I remember the snowstorm better than I remember the vote that caused it. Tulsa was buried under a foot of snow, the kind that shuts down a city for days, and I was sitting in a mayor’s office asking him to reappoint me to a commission that, by most accounts, he’d been advised not to touch. Few people ever think to volunteer for a city board or commission in the first place. I had, and I wanted to keep going.
We had been friends for years, this mayor and I, before a personal falling-out put some distance between us. He was a Republican. I had only been serving two years at that point, but I’d already made a name for myself as, more often than not, the lone dissenting vote on the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission — a board that had long leaned toward the interests of developers and against the kind of sensible land-use and transportation policy I’d come to believe in. His own supporters told him I wasn’t worth the trouble of a second term. It would have been easier, politically, to let me go.
He reappointed me anyway. It was awkward, and I suspect it cost him something with people whose opinions he valued. I’ve often wondered what made him do it — whether it was the friendship, or whether, somewhere underneath the politics, he knew the commission needed a voice like mine even if he didn’t especially want to hear it himself. Either way, I got a second term. Most people who serve on boards like that one don’t even get asked the first time.
That’s the real subject of this piece. Not the zoning fights, though there were plenty of those. It’s the fact that our towns are full of seats — real ones, with real power over how a place grows — that go begging for qualified people to fill them, while a handful of high-visibility appointments get all the competition. And it’s the fact that retirees, of all people, are sitting on exactly what those seats need: time, and a lifetime of experience nobody’s bothered to ask about.
The seats nobody's fighting for
During my years on the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, I also served on the city’s Transportation Advisory Board — several of those years as Vice-Chair — and on a Land Use Task Force created to improve communication between the city and the people affected by its zoning decisions. None of those were glamorous appointments. Nobody threw a dinner when I joined them. But the TAB shaped recommendations on transit, walkability, and street infrastructure that the mayor and City Council would act on. The Task Force existed because ordinary Tulsans felt shut out of decisions that were reordering their neighborhoods. These were not ceremonial bodies. They were where the actual decisions got made, or at least argued over honestly, before they ever reached a council chamber.
This isn’t just a Tulsa problem. A statewide survey of local officials in Michigan found that a large majority — better than three in four — said their communities don’t have enough residents willing to serve on appointed boards and commissions, and nearly as many said elected seats routinely go uncontested. The pattern researchers found was blunt: the same handful of people get recruited over and over, or the seats simply sit empty, while a few visible boards stay competitive. It’s not that towns don’t have capable people. It’s that most of those people never think to raise a hand, and nobody thinks to ask them.
I understand why. It’s worth being honest about how these appointments actually happen, because the honesty matters to the argument. Mayors and councils tend to fill boards with people they already know — friends, campaign supporters, business allies. Scholars who study this distinguish between patronage, where the appointee is a supporter but still genuinely qualified, and outright cronyism, where qualifications hardly enter into it at all. The higher-profile the position, the more likely it goes to someone at least reasonably capable. It’s the boards further down the ladder — the ones without ribbon-cuttings — where an unqualified favor is more likely to slip through, simply because fewer people are competing for the seat and fewer people are watching.
That’s not a conspiracy. It’s arithmetic. And it means the fix isn’t outrage — it’s supply. If more retirees showed up asking to serve, on the boards nobody’s heard of as much as the ones everybody wants, that arithmetic changes.
A student of the game
I didn’t walk onto the Planning Commission already knowing what I was doing. I made myself learn it. I read Jane Jacobs, whose argument that “urban renewal” too often ignored the actual needs of the people living in a city reshaped how I saw every zoning case that came before us. I found a mentor in Jamie Jamison, an advocate for form-based codes, and I spent years consulting with him and with other planners and advocates who cared about walkability and sensible land use as much as I did. I studied what other cities were doing right. By the time I sat for a comprehensive plan hearing, I wasn’t guessing.
There’s a line from planning consultant Albert Solnit that I wish I’d had in front of me during my first year on the commission: the job, he wrote, belongs to “someone who can serve the long-range interests of a community, unbound by election promises, political expediency, or narrow interests.” That’s the whole case for why retirees, specifically, belong on these boards. We’re past the point where our next promotion depends on staying quiet. We don’t need the job. We don’t need the favor returned. That freedom is exactly what a town’s long-range interest requires and what a working professional, still climbing, often can’t afford to offer.
We’re past the point where our next promotion depends on staying quiet.
I cast a lot of dissenting votes in those five years — enough that I couldn’t begin to count them. I remember the roll calls where I knew, before the clerk finished reading names, that I’d be the only “no” or one of a very few. I took real satisfaction in that, not because I enjoyed losing, but because I knew my vote gave a voice to people who otherwise had none in that room — the neighbors who couldn’t afford a land-use attorney, the residents whose only advocate was whoever happened to be sitting on the commission that year. When the city finally adopted a new comprehensive plan, the first meaningful update in decades, it included planning approaches that wouldn’t have survived committee without the small number of us willing to keep voting no until the plan caught up to us.
What's actually being wasted
Here is what I want a reader my age to sit with: you have spent decades learning how institutions actually work, how to read a room, how to hold a position you believe in without becoming impossible to work with. You’ve made mistakes and watched what they cost. None of that expires at retirement. Most of it is just getting good enough to use.
None of that expires at retirement. Most of it is just getting good enough to use.
And most communities are not making it easy to find you. There’s research suggesting that civic engagement in retirement is increasingly understood as a legitimate role in its own right — not a hobby to fill idle hours, but real, needed work, especially as the demand for people willing to take it on keeps growing while public budgets for staff keep shrinking. Nobody is going to build that pipeline for you. You have to show up at your city clerk’s office and ask what’s open.
I recognize boards and commissions aren’t for everyone, and they shouldn’t have to be. Purpose in retirement takes plenty of other shapes. Some men will find it behind a woodworking bench, building something with their hands for the first time since a high school shop class. Others will find it behind a camera, chasing better light, or elbow-deep in a garden bed, coaxing something to grow through another Oklahoma summer. Some will finally sit down and write the book they always meant to write, or pick up an instrument they set aside decades ago. None of that is a lesser use of a retirement than mine was. But if none of it has ever quite scratched the itch — if some part of you still wants a hand in shaping the place you live, not just enjoying it — there’s a seat with your name on it, and it’s likely been empty longer than it should have been.
I’m not on those boards anymore. Five years on the Planning Commission and five on the Transportation Advisory Board was a good, full run, and I’ve made my peace with handing the work to people who see the town’s future differently than I do. That’s how it should go. But I think about that mayor, in his office during the snowstorm, deciding whether to reappoint a friend he had every political reason to let go. I think about how much harder it would have been if I’d never asked in the first place — if I’d assumed, as so many retirees do, that nobody wanted what I had to offer.
They do. They’re just not going to ask twice. Most won’t even ask once. If you’ve got the time and a lifetime of judgment nobody’s cashed in yet, go volunteer for a city board or commission near you. The seat is probably closer than you think, and it’s probably still empty.
