So we had a meeting with the county executive and not so surprisingly he shot down our proposal for a housing trust fund. However, the surprising part was how quick our task force members went into "A-student" mode:
Task Force Member: "Well, what can we do to improve our proposal?"
County Executive: "You need to find better funding sources."
TFM: "OK, we will find more funding sources and then schedule a follow up meeting with you."
Although this conversation might seem OK, when you consider that the task force has been working on this issue for over two years and had several meetings with both the county executive as well as other county supervisors, this reaction is inexcusable. Unfortunately, too many people were brought up in a school system that says, "if you work hard enough on your homework then you will get the results you want from your teacher" which is not necessarily true (and at times can be debilitating) in the real world. In this case, we could bring a perfect proposal to him and he still would reject it because of his politics. So, we have to seek to change something outside of the classic "teacher-student" dynamic in order to change his behavior. But our task force seems a little cool to the idea of mounting an aggressive and serious grassroots campaign to place external pressure on our elected officials.
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