Politics as sport:
How to know the score

With the Chiefs’ record standing at 2-3 (too many tailors, not enough swifts?), many die-not-so-hards may be looking for other sources of vicarious entertainment.

Some like mixed martial arts. Others prefer bull riding. Some like Three Stooges reruns. Still others favor soap operas.

Only a few of us manage to put all those and more together in a rather unique form of entertainment — listening in on various government meetings.

For quite some time, we’ve regarded Marion City Council as one of the cellar-dwellers in the league of ordinary teams, but to my surprise it showed some promise Monday night — not unlike a rookie getting a chance and unexpectedly outperforming a veteran in a pro football game.

When staff seemed insistent on buying yet another piece of equipment that seemed overly likely to join the city’s menagerie of broken and unused toys, council member Zach Collett surprised nearly everyone by not toeing the party line and speaking up to question the purchase.

The council had seemed poised to approve buying the power rake before he spoke, but afterward others joined in his concerns. Kevin Burkholder wanted the city to find out just how often others who bought the equipment had to repair it and how costly it might be. Even Mike Powers wanted to know with some specificity how often the city planned to use the item, since staff were saying they didn’t have enough people to regularly assign to it.

Later, when staff wanted to replace antiquated computers that already are newer than the one I am writing this on and most readers checking our online site are using to access it, Tim Baxa pointed out that he had quickly and easily found better prices on the computers than the no-bid proposal staffers had presented.

Best yet, at one point Powers suggested a need to actually evaluate the performance of city employees, as the city used to do but abandoned for reasons unknown, and to offer raises based on merit rather than handing them out like across-the-board entitlements.

They even acted like they were willing to pay money to restore the historic, nearly century old Central Park merry-go-round workers took down a few weeks ago.

Against a backdrop of past council discussions in which all questions were considered offensive and disrespectful and all staff reporters were taken as gospel, council members suddenly began doing their homework and asking questions that needed to be asked.

To be sure, they could have asked more — like why the computers proposed were configured as they were. Most savvy teenagers could tell you they seemed overpowered in easy-to-talk-about areas that don’t matter and underpowered in harder-to-talk-about areas that do. They also could at least have questioned an expense of more than $4,000 for “spacing” multicolored Christmas lights, whatever that means.

But it was a sign of hope, just like Jameson Looper rushing for a whopping 211 yards in Friday’s Marion High School homecoming game despite the Warriors losing 52-30.

I wish we could say the same for the other meeting and a few other nerds attending for vicarious entertainment Monday.

The meeting of county commissioners would have been entertaining only to someone who thought the Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950s were fun. Clarke Dirks, an otherwise good commissioner, attacked representatives of the county’s southern wind farm with a ferocity normally thought to exist only in abused pit bulls.

To their credit, representatives of wind farm owner Orsted remained polite and positive as they endured a gantlet of overly pointed questions, though I suspect their tongues were mighty sore from the number of times they had to bite them.

Commissioners also talked about wanting to spend $45,000 for a semi-trailer tractor even though they don’t have a trailer for it to pull and aren’t 100% sure they have a driver who can safely be taken away from other duties without repercussions.

The discussion focused mainly on how they could spend every last cent in key accounts, even having to resort to borrowing by using a lease-purchase on other items.

Then there was the question of a proposed building at Peabody and how commissioners could ignore costly plans they already have paid for and construct only a shell of the planned structure and not develop it into a third full-time ambulance station, which originally was one of the prime motivators for proposing the building.

They weren’t exactly the fumble-turned-touchdown or the pick-six interception that doomed the Chiefs, but they came close.

Some might say that watching meetings like this or the one the next night in which Hillsboro gave a huge raise in benefits to police officers are a waste of time — entertaining only to a handful of bizarre people like those who work at newspapers.

But there’s a reason. We shouldn’t be just idle observers. We’re voters, too. And we have to stop blaming government for what it does unless we first blame ourselves for blindly electing the people who are in government. The best way to find out whether our leaders are doing what we want is to watch them — attend meetings and speak up at them, or at least read about them and keep them in mind every couple of years when you cast ballots.

The Chiefs undoubtedly will recover and do all right this season. It’s not so clear whether our democracy will unless citizens become more involved.

— Eric Meyer