Clark County.info has been live for about two months. In addition to the content provided, we have used this period of time to tune our approach and team coordination to deliver useful information about Clark County political matters. Our mission is to promote wise and ethical local government, and we’ve had our hands full reporting on self-serving behavior and incompetence of politicians and senior bureaucrats that negatively impacts citizens.
Our agenda for articles will be increasingly proactive, instead of waiting to react and write about local political issues that are counter to wise and ethical local government. Elements of this proactive outreach include:
- Public servants assessed: Our team will evaluate and score the suitability of local politicians and political candidates in preparation for this year’s political races. This will be just like a professional HR department would methodically measure the strengths and weaknesses of candidates. Example of the political candidate scoring matrix.
- Interstate highway throughput: Our experts are reviewing and scoring various options that can contribute to improved throughput on our interstate freeways. This is intended to change the broken and perplexing paradigm in which politicians and special interests drive this planning process. Our transportation team includes five members with appropriate backgrounds in transportation, public transit, and large public works construction projects. They’ve spent considerable time formalizing the evaluation approach and should provide initial results by the end of April. Example of the evaluation matrix.
- Clark County cities: Establish writers whose job is to watch and report on the various actions of the city politicians, senior bureaucrats, and proximate port activities. Again with a focus on highlighting self-serving behavior, incompetence, and special interest collusion. This is a problem, to varying degrees, in all county cities—although we acknowledge it is somewhat driven by the special-interest culture of politicians and bureaucrats from Vancouver and Clark County governments.
Call for writers: Considering all the local topics that we could write about, we’re making another call for volunteer writers. We have seven now, and could use more, especially writers who can focus 
on the cities in Clark County. Our new legal structure of a limited liability company will be useful for improved protection for our writers and associates. Even though we have comprehensive protection with constitutional rights for political free speech, we know that exposing corrupt and incompetent politicians and bureaucrats can evoke pushback and threats. We observed this environment of threats from establishment politicians and special interests in spades during the takedown of the CRC Columbia bridge boondoggle.
Increasing readers and our influence: Since ClarkCounty.info went live, we knew we would use the first few months to stabilize our approach, team coordination, and content. In promoting our content so far, we’ve communicated with about 900 Clark County citizens. This list was largely developed through the work in 2013 to successfully take down the CRC boondoggle. Next stage promotions will reach tens of thousands of Clark County residents and will include:
- Radio and targeted Internet advertising
- Coordination with a hundred-plus known advocates of ClarkCounty.info to have them promote to their local friends and business associates
- Social media expansion under a professional plan
- Outreach through other email lists for which we have access
Not only do we want to provide useful content to readers, but also make a real positive difference in Clark County in containing and reversing the large problems with self-serving political behavior and incompetence of politicians and senior bureaucrats that hurts the citizens’ value in local government.
We thank our readers for your interest and feedback to help make this news source an increasing success.
Mark Engleman – Founder of ClarkCounty.info