Tag Archives: meetings

Mayor Kaufusi Is Listening, So Please Speak Up!

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Provo’s mayor Michelle Kaufusi plans to embark upon a “listening tour” around Provo this autumn. As part of this tour, she will welcome input from residents during meetings at the following times in the following places:

While she’s listening more intently than usual, this may be a prime time for us liberty-lovin’ Provoans to speak up about various things that are concerning us, such as our growing array of city-run businesses, increased central economic planning, multiplying municipal ordinances (and city employees) along with increased business regulation, subsidies for startups, overpriced underused public transit, and an official vision for our city’s future that includes a variety of statist goals.  These are items that our blog has highlighted since this year began, while many additional concerns are outlined on our website.  We shouldn’t be upholding such statist policies in our city, or even acquiescing to them, but actively seeking to thwart them—not through threats or condemnation but through effectively persuading others (whether our neighbors or our elected politicians) to change their hearts/minds for the better.

Perhaps our passionate reason will never persuade Mayor Kaufusi (or our city council) to implement any major course-changes, but we should at least try.  And also try to help our neighbors to vote more wisely in 2019.  In fact, if you’re not already knocking on your neighbors’ doors regularly to try to build passionate well-informed support among them for better local government, then there’s no time like the present to formulate such plans, especially while the weather remains favorable.

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Neighborhood Meetings and Caucus Meetings

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Provo recently reminded residents through its YouTube channel about its “neighborhood chair” program.  This program involves residents in each of Provo’s 34 neighborhoods regularly electing one of themselves to serve as a “chair,” who will then host periodic neighborhood meetings in which residents may discuss their various concerns and/or suggestions, while providing a regular line of communication about such issues between neighborhood residents and city councilors.

We urge you to participate in this program, along with your like-minded neighbors, to help champion the principles of a virtuous free society over the practices of centralized political command-and-control, as exemplified by Vision 2030 and/or Vision 2050 (see our previous blog entry).

In doing so, please remember that it’s better to save than to condemn, and to toss figurative life-preservers than to cast figurative stones—and that the best way to defeat our enemies is by humbly striving together with them to unite around objective truth-and-righteousness, thereby helping them to become our friends over time.  Our statist adversaries often have good intentions, but foolishly pursue those goals through bad methods—and, so, we need to help them to redirect their efforts from the wrong means to the right ones, instead.  Tools like persuasion, contract, volunteerism, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, economic activism, et cetera, are always better ways to accomplish anything than unilateral coercion, which is generally acceptable only as a last resort in defense against aggression.

Alongside trying to proselytize our neighbors to embrace freedom, these neighborhood meetings may also be good opportunities to actively seek out virtuous wise neighbors to encourage to run for city office.

Speaking of elections, we’d like to mention another very important political meeting to attend, although it’s not directly related to Provo…

Utah’s two major parties will hold their biennial precinct caucuses next Tuesday to elect both county and state delegates for the next two years.  This year, those delegates will scrutinize candidates for public office and then convene to narrow down their options to one candidate for each office as their party’s official nominee—or two candidates (in some cases) who will then face each other in a primary election so that voters may make the final decision.  Next year, those same delegates will follow a similar process to choose candidates for party offices.

Party officers, by the way, generally belong in one of two categories—one sort believes that the grassroots should govern the party through sound parliamentary procedures facilitated by respectful officers, while the other sort believes that the elites should rule the party, and should violate party rules as much as they can get away with in order to finagle the grassroots into doing whatever the elites want.  This dichotomy generally parallels the timeless universal spectrum between those who favor “bottom-upward” political systems that help citizens to defend their rights against others’ aggression, and those who favor “top-downward” political systems that reign over society.

This endless political struggle is currently manifesting itself in a raging conflict over Utah’s longstanding caucus system, as many liberty-lovin’ Utahns (represented by Keep My Voice) want to continue it, while certain statist politicians (represented by Count My Vote) want to destroy it in favor of primary elections alone, and are allegedly resorting to lies, harassment, threats, and bribes to accomplish this goal.  Primary elections alone were used from 1937 to 1947, and were shown to reduce voter participation; they also render votes more affected by both biased journalists and wealthy donors, and allow the “spoiler effect” in which candidates may win with only minority support, as we recently saw when “liberal” John Curtis defeated two “conservative” Republicans in a primary election to become the Republican nominee with only minority support.  These sorts of problems encouraged Utahns to adopt a hybrid caucus-convention-primary system in 1947 that has persisted until recently with only minor adjustments.

So, please encourage your like-minded Republican neighbors to participate in their respective caucus meetings to help preserve Utah’s caucus system, while upholding wise virtuous rights-defenders to both public and party office.  And please feel free to report any victories to us that we might want to share with others.

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Awakening Our Neighbors

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So, what’s next?

As of today, thirty days have passed since this year’s set of candidates for city office were finalized, and forty days remain until this year’s primary elections.  Which gives us all a bit more than five weeks to awaken our neighbors to what’s happening in our city, and to rally them to go vote.

Only about 7-12% of Provoans usually participate in these municipal elections in recent years,  which means that only a few people (with a lot of friends in tow) can potentially make a BIG difference.

We hope that you’ll use our website to get informed, and also to help your educable neighbors to do likewise.  We’ll also feature a series of posts on our Facebook page starting tomorrow that will hopefully help, as well.  We always welcome any suggestions about how we can do better.  Donations are always welcome also.

It’s been suggested that we should hold regular meetings, perhaps to learn from one another, discuss plans, and/or get better acquainted.  If enough people want to do this, then we suggest meeting monthly at Denny’s on Freedom Boulevard near University Parkway.  If you’d be interested in attending such meetings, then please inform us via e-mail at freeprovo@gmail.com.

Thank you.

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