110 W. New York Ave., DeLand, FL
386-734-4622
PHOTO BY BRIAN HADDEN COURTESY MICHAEL ARTH CAMPAIGN
The race has begun — Michael Arth, center, poses with, from left, daughter Sophie, wife Maya and campaign volunteers Skyler Mann and Andrew Manning during a July appearance in Kissimmee.
BEACON PHOTO/PAT HATFIELD
Talking politics — During an interview in his Garden District office, Democratic candidate for governor Michael Arth talks politics, social issues and his vision for bringing the future to Florida.
By Pat Hatfield
posted Jul 30, 2009 - 10:03:06am
He doesn’t have the money. He doesn’t have the political machinery or the support of leaders in his party. None of that is stopping DeLandite Michael E. Arth from tossing his hat into the gubernatorial fray.
Arth is running as a Democrat, with virtually no name recognition outside of Volusia County. He earned a day of recognition from the City of DeLand and the County of Volusia, however, as the man who cleaned up a drug-ridden DeLand neighborhood and turned it into the Garden District.
So far, Arth is one of six Democratic candidates for governor. Alex Sink is best-known, and is touted by the Florida Democratic Party.
Arth is an urban planner and architect by trade. Designing pedestrian-friendly communities is his specialty.
Arth’s wife, Maya, was unhappy at first about the gubernatorial bid. Now, she’s treasurer of her husband’s small campaign kitty. The Division of Elections showed a little more than $9,000 in the campaign account as of July 28, most of it put there by Arth himself.
Sink, on the other hand, had $2.9 million and a list of 7,898 contributions as of July 28.
High-ups in the Democratic Party told Arth he would need at least $3 million to begin a campaign, and $1.3 million a week to win it. That would make him little more than a telemarketer, constantly on the phone soliciting money, he said. Arth isn’t doing that.
In this time of dissatisfaction with the status quo, when a man named Barack could be elected president, Arth figures an outsider who’s not beholden to special interests stands a chance.
He believes his involvement in social issues gives him the experience he would need to run the ship of state. He has an organized campaign, based on a Web site, www.michaelearth.org/, an e-mail campaign, public appearances and just about anything else that can be done with little or no money.
Arth points to the Garden District, where he ran off drug dealers, renovated dumps, and created a comfortable middle-class neighborhood, as good experience for running the ship of state.
In 2001, Arth packed up and moved to DeLand from Santa Barbara, Calif., with his wife, Maya.
Arth bought the first of a number of crack houses and sent Maya, then pregnant with daughter Sophie, back home to her family in Bulgaria, while he made the neighborhood safe for them.
Maya returned in time to make Sophie a DeLand native. She was born in the couple’s Garden District home.
Arth, who said he was interested in finding “compassionate and practical solutions to the problems of the world,” came to DeLand to put some of his public-policy analysis to the test, after seeing a collection of small properties advertised on the Internet by DeLand Realtor Maggi Hall.
Arth focused on the run-down residential area whose center is at the intersection of Voorhis and Alabama avenues. He found private financing — the banks wouldn’t touch it — to buy 32 properties.
Eventually, Arth widened his scope to include homeless people and drug addiction, and dealing with public officials to make change.
He developed plans for a village for the homeless, using the pedestrian-village concept, where services and goods are available within walking or bicycling distance, and vehicles are seldom needed.
Arth is a New Urbanism architect, focusing on small communities that are ecologically and pedestrian-friendly.
He identified a piece of property near the Volusia County Branch Jail to build Tiger Bay Village to house the homeless in small individual cottages.
Arth presented the concept to locals and the county government in 2007. He ran into objections that ranged from the ground being too wet to the plan being too grandiose and expensive, at $17,500 per bed.
Arth hasn’t given up on the concept. He still believes a small start on something like Tiger Bay Village would save money over the cost of jailing people or turning them in and out of hospitals.
Arth on the issues
Many of Arth’s positions revolve around reforming elections, not surprising for an outside candidate.
• Electoral reform – Arth favors a system called “instant runoff,” which is used in other countries. Instead of feeling forced to choose only between the two most popular candidates to make sure their votes count, voters would be able to cast their ballots for an outsider and be assured that their votes would be credited to their second choice, if the outsider didn’t win. Such a system prevents third-party candidates from acting as spoilers in a two-party race.
• Campaign financing — “We’ve got to get rid of private campaign finance,” Arth said. It makes fundraising the primary activity of candidates and officeholders.
Eliminating political ads and making campaigns about the issues would make political campaigns cost a fraction of their current totals, he said.
• Gerrymandering — Arth wants to eliminate gerrymandering, the deliberate rearrangement of the boundaries of political districts to influence the outcome of elections.
• War on drugs — Arth’s approach to the war on drugs is to decriminalize drugs, for the most part. He calls the war on drugs, begun in the 1970s, a war on poor people. Putting people in jail costs a lot more than taking care of drug problems through treatment, he said.
• Robotic vehicles — Along with other eco-friendly developments, Arth is a proponent of a public policy to develop robotic vehicles owned by the community.
Instead of driving a personal vehicle everywhere, then finding a place to park it, these community-owned, automated vehicles would drive locals to their destinations, then return to the depot or be deployed to the next party who needs a lift. They would come in different sizes for different needs. No downtown parking lots will be needed. Commuters can read the newspaper, finish a project online, or read a book, instead of sitting at stoplights.
• No-growther — “I’m a developer. In some sense, I’m shooting myself in the foot,” Arth said. Nevertheless, he opposes growth and development as the basis for Florida’s economy. He called it “a dead-end road.”
Florida’s population has grown from a million in 1910 to a projected 19 million in 2010. No politician in Florida has really stood up on this issue, Arth said.
Arth believes in population control.
Renaissance man?
If Arth’s position points seem diverse, that’s because his interests are far-ranging, from art and architecture to social policy and planning. He’s a writer and self-promoter in books such as The Labors of Hercules. The opus, in its final stages, details Arth’s solutions to everything from overpopulation to problems of the environment, economics, energy, health and justice.
Another book Arth expects to be out in a few months is called A New Road — Beyond 2010.
Last year, he released a documentary called New Urban Cowboy — Toward a New Pedestrianism, detailing his work in the Garden District. The cover tease states, “Michael E. Arth is fixin’ the Earth one town at a time!”
The book Michael E. Arth: Introspective 1972-1982 featured original prints, paintings and photography.
It remains to be seen whether a Renaissance man can get the gubernatorial nomination — or get elected.
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This is a systemic problem related to a breakdown in the the family, a lack of family planning, the war on drugs, and extraordinary levels of minority incarceration. The people doing the worst job of raising children are having the most children. Combine this with increasing contempt for the law among the youth because of the war on drugs, and growing numbers of poor fathers being sent to jail, it is a prescription for disaster.
Education begins at home, so without a proper grounding we have seen increasing numbers of disruptive students who are hard to teach. Many teachers feel like wardens in a reform school. That is why my wife quit teaching.
The solution is to address these problems at their source while also improving the quality of education by rewarding teachers for producing results, by reducing class size, and by improving online interactive environments. Virtual reality combined with live teachers interacting with small groups of students who are paired according to their learning level and interests is probably the future of education.
Please visit http://www.michaelearth.org for more.
Re: Overpopulation- "Think globally, act locally"
If one does not understand the big picture, one won't fully understand the local picture. As mathematician Bertrand Russell once said, "People would rather commit suicide than learn arithmatic." Florida's population grew 19 times in the last 100 years. The world and the U.S. grew about 6 x. This is not a good thing in all three cases, and not only because we are probably exceeding the carrying capacity of the Earth. Poorly regulated growth in Florida has distorted our economy (and led to its hard fall), ruined our landscape, and created a hideous and inefficient sprawlscape. I'm for smart growth in Florida (not "no growth as" stated in the article) and zero population growth for the planet as a whole. Some areas will grow, others will shrink, but we have to treat our planet as our common trust.
Re: Gerrymandering, Proportional Representation:
"First-pass-the-post" (aka plurality voting and winner-take-all) applies to single member elections (President, Governor, Senate, Congressman, Mayor etc) Proportional representation (used rarely in this country for minor elections) applies to multi-member districts where the winners are determined proportionately. So I'm not sure what you are referring to when you use the term, since we don't use it. (NYC once used it to elect council members but they stopped it because they wanted to keep out any minority views).
You don't have to couple your disdain with condescending, especially when you are misunderstanding the law you are citing. The voting system was not written into the constitution by the Founding Fathers and there were no "Founding Mothers." Women weren't even considered to be a man's equal. We inherited winner-take-all from the British because they didn't know any better, and we would not need a constitutional amendment to change it. No less a notable than John Stuart Mill pointed out how unfair it is. I support having larger Congressional districts, drawn according to population, irrespective of the desire of our two parties to create a Democratic or Republican districts.
If you have PR, no one would fight over how to draw the districts because candidates would be elected proportionately, which is to say the representatives would actually represent the members of their districts proportionately. What could be fairer than that? if you are a Republican (which you seem to be) living in a Democratic district now, you have zero representation. If you don't agree with either party, you have zero representation almost everywhere in the U.S. Again, how fair is that?
The passage you quoted "It may be suggested..." refers to redistricting that uses the winner-take-all system, so it is irrelevant to cite it except to further show how gerrymandering and redistricting fights are intrinsic to such an unfair system. A computer can draw the district by population when you have multiple representatives in one House district. There would be no fights and no gerrymandering under P.R.
We could have both Instant Runoff Voting for single member elections and Proportional Representation for newly drawn multi-member districts without a constitutional amendment and with no dissension from the Supreme Court. To see how Instant Runoff Voting would work, read my other post to this forum and my website at http://www.michaelearth.org. I think you'll find it to be a good idea.
Next, gerrymandering. Um, newsflash, we live in a liberal democratic republic as constructed by our founding fathers and mothers. We already have proportional representation in a first-past-the-post single-member voting scheme. So how then shall we draw the dirsticts? The Supreme Court has already held in Gaffney v. Cummings that population equality is not the only intent of redistricting. In fact, political fairness was an acceptable principle and that "politics and political considerations are inseparable to districting and apportionment and that it is not only obvious, but absolutely unavoidable that the location and shape of districts may well determine the political complexion of the area", stated Justice White for the majority. As well, a, "politically mindless approach may produce, whether intended or not, the most grossly gerrymandered results", he wrote.
Look, I find it ridiculous that a candidate for office running under a party banner like Mr. Arth, cannot see the above obvious points and latches onto such intellectually void ballot initiatives as the one on gerrymandering. If the ballot initiative was to pass, it would be struck down by the Supreme Court prima facia. Its a bankrupt enterprise. Imagine, gerrymandered non-gerrymandered districts; its absolutely laughable.
My views regarding the shortfalls of our educational system can be found under the issues section at http://www.michaelearth.org and in my two forthcoming books, A New Road: Beyond 2010 and in the Labors of Hercules (http://www.laborsofhercules.org)
Also, I'm not a no-growther except in regards the overall population growth of the world. In Florida I'm for the smartest, greenest kind of growth: New Pedestrianism
Another tax and spend socialist.
Don't we already have enough socialists in D.C. ?
Sink will earn his name in the upcoming election. Mr. Arth will establish entire new orders of fairness. The Bush/Gore episode should lesson our fair state that elections are not fair as they operate now. Ideas and values should count whereas only cash flow and popularity now matter. The recipe for leadership is changing in a big way. It will now require truth and fairness.
Most importantly, we need to move beyond negativism to visionary living, and while visionaries do not reach all their goals, they reach a lot more than the naysayers.
So, go for it Arth. We are fully behind you, and alongside you.
At least Mr. Arth has put his money where his mouth is and already helped make positive improvements in town. It's not about being a Dem. or Repub. It's about who has the guts to get in there an make a difference, in spite of the obsacles thrown in your path. Change is needed, so best wishes to you Mr. Arth.
I'm not a "no-growther." I'm for the smartest kind of smart growth - New Pedestrianism - an urban design movement I started in 1999. I do say, however, that our economy should not be based on the rapid growth of the past.
"Instant Runoff Voting" or Majority Voting for single member elections is more democratic because it takes a majority of the votes to win and voters do not have to strategize their votes. Voters simply rank their candidates in order of preference. If there is not a majority winner on the first count, the votes are automatically re-tabulated by successively dropping the lowest vote getters until there is a majority winner.
In regards gerrymandering-- We can eliminate gerrymanders by having proportional representation. This would mean larger districts, but all the voters would be proportionately represented. As it is now, if you don't live in a district that is controlled by your party, you have no representation.
Most of the world's democracies have public campaign financing, majority voting, and proportional representation because it's fairer and more representative.
For more on the issues, please go to the campaign website at http://www.michaelearth.org.
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