WHAT TYPE OF GOVERNMENT do we want or expect? That seems like a pretty simple question but, if you take more than a moment to think about it, it becomes readily apparent that it is much more complicated than originally thought.

On my commutes to work a couple of weeks ago, I witnessed two incidents that got me thinking about this. On April 1, the day after Easter, I was driving through a small city just north of Boston and got caught in a traffic jam. Traffic was barely moving – it took me almost 20 minutes to travel three blocks.  There must have been 10 tow trucks on the street as well as police cars with flashing blue lights. 

My first thought was an accident, but that wasn’t the case. The answer was that this particular city had resumed street sweeping after a long winter.  I understand the need for street cleaning.  Everyone wants to live in a clean, well-maintained municipality.  But towing cars at the height of the morning rush hour, creating unnecessary delays for hundreds of people on their morning commute, while subjecting residents to parking tickets and towing and storage fees, seems like a rather heavy-handed way to achieve the aesthetic goal of clean gutters.

The following day, I arrived at work and parked in one of the employee parking lots and noticed one of the municipality’s parking enforcement vehicles illegally parked on a private way, partially blocking the entrance to one of the parking lots.  As I walked toward my building, I noticed a parking enforcement officer measuring the distance between the rear bumper of a vehicle – parked on a public way – and a curb cut for yet another parking lot, before issuing a $50 parking ticket for parking too close to a driveway. 

I pointed out to the officer that she was issuing a parking ticket to someone for doing the exact same thing that she was doing – parking illegally. Her vehicle, in fact, was actually blocking a driveway.  She responded that she had to illegally park, but only for a moment, in order to issue a parking ticket.  It was a violation of necessity. 

These two incidents illustrate the power of local government. In the first case, it was a municipality using the coercive power of government to achieve a desired end: clean streets. But at what cost? The town is placing an undue financial burden on people that are presumably already having trouble making ends meet, just to comply with some arbitrary street cleaning schedule. In the second instance, it appears as though that municipality may be using visitors to their city as an additional revenue source.  In both cases, the towns are viewing residents and/or visitors as ATM machines with feet.

Voters need to begin to make the connection between the people they elect and the policies that those officials implement.  Many times, voters just scan down the list of candidates on a ballot and check the names that they recognize.  It is time to hold our local government officials accountable for implementing policies that may not be in our best interests.

Paul L. DeBole is an assistant professor of political science at Lasell College in Newton.