By the time you read this column, the 2021 elections will have ended, and new elected officials will have been decided. Since I served on the Enumclaw City Council for four years, I’d like to share my insights with these newly elected city council members.

I wish someone would have educated me in these insights. Instead, I had to learn them through experience. For the rest of you, this is your opportunity to understand what it is like to be given the power to make decisions on issues that affect the whole community.

• Power is one of the reasons why candidates run for office. They want to affect change and to make their community better, or maybe right a social wrong that has been ignored. Power also brings with it the understanding that a public servant’s decisions are going to affect a lot of people; sometimes positively, and sometimes negatively.

That responsibility weighed heavily on me. After a council meeting when I made a major governmental decision, I would often awaken at 2 a.m. in a cold sweat wondering whether what I had said and voted for or against was the right decision.

Not every elected official has these thoughts. But I have talked to people who have exercised power in the public sphere, and they seem to share that same burden of pressure. They know that there will be people who agree with them, and there will be those who are angry and often vocally critical. Learning to make good decisions often comes into conflict with the desire to be reelected.

• The public often does not understand what the real issues are. They hear sound bites in the media, but usually the decision points are far more complex than what is shared with the public. It’s difficult to communicate complex ideas in ways that the average layman understands.

Sometimes one’s opponents take what has been said and twists it to turn the public official’s words against him/her. This is especially true on the national level where coverage and power are greater, and the stakes are higher. When I got on the council, one of the veteran council members counseled me to be very careful what I said publicly or wrote. He told me that my words could come back to bite me in the future when a political opponent was looking for reasons to turn the public against me.

• Once someone has been in office for a while, that person tends to become very calculating. A public servant begins to weigh every word and action because they may have unintended consequences.

Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, for example, weighed where to go on vacation, trying to determine which spot would show her in a favorable light. Sen. Ted Cruz took a lot of heat because he chose to leave his state of Texas on vacation during a major storm with cold temperatures and power outages. No matter what the level of government, being in the spotlight becomes something every elected official has to deal with.

• Former President Barack Obama once stated that being in public office is like drinking water from a fire hose. The force and amount of information is overwhelming. It is difficult to try to sift through all the data to be able to make good decisions. Before every council meeting, we had to read between 100-150 pages of very technical material. Decisions had to be made based upon that information.

After three and a half years on the job, I realized that what I needed to do was just to formulate the key questions with their pros and cons. The rest was just detail. Being able to summarize the basic issues sounds easy, but it’s not. It takes practice. That’s why there is an advantage to being in office for a long time. One learns the ropes.

There is also a problem with long tenure, though. Power tends to corrupt. It tends to be taken for granted after a while. Some politicians begin to believe that government won’t work unless they’re making decisions. No politician, having once experienced that power, wants to give it up.

Consider my insights. Watch the council meetings that are recorded by the city and are on the city of Enumclaw website. If you watch the meetings after they have ended, you can skip through the parts that don’t interest you. You can also come to understand what your public officials are really like — their strengths and weaknesses and personalities.

Understanding how politics really works will make you a better citizen. Your knowledge will also help make better government. Government works best with public involvement.