Last Christmas, I wrote an article about how community spirit is a necessary and present ingredient for Trenton’s revitalization.

“Community spirit as an economic engine”

Beautiful Trenton is the best example of that spirit to date but there are problems.

A small group of citizens have taken it upon themselves to assemble a larger group of Trentonians (around 150) to discuss Trenton. All of the organizers and most of the 150 are people who’ve been civically engaged before but many were new. I always wonder what the other 82,850 residents are doing.

The Beautiful Trenton meeting was interesting not so much for the content but in the assemblage of both veterans of Trenton’s civic life and newcomers. I hope the newcomers stick with it. I really hope those newcomers find their way to reinventtrenton.com.

However, as wonderful as it was to meet new people, the Beautiful Trenton movement is fatally flawed and I sincerely hope the organizers will address the issues.

The current process includes:

1. Inaugural Community Café to identify and examine emerging themes and questions for a vision of the future of Trenton

2. Written Responses from invited participants exploring the questions and ideas generated from the Café.

3. A day of reflection, using a model of reflective discourse, in which invited participants will move beyond their authored pieces and engage each other in conversation.

4. A Culminating Community Café, held after the day of reflection, in which both the general public and invited participants will seek to identify actions Trenton residents can take to guarantee effective and responsive leadership in Trenton.

5. The results of the culminating Community Café will be used to produce a Candidate Questionnaire for all mayoral and city council candidates.

If it sounds “New Age”, that’s because it is.

As I see it, there are several important problems with this process.

The expected output is unsatisfying.

• The output is a questionnaire, not too different from the countless questionnaires produced by various groups every election cycle
• There’s a lot of time and effort being spent to produce an output short on the depth necessary to show the way forward and teeth sharp enough to make insure plan is followed.
• There is no plan for building a lasting political force in Trenton
• We don’t need talk, we need rocket scientist level thinking and in your face political force to change Trenton

Beautiful Trenton is undemocratic

• Beautiful Trenton seeks to be part of the democratic process, however the group’s outputs will be interpreted at the whim of the organizers
• The organizers will then be free to represent their interpretation as the will of the participants. Notice that the written pieces are written by “invited” / hand selected people
• There is no democratic check and balance over the interpretation (i.e. no vote)
• There’s nothing stopping the organizers from using this exercise as a power building platform
• By the end of the process not a single vote will have been cast and no membership role will have been created

All is not lost however, the organizers just need to make some modifications to their process.

I suggest Beautiful Trenton become a “new” political party

• A new political party could build its platform using a process similar to Beautiful Trenton’s current plan
• Citizens would explicit identify themselves as members of the group
• Meetings would be held with citizen volunteers to develop different aspects of the platform

• Debates on platform planks would be held
• Beautiful Trenton Members would vote on the resulting platform
• They would also vote on the leadership of the group
• Members would vote to support candidates who adopted the platform
• The party would take an oversight role going forward (for instance budget and policy reviews)
• The group doesn’t ever have to run a candidate just organize people to keep the ones we have in line
  

Community spirit is only useful when it turns into tangible results rather than meaningless talk. Voting is the difference between serious political action and a mob rally.