relevant, engaging, and, ahem, solvent, feel free to share here or on Jason’s blog post.

Richmond already has a number of issues with public perception when it comes to tourism and first impressions.  All discussions of religion and symbology aside, I think this new fixture probably doesn’t help with that.  But the main question that came up in the casual discussions I’ve had with people about it is “how does such a thing go up without the community having any input on it?”  To answer that question I contacted Scott Zimmerman, who works as a City Planner with the City of Richmond.

Here’s what he had to say:

Under our Zoning Code, R-1 One-Family Residence District allows as Principal
Permitted Uses Institutional uses including churches. That would include all
church uses unless specifically prohibited or further regulated somewhere in
code. Under our sign code, things like flags and monuments are not
considered signs. If this were part of a church building (steeple) it would
be regulated. This is also why the Ford dealership has a similarly large
flag pole which has no review through our office.

The only permit required was an Improvement Location Permit (ILP) verifying
setbacks and zoning.

So, there you have it.  My understanding is that the zoning code is changing soon in a way that might require a little more oversight from the City before such large items are put up, but I don’t know the details of that.

What do you think about a symbol like this as an introduction to Richmond for travelers, visitors and residents?  Is it a good and appropriate use of $150,000?

The de-funding measure was proposed by Councilman J. Clayton Miller.  Every encounter I’ve had with Mr. Miller has been a positive one, and he seems to be a good person doing what he believes is right, which I appreciate.  I’m sure that his fellow supporters on Council who also voted in favor are also doing what they think is right.  But I question whether they have made this decision with full consideration for the needs of the whole community in mind.

Let’s not kid ourselves: these five men are privileged white males who enjoy a fair amount of power and influence in this community.  It’s unlikely that they have recent personal experiences of being discriminated against in Richmond based on their race, gender, or ethnicity.  I write this blog entry as a privileged white male in the community who is fortunate to have experienced minimal discrimination in my own efforts at employment, career-building and personal success.  Are the lot of us really in a position to confidently say that Richmond doesn’t need a locally-based organization focused on defending the rights of people who are NOT coming from a place of privilege, and who ARE being discriminated against?

Before making such a decision, I hope the council members at least took the time to:

• Meet with the staff and board of the Human Rights Commission to listen closely to their input and suggestions about how closing down the agency would affect the community
• Meet with the people who have been affected by the Commission’s work, especially citizens who have submitted claims or engaged in casework, and listen closely to how their case might have gone differently if the local Commission didn’t exist
• Say, as Mr. Miller said he would in his campaign for his Council seat, “let’s figure out how” we can make this agency work in a way that meets the needs of local citizens and balances budget constraints in the City government, and then really work with all parties involved to do so.
• If they can’t figure it out, work with state agencies to insure that in the absence of a local commission, the same level of services can and will be provided to the citizens of Richmond who are being discriminated against.

If these Council members voting in favor of cutting this agency’s funding didn’t each personally engage in at least those activities, then I think they’ve been irresponsible in their actions and failed the people they are supposed to represent.

To be sure, the Human Rights Commission has had a checkered past in this community.  A former director was known for defending against some kinds of discrimination while actively engaging in others, politics and grandstanding often go along with any headlines about its work, and there are real questions to answer about the role it plays in the context of state agencies and other organizations with similar missions.

It seems clear from the initial reaction to last night’s vote that these questions were far from answered, and that the Commission still plays a critical role in a community that does struggle with discrimination of all kinds.  The decision needs to be re-examined and better explained, and in the absence of a clear justification that goes beyond saving money to really look at the impact on all citizens (not just privileged white men in power), the decision should be reversed.