You may have read this month's story about the Mayor/City Council goals for 2002.

At the beginning of the planning session, Pat Callahan, a predecessor of mine, suggested to each of our elected people that they should consider two questions concerning their time in elected office. The questions were: "What will your legacy be?" And, "How do you want to be remembered?"

These are important questions.

My time as a city administrator and as an elected person before that covers over 19 years. In that time, I've seen different people run for office or apply for board appointments for several different reasons:

A.) To serve the public, either with or without a specific goal in mind.

B.) To try to improve something or make something better.

C.) To be a part of the action or to become an "insider."

D.) Because someone else asked them to.

E.) For a reason related to the candidate's ego.

F.) To keep a perceived bad candidate from winning.

G.) To stop something such as an existing or proposed program.

H.) To get even with someone.

I.) To gain by it on a personal and/or financial level.

Some of these are positive reasons, but just as many are not. This makes Pat's questions about a person's legacy even more pointed.

Will an official be seen as making a contribution to the betterment of his or her constituents, or will they be seen as making things worse?

As for myself, when I was elected to my first office, I ran because I wanted to serve the public, but there was an ego issue as well. I wanted to see if a teenager could be elected to our school board. I also had a goal in mind. Having recently graduated from high school, I wanted to try to give more significance to our high school's Student Council. I never liked the school's method of electing people to student government when I was a student. Back then, student elections were done in a single half-hour class assembly. Added to that, service in school government didn't do much to develop leadership skills in people.

Along with offering extracurricular sports, I thought that our school should also put more time and effort into developing extracurricular activities like the student government and the student newspaper to develop future public leaders.

Later, when I joined my hometown's City Council in 1989, I did it because I was asked to fill in for the last few months of an unexpired term. I ran in the next election because I wanted to see if we could execute a project that many felt we couldn't do. Namely, we were trying to become the first town in Iowa in nearly 20 years to form a municipal natural gas utility.

As far as the idea of a legacy goes, I know that Fairbank, IA has a municipal natural gas utility--though, I doubt that anyone will remember that I was involved with the project. I also believe in my heart that, once the town clears its debt service for building this utility, the gas utility, along with Fairbank's municipal electric utility, will make it a richer town.

As for my time as a school board member from 1978-1984, I never heard much in terms of a legacy for many years. Then, on New Year's Eve of 1999, my wife and I were seated at a table at a millenium party in Cedar Rapids with a person who worked at the Wapsie Valley High School. While she was telling me about the school, she mentioned that the student council there is elected by way of filing "petitions of candidacy" then being allowed to campaign for two weeks before their election.

I turned to my wife and said, "I can't believe. That was an idea that I proposed 20 years ago." I had always assumed that the program had been discontinued after I left office.

In retrospect, I was not as effective a school board member as I was a city council member. As a young school board member, I was perceived as an outsider, and I did and said some things that further made me an outsider. As a council member, I did much better because I tried harder to understand how city government worked and what was important to my fellow council members. I was also a better communicator and tried not to appear as if I was operating on an ego-driven agenda.

Public office is "give and take." It is also a place where there is no such thing as a "last laugh." I have often found that the person who is reveling in the fact that he has just trounced an opponent on an issue today is the same person who ends up wishing that he had that same person's support on another issue a few months later.

No matter the reason why someone joins a public governmental body, he or she should consider how their actions will be seen by their fellow members, by their constituents, and in local history.