Knowing the rules is only a fraction of the battle.

Candidates also have to know how to use the processes to get things done, or not done. Some elected members do, some members of the community do. Many don’t.

Getting information out of the council is an art form. Some might argue it’s a dark art.

You’ll see some members posting saying they are still waiting on reports. That’s because they either don’t actually want to know or they just don’t know how to ask.

When you’re evaluating your candidates, ask them to list the top journalists and community advocates in the city.

Do they know how to facilitate a media question?

Do they know how to use a petition from the community to give staff a mandate to provide information that isn’t ordinarily in the public domain?

Do they know how to use a community advocate or a general resident to ask a question on their behalf to get an answer from the chief executive’s office?

Elected members exist to provide governance over the council not to be a constant source of fishing questions for political gain and staff understand this well so staff are offering looking for a mandate from the community before making a project to answer a detailed question with a detailed report.

A question from a journalist or a community advocate can be and often is a suitable mandate to cause staff to engage with answering questions.

When you’re evaluating your candidate you should also be asking yourself if that candidate has burnt some bridges internally within council. Some Council staff have tired from providing the same answers to the same elected members repeatedly and now don’t take some of their questions particularly seriously. In these sorts of situations it’s time to start looking at weather you need a new community representative.

Does your candidate know how to use the Council website effectively to find information that is already in the public domain?

Does your representative pledge to get you an answer to a question or provide you with the knowledge on how you can get those answers for yourself.

Representatives don’t exist for the pleasure of the community to answer questions.

As a member of the community you are entitled to ask the council questions.

You are then entitled to present your question and the subsequent answer to your elected member and ask them to say something on your behalf at the table or make a vote in a particular direction on an issue at the table.

The job of the elected member is to moderate your request and consider if that request reflects the tenure of the community that have elected them.

For example you may hold the view that the town hall should be painted blue to reflect the color of the city while the elected member needs to consider that painting the town hall blue may cost a large amount of money and they have consideredably more constituents that both voted for them and didn’t vote for them that want to see cost savings rather than a paint scheme that you regard as nice to have.

If you ask the Council staff whether current council policy aligns with the argument to paint the town hall blue they may come back and tell you that it in fact does and to that in fact aligning with both government and council policy the best decision that the community could make is to paint the town hall blue however your elected member is still elected as a representative of your community to moderate that question and consider all of the other constraints for example it may be that the elected member is aware that there are simply not enough blue paint available in the city to do the job at the present time without impacting the delivery of something else in the city for example a thousand new homes that also need to be painted blue.

When vetting your potential candidate one of the things that you need to do as a member of the community is to satisfy yourself that the candidate actually understands their roles and responsibilities, the rules and how all of those things fit together to affectively govern the city.

For example a candidate who is telling you that they stand for not installing more speed humps or reducing rates but has no idea how to actually go about that process is not a candidate that you should back because you will end up with an elected member who has an idea that you stand behind but doesn’t know how to get it executed.