I just sent the email below to lots of the candidates running for city council in my little burb. I’m hoping a few will reply.

Hi,

I’m your neighbor; I live at XXXXXXX. Anyhow, I’m emailing as many city council candidates as I can, looking for their thoughts on a few topics.

I would like to copy and paste anything you send me in my blog. I get very little traffic from locals; most of my posts deal with fairly obscure computer science issues.

So, here’s the topics:

1. Cleveland has red-light cameras. Should Cleveland Heights (CH) have red-light cameras?
2. Cleveland now allows people to keep chickens in their backyards. Should CH?
3. Should we ban or regulate gas leaf blowers?
4. If you couldn’t vote for yourself, what other candidate would you pick?

And here’s my opinions on those topics:

• I have nothing against red-light cameras in theory. But when I lived in DC, the city put them at intersections where lights were poorly timed and traffic flows were confusing. So it turned into a way for the city skim huge amounts of cash from drivers that believed they were following the law.

  I wouldn’t mind cameras as long as we clearly pointed them out way in advance of intersections. Also I believe we should be generous and give some number of warnings for each driver before the tickets count for anything.

• Yup. More generally, the city should do anything it can to encourage backyard and community vegetable gardens.
• On nice days when I work from home with all my windows open, everything is great until some landscaping crews show up. I don’t like banning things, but I would like to create incentives for landscaping firms to explore less noisy options.
• No opinions here. I just started doing research.

Thanks for your time, and good luck!

Matt