The Influence of a Third Party on Individual Citizens

The entry I just posted discussed an expansion upon one of the issues addressed in my most recent episode of Exist Kind.  Here, I'd like to in turn tell you a little more about the show itself.

My guests were Beryl Baker, Kent Solberg, and John Kromko.  As I said before, Beryl had seen some of my work under the Exist Kind umbrella and was impressed such that she asked for my help with her campaign for office.  She ran for City Council on the Green Party ticket last year.  She presented a lot of very common-sense ideas and promised that if she got very few votes, then that must mean that few citizens care about the issues that she cares about.  Well, she took an unprecedented 34% of the vote--that's over one third--so a lot of citizens proved that they did share her concerns.  She gave Beth and me a lot of credit for doing so well, so we promised to get together again in the future to get some more political ideas and messages out there.  I invited her, Kent, and John to a panel discussion on Saturday, the 10th in Studio A.

Kent Solberg also ran for political office at one time as a member of the Green Party.  In 2007, he ran for the Arizona House of Representatives and though he did not take office, he has continued to stay politically active.  John Kromko was a Democrat in the state legislature from 1976 to 1990, where he took an aggressive, progressive role in his representation of his constituents.  One of his major accomplishments was getting the state to adopt Medicaid in 1982, which doubtlessly has saved lives.

Together, we touched on a number of topics that related both to Tucson politics and longer-range concerns for Americans in general.  These topics included the following:

*appropriate allocations of RTA (Regional Transportation Authority) money

*the necessity of maintaining a city's core

*the importance of grassroots citizen involvement

*threats to citizen involvement and ways minimize them (thus keeping the power with the people)

*whether it is better to build a very limited downtown streetcar system or use the money for improving the existing bus system that serves the area as far out as the suburbs

*the question of whether or not the auto industry would support the streetcar (as it does currently) if industry leaders believed that it would actually make a significant difference

*Repeal the Main Gate Overlay (initiative of the West University Neighborhood against an incomplete process of finding agreement over an upcoming development)

We also rolled in the video of my interview with John Patterson of Repeal the Main Gate Overlay.  Below is a still from the show.  I was unable to embed the video itself here, so under the picture is the link to the YouTube clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAwVCVQtd_Q)