Earlier this week, the Mayor and I met with four journalists and two translators from the Ukraine who were in Springfield studying democracy in general and our municipal government in particular.  The over-arching conclusion that I came away from this meeting with was that we her in Springfield and the US truly take our systems of government for granted. 

The four journalists from the Crimean Sea insisted on taking our photos with each one of them so they could prove that they actually were in the same room with us.  In their country, the Mayor travels in an entourage of four large black vehicles with four large bodyguards—even though, as the journalists related, there is no threat to the Mayor.  In addition, the general populace cannot enter the municipal building nor talk directly with members of the City Council.  They can send letters, but they have no idea if the letters are read or acted on.

In addition, our system of government is far more transparent.  In the Ukraine, only recently has a law been passed to require government entities to provide minutes of official meetings to journalists.  Contrast that to our Freedom of Information Act on the national level and the Sunshine Law on the state and local levels.  Furthermore, the amount of information on our municipal website is phenomenal, especially in comparison to our visitors’ home city.

The journalists also mentioned that, in their hometown, the Mayor owned the company that counted the ballots for City Council elections and, as a result, members of the City Council who were friends or relatives of the Mayor kept getting re-elected.  The Mayor and I took great pains to explain that both Greene County’s County Clerk and Springfield’s City Clerk zealously guarded their reputations for being independent and unbiased elections officers. 

One point that I made was that, even though the Mayor and I had different political philosophies, we could put those aside to work on the major issues for the City of Springfield.  Of course, there was a light-hearted moment when I held my hands about a foot apart in describing the difference in philosophies and the Mayor was holding his hands about three feet apart!  But our visitors got the point—if people of differing viewpoints had faith in our system of government—they could work together for the betterment of the community.

Finally, Mayor O’Neal stressed that the United States had been working on developing a democratic society for over 225 years, while those folks in the Ukraine were in the very beginning stages.  We stressed that we still didn’t have a perfect system, but that we continued to work on it.  The journalists were coming from a country with a long history of totalitarianism and that it would take a long time for them to convert completely to a democracy.  But the fact that they were allowed to come here and to report on what they found is a very encouraging step.  We wish them continued luck. 

And the Mayor and I left the meeting with a renewed pride in our system of government and in how Springfield handles the issues it’s faced with.