There’s More Than One Way to Crack an Egg by Keith Watts

Two Spy pieces this week had me thinking about chickens, eggs, and how quickly we shrink complicated questions onto a bumper sticker. And you thought I’d ask which came first.

Jim Bruce’s recent letter frames the County Council race as development versus preservation. Meanwhile, yonder in Oxford, the Planning Commission discovered that whether someone may keep a flock of chickens involves zoning, enforcement, waste, predators, and a possible fox buffet.

If a few hens take that much deliberation, surely a county deserves a little more.

Talbot’s mission statement and Comprehensive Plan don’t pick sides. They call for preserving our rural and agricultural character, promoting economic development, and protecting the environment. All three. At once.

That’s not a bumper sticker. It’s a Rubik’s Cube with a zoning overlay.

Johnny and Jane One-Issue have every right to exist. But most of us have more than just one concern: good schools, reasonable taxes, functioning roads, a healthy Chesapeake, farms that remain farms, housing working people can afford, and a county our grandchildren may yet recognize. Those wants, however, often collide like bumper cars at the Easton Carnival.

Confession: I’m tempted to tick off boxes, too. Pro-this. Anti-that. So neat. Tidy even. Yet wrong more than I’d like to admit. Even the serpent kept it simple with his offer of an apple.

Here’s what I know about how a candidate will vote on a question nobody has yet asked: “Nada.” Neither do they.

Not until they’ve read the staff report, heard the testimony and sat through—and sat through, and sat through—the meetings. That’s governing. It’s also what watching paint dry sounds like.

Messrs. Callahan and Lesher have spent years doing exactly that. Mmes. Mielke and Price Everingham have given themselves over to public service, too.

I can’t speak for their paint-drying abilities. Heck, I wouldn’t even speak for myself but for Melon Usk’s Super-duper PAC underwriting this humiliation of the alphabet.

We can disagree with a vote without turning the person who cast it into either a superhero or a Bond villain. If someone pleased everyone all the time, The Spy would have nothing to dish about.

And then there’s winning, present and past. A big vote total tells us a lot of people wanted you there. It doesn’t tell us why, what they expected, or whether they’d make the same mistake, er, choice again.

Elections are snapshots in time, not lifetime achievement awards. They don’t come with a four-year warranty.

November’s ballot isn’t a four-year permission slip. We aren’t hiring for a day, a season or until the next news cycle. We’re hiring for four years.

You’d never hire a plumber, a contractor or a cousin’s friend’s nephew’s bushhogger without checking references. Yet we’ll hand over the County Code on the strength of a slogan and an out of context factoid on a mailer, the four-color kind that rides shotgun with our tax and sewer bills, bound for the landfill.

Normally, an employee evaluation or review comes at the end of a job period, when the damage—or the glory—is already done.

Do it now.

Yeah, it’s backwards. So is most of my career. But the evaluation that matters most happens before the hire, while we still have leverage—and they still return calls.

Some present, past and soon-to-be-past Council members surely ruffled some feathers and even broke an egg or two along the way. Maybe a dozen. But broken eggs aren’t an omelet. The question is whether the egg breaker had a recipe.

So what should voters ask? Not “Are you for growth or against it?” Not “Republican or Democrat?” Ask: What should Talbot County look like in five, ten, and twenty years—and how will you get us there?

Then ask the harder one: Why? Why do you want this job?

Surely there are far easier ways to go unthanked. You could raise a teenager. Right? Or two.

Instead, you’ll shake hands, kiss colicky babies and eat endless servings of overdone, under-sauced, latex chicken legs, thighs and breasts.

Because . . . ? Yours truly in the cheap seats would genuinely like to know. He’d also like to know that you’re human, with all your maddening, glorious idiosyncrasies. Like being against something before you were for it. And vice versa.

Meanwhile, Talbot isn’t going to stop changing while we irrationally yet exuberantly discuss labels. Read the comments sections lately? The only sure thing, besides death and taxes, is change—and folks complaining about it. They can’t help themselves. Take me, for example.

There will always be another meeting. Another zoning question. And, somewhere in Oxford, undoubtedly another chicken.

The candidates will be at the forum at The Avalon on October 6. Go. Listen. Ask a question. Pay attention.

You’re hiring them for four years. You can’t gripe about who got hired if you skip the interview. Best mind the henhouse now, before any bushy tail applies for the job.

Democracy is fragile, and it runs on process. Sometimes that’s consequential. Sometimes it’s spectacularly boring. Usually, it’s both.

But somebody has to sit through it. Might as well be us.