If your candidacy is successful, and you take office, you are probably looking forward to tackling the issues you have campaigned on. So winning a city council campaign is just the beginning.
Logical enough.
But the future being what it is, you might find yourself dealing with issues that pop up fresh and out-of-nowhere, changing the contours of the political landscape and requiring still more nimbleness on your part.
And you thought that was over now that the city council campaign was finished!
In one Southern California beach town, office holders found themselves on the horns of one such dilemma. Public drinking and organized raucousness clashed front-and-center with good old-fashioned family values.
This story will have a moral – about cool heads prevailing in heated times – but first, by way of background:
The Fourth of July has long been a party hearty holiday in the beach town in question. Young people filled the seaside entertainment district, and empty red plastic cups lined the sidewalks. Police labored to keep the peace and corral the worst excesses, and despite numerous arrests for minor offenses, an overall chaotic but happy equilibrium prevailed.
Then one year the spotlight of publicity fell onto a semi-underground event, held annually on the Fourth of July, in which hundreds of young men and women (maybe a thousand?) paddle a mile back-and-forth in the ocean and then sprint up the beach, where they gather to chug what is usually a semi-warm six-pack of beer. The winner of the event is the first to chug a six-pack and hold it down. The gross part of the event is that very few participants hold it down.
The event was widely known. There were “official” T-shirts, and the results of the competition were printed in local newspapers. But the papers treated it like a paddling and running event, and winked at the drinking element, while dancing around the beer-barfing melee at the end, which was the actual (unspoken) centerpiece of the whole affair.
Then one year, one of the reporters covered the event, from the heart of its ralphing epicenter.
A splashy story appeared, complete with a large photo of one contestant unleashing a foamy geyser onto the bare back of another, who was bending over to grab a fresh beer can off the ground. The caption read, “I got your back.”
The cat was out of the bag.
The publicity touched off a culture clash between old-school residents with their cherished traditions of iconoclastic scruffiness, and mostly newer residents whose family values did not include an open-air vomitorium. Is this what their town should be known for?
Pressure built upon the city council to – you know – do something!
There were calls for the council to assemble a massive police presence and break up the event. But that would have been a problematic approach during a citywide party that would dwarf even a multi-agency police response.
There also were calls for the city to establish and enforce rules for the event. But the city attorney pointed out that if the city sanctioned the event, the city would make itself liable for damages from it.
In the end, the passions of the moment were calmed by the cool heads of reason. The councilmembers refrained from any rash action. They took the matter seriously. They listened to their constituents, their city attorney and their police chief before acting.
In the end, they had a meeting of minds with the beery event’s unofficial organizers, who agreed to locate the barf-chugging climax in a remote section of the beach, where offended parties could not stumble upon it.
The police continued to rein in the most excessive holiday antics, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Just by winning a city council campaign, you might not have this exact scenario rise on your radar screen – but you will have something. The thing to remember is that rash action rarely if ever solves problems, and sometimes a light touch and letting things find equilibrium on their own is the best response.