Why would anyone oppose letting Arlington voters alter City Council term limits?

Consistent with annual practice, lots of new year resolutions have been shared recently. I would, instead, offer some misgivings of things I don’t understand about what likely lies ahead in the coming months.

Beginning at the local level, the Arlington City Council is going to take up recommendations from the citizens committee it appointed to advise on possible modifications to the extreme term limits system that was set up in 2018. Although it passed, tens of thousands of voters opposed the change to the city’s charter.

There should be an opportunity in the upcoming May elections to remove the lifetime ban on council members who have reached the end of their terms. Voters should be able to reconsider them after they’ve been out of office for some period of time.

Another revision recommended by the committee would extend the length of initial council and mayoral terms by two additional years.

There are those among both the citizens committee and the City Council who oppose putting such an option on the May ballot.

What I don’t understand is why anyone would deny voters the opportunity to consider such modifications.

At the state level, as members of the Legislature gather in Austin starting Tuesday, they will have before them proposals that would shift power to the state and away from local citizens to decide what’s best for their communities.

I have previously argued that robust local economies lead to highly desirable results for all citizens through job creation and corporate investment that shifts property tax burdens from residents to the commercial sector.

What I don’t understand is why any of the representatives we have elected to serve our best interests would support any measure that would deny or reduce the authority of city, school and county officials to act on our behalf.

The best government is the one closest to the people. That’s so the people can govern their lives – something more difficult to do the further away we are from the seats of political power.

Which brings me to the national level. With the transfer of control in Washington into the hands of a liberal administration declaring a plethora of initiatives that unmistakably will lead us deeper into socialism, it’s hard to know where to start.

Let’s consider just one area that is a centerpiece of how the Biden-Harris team intends to govern: – its declared plan to implement as much of the Green New Deal as possible.

We can look for a return to the Obama era, when that administration tried, unsuccessfully, to take over the country’s energy sector at the expense of the national economy.

Expect a repeat of the kind of regulatory initiatives that resulted in an avalanche of lawsuits from half the country’s states to stop the Environment Protection Agency from curtailing the use of resources that power our daily lives and the country’s industry.

The first warnings of how global warming was going to result in the melting of the polar ice caps and turn the Mississippi valley into an inland sea came from a Frank Capra documentary in 1958.

That, of course, didn’t happen, and neither did subsequent dire threats emanating from the past three decades.

So, I don’t understand why targets to eliminate fossil fuel usage that will, according to the U. S. Department of Energy, never be met, are going to be set by the new administration. The result will be more disruption to an otherwise orderly transition to alternative energy sources.

There’s more I don’t understand about further government takeover and loss of individual freedoms, but that’s fodder for future commentary as this perilous new year unfolds.