Why I am Running
By candidate for Mayor, Kevin McCrea

I come to this candidacy not as a politician, not as an academic, not even as a business owner (which I am). I’m running as a citizen, an ordinary member of the community, and representing what I’ve heard community people talk about all over the city. I’m running, first and foremost, to restore honest, open government, and to show what can be accomplished for our community if we made truly fair and efficient use of our public powers and resources. And I’m running now, and for the highest office in the city, because we are facing a particularly dangerous time for the economy and for the environment, and informed and courageous leadership will make the difference in how we deal with these challenges. We can’t get by on “business as usual.”

We all know, really, that the city’s government is not working as it should. I’ve been struck, when I tell people I’m running for office, how many just turn away, saying, “All politicians are crooks.” The periodic articles revealing shameless abuses of the public trust and negligent incompetence just confirm what many of us have experienced: it’s not working well. It’s not working well, unless you happen to be one the connected.

And – this is very important — it’s not because of a shortage of money. We have lots of money; for example we have the largest school district in the State and we are in the top 10 percent in terms of dollars spent per student. Our taxes and expenditures have increased at twice the cost of living under Menino. The Mayor and City Council simply burn up the excess through “soft” graft and corruption – what I refer to as “waste, fraud and abuse.”

I’ve been demanding information from City Hall, breaking open back-door meetings, and talking to people inside and outside government for years, and I’ve learned about the specific ways that our laws and our money are being taken away from us by the very people we elect to protect us. I’ve been an activist for a while, blogging, speaking up at community meetings, even successfully suing the City Council for violating the Open Meeting Law through a series of secret closed-door meetings. I’m going to bring information to people so they can elect better officials, demand more of them, and hold them accountable.

But in the end, even if we know all the facts, how can those officials be held accountable if there are just no alternatives to replace them? We can’t vote for “none of the above.” We need candidates who will force a public conversation, bring out information, and give people choices. Entrenched incumbents do their best to prevent this threat to their seats, and shamelessly manipulate the electoral process to avoid accountability at the voting booth. We have to reform a fundamentally broken process, and this is just not going to be done by people who have been part of it and whose career path depends on it. We have to make politics a hopeful public activity again, and public office an honorable profession. Really, if we want to improve things, we have no choice: democracy is messy, but, to paraphrase Churchill, it sure beats the alternatives.

So my purpose is to provide that alternative for a discouraged and, in fact, essentially disenfranchised electorate. Like most people, “I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it any more.” And we don’t have to. I have specific ideas to make it better, as outlined in my literature and my website www.KevinMccrea.com.