Amber's Essay

West Liberty is participating in a project known as the New Cities Institute initiative. At the end of this process, leading citizens of the community will come together and decide on a course of action… a plan… on how to make the community a “New City.” The plans might include economic development proposals, recreation ideas, etc. Using the political linkages of the policy pyramid, analyze how this process might work.
I think New Cities Initiative is a very good way to get things done. We will have to take action in many ways such as using public opinions, (getting our voices heard within the community), media, other interest groups, political parties, and elections.
Most importantly we need to find out what the people in our community really want and think that we need to improve our city. Ways we could do this is to do polls, surveys (possibly phone calls) and interviews. We need to let the people know that we care about their opinion and that when participating in giving their opinion that it helps get things done much easier.
Next we could involve the media. We could use the internet in such ways like blogs & Facebook, like we are doing now. We could post flyers all around West Liberty telling them all about the New City’s Initiative and what we’re about. Then to further extend out to the public we could use radio stations like 102.9, or put ads in the local newspapers, and possibly work our way onto the news stations like WKYT27 or WLEX18.
We need to invite churches, Woman’s Club, Rotary’s Club, Kiwania’s Club, and other interest groups such as ourselves. These groups can start a petition to get peoples opinion on what they think we need to do to West Liberty. Also we could get these groups to help participate in fundraisers/donations to help make the city better, and let them know that their money will go to what they want done.
Using the policy pyramid we can use the political parties to our advantage, by getting them to involve higher parties which will get things done quicker and probably much easier. We could find out what each political parties opinion is on certain things and then pick which one we agree with and then get them to get people in higher places to get what we need done.
The last thing we could do is elections. We would need to go to the people running in the elections and find out what they stand for and want done. Then we could reassure them that if they get the things done that they said, and then we would gladly vote for them. Also people would see that they are working with the ‘New City’s Initiative’ to make West Liberty a better community.