The kick off to Steve Serasis’ mayoral campaign is this Saturday. A fund raising concert will be held Saturday from 5 PM to 7 PM at Union Park, entitled “State of the Union Concert.” Serasis gets props for breaking out of the mold of the hum drum campaign cycle that snares the political office aspirants. But if you’re going to make a play on the state of Norwalk’s government it would be handy to be prepared for the inevitable question of what is the state of Norwalk?

It’s hard to pick out what Serasis actually stands for from his words on the council floor or in quotes from news tories. Take this graf from The Hour:

“I plan to be a hands-on manager of the city,” Serasis said. “Managing the city correctly is an issue. Having a transparent government where people are included is a big issue.”

One of the things that any candidate for council or mayor should know is that the Norwalk charter is pretty specific when it comes to who is “managing” the city. It is the Common Council through its committees. You see, the Common Council alone controls the finances of each and every department. The Mayor certainly has some powers, such as actually beings in City Hall full time. Any Mayor can certainly set priorities in terms of what projects each city department should be doing day to day, but the ultimately power of funding those priorities rests with the Common Council. Which makes it difficult to point a political finger at the “management” of the city when it turns out that you’re part of the problem.

It would be nice if Serasis could get past the “transparency” sound bite. The problem in Norwalk is not that there’s a lack of transparency in government, it’s that there’s a lack of good old fashion customer service coming out of City Hall. Modernizing communications should be a top priority for all candidates, but just who actually supports that is hard to figure out. Take the televising of the Common Council meetings. If it weren’t for Council member Herb Grant, Cablevision would never carry the meetings on channel 79. But why is the effort stopping there. Neither the Mayor nor the Council have put forth any infrastructure money towards moving the recording of all committee and board meetings to web friendly standards. There are no cameras in public meetings, no mp3 recorders, no RSS feeds of agendas, minutes, or meeting schedules. Instead the City of Norwalk meets its legal obligations by publishing legal notices in newspapers and not a single elected official has attempted to change that.

Nor has any elected official, except for Phylis Bolden, requested that council packets be placed online for all the public to access. Bolden made those requests as part of her role as chairwoman of the Council’s planning committee. Anything submitted as part of an application or proposal to any board or committee should be available online. In fact, every Common Council member should have a City of Norwalk email address, so that all the communication between them and constituents can be managed. The Common Council members could solve their own time issues by funding staff that could work for them, analyzing policy, crafting legislation and otherwise putting into place the infrastructure that a legislative body needs. Instead too often they accept the structural deficiencies of the part time job that was created in 1913 and think it unchangeable.

Transparency can mean many things to different people. Which leads to the somewhat interesting detail that Bill Krummel, in his campaign to get the Democratic Mayoral nomination accused the Democratic town committee of not being transparent. Maybe the label of transparency is actually short hand for not liking the outcome of certain actions. I suppose we can all see through that.