Institutions are shaped by many forces, and this is true of the Columbia Association. One of the stronger forces that has influenced CA and its politics over the years, however, is one of absence and omission—namely, indifference, or perhaps more fittingly, apathy.
Indifference is a silence that can be mistaken for consent or contentment, and a force that creates a vacuum that those with specific or narrow interests can fill for their own ends. And they have, and we’ll talk more about some of those interests later.
For now, we’ll focus on the lack of interest.
In a community that is as informed, engaged, and active as Columbia, the broadly shared apathy towards CA is curious. When I first got involved in the community, I joined and eventually chaired the Columbia Association’s Environmental Matters subcommittee in the early 2000s and our staff liaison at the time made a joke that’s stuck with me: Community meetings are the official pastime of Columbians.
While that’s not entirely true, it’s not wrong. We love meetings, and we have many of them in our community. Indeed, many Columbia residents are involved and engaged in a variety of community matters, but aside from periods of upheaval or controversy, engagement with the governance of CA and participation in Columbia elections is and has always been relatively low.
Even going back to the early 1980s, around the time a grassroots community movement successfully managed to wrestle complete control of CA from the Rouse Company, newspaper articles detail and editorials bemoan elections that failed to meet the minimum quorum of 10 percent of eligible voters. Village managers at the time threw parties and gave away free beer to get more participation, but they were largely unsuccessful, even when the founding zeitgeist of Columbia was still in the air.
It’s true that at the time the biggest matter affecting CA—financing—was somewhat obtuse, but this has been true of CA throughout the decades. Elections struggle to reach quorums and the CA board, while once having received generous coverage from local papers, operates in a manner that is at least somewhat disconnected from the community itself. Which is, in some ways, fitting because the structure of CA is such that the only real “members” of the organization are the members of the board. The rest of us are just leinpayers and residents.
I had long assumed that Columbia’s glory days were defined by greater involvement with CA governance and politics, and while I think that assumption is part true, it is more false than not.
While CA generally enjoys broad awareness, many people are unclear about what it does and who runs it. Indeed, a survey conducted in the 1990s found that only 21 percent of Columbians knew it was governed by an elected Board of Directors and I would surmise the number is about the same today. It’s no wonder, then, that most aren’t engaged with the politics of it.
Many early writers posited that this was complacency—Rouse gave Columbians everything they ever wanted and they got fat and happy. Maybe it was complacency once, but that complacency has clearly given way to apathy and indifference, except in a few specific instances or from a few specific constituencies.
And I think CA’s leadership is generally happy with the state of affairs. Those who are elected can maintain power by engaging the small constituency that elects them and ignoring—either willfully or by omission—the overwhelming majority of Columbia residents and lienpayers who don’t engage.
CA doesn’t generally hold public hearings, setting aside only 15 minutes each meeting for “Resident Speakout;” it doesn’t promote village elections in a meaningful and deliberate way; until the pandemic, its meetings were not broadcast publicly; it rarely uses its communications channels to talk about its governance; and throughout this pandemic has made drastic cuts to its programs and services without any real engagement with the community it serves.
In short, the Columbia Association indifference seems to be a two-way street. A community that is indifferent to the institution that is supposed to be serving it, and an institution that is indifferent to the community it is supposed to serve.
And a cycle that has repeated itself decade after decade.
Of course, not everyone is apathetic about CA. And those who aren’t have leveraged this imbalance effectively.
