The Freeholders, the Parks Commission, and Politics

I like to get up early on weekends, before anyone else is up and about. It’s time for a shower and shave, brewed coffee, a light breakfast, and a table set for my wife. It’s also a time when the rest of the town is mostly still getting its Z’s – a good occasion to do some quiet reading and thinking.

In so doing, I came across an essay in the August/September issue of FIRST THINGS, entitled, How to Understand Politics. I suppose we could all use some of that knowledge; certainly, I could. The article was authored by Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard – but I won’t hold that against him, since his thoughts seem to be particularly cogent, and he seems to express a genuine degree of humility in articulating them.

Mansfield claims that, “Politics … is a series of victories and defeats in which every victory for one side is a defeat for the other … many of them ephemeral, but some of them decisive. He goes on to say, the struggle, “… rarely ends in final victory. The left will never finally defeat the right, nor vice versa.”

The contest now taking place in public meetings, as well as in the back rooms of Somerset County political power brokers about what to do with the Parks Commission, fits that description. It is also prophetic. Institutions don’t go down easily, and that applies to the Parks Commission and its supporters.

By transferring purchasing, procurement, finance, and engineering responsibilities to the county itself, you might think that there is not enough left for the Parks Commission to remain intact, and that the Commission should be dissolved.

But you would be wrong, because the factors which go into the final decision won’t be the normal ones which you might expect. To completely eliminate the Parks Commission would, as Mansfield outlines above, involve a decisive defeat for the political forces in the community who don’t want to see that happen. They may or may not have good reasons for their choice – we don’t know, because, so far, the debate is not being conducted in the public square, and we are not participants.

What we should recognize is the probability that, when the dust settles, there will be a compromise which will leave the Parks Commission still intact, but outwardly crippled.

That’s not a good role for any public body. And, if this is the direction which the freeholders decide to pursue, then it is their responsibility to define exactly what they expect of this down-sized Parks Commission; because, remember, under the law it will still be a completely autonomous body acting in that capacity, and not in an advisory mode. So, then, will there be enough real work for 9 appointed commissioners to do?