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For anyone with ideas about how to improve the way Santa Rosa is governed, it’s time to step up to the microphone.
Santa Rosa’s charter review process — a once-a-decade mini-Constitutional Convention — hosts a special public forum Saturday.
The issues may be less weighty than those facing the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1787. Instead of debating the structure of a bicameral legislature or whether to abolish the slave trade, Santa Rosa’s 21-member Charter Review Committee is pondering how City Council elections should be run and who should resolve disputes with police and firefighters.
Other issues include direct elections of the mayor, the role of the Community Advisory Board and whether workers’ pensions have to come through the state.
The committee, which has been meeting for months, is expected to tell the City Council by May what changes it thinks should be put before voters in the fall. The City Council makes the final decision.
The meeting runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the city’s Utilities Field Operations building, 35 Stony Point Road.
Even though all its votes to date have been preliminary, the committee appears to have made up its mind on a key issue. It voted 16-0 against a directly elected mayor, citing in part the experience of former Petaluma City Council members who said that having a mayor with limited power has been challenging.
But other issues are far from settled, and whether they ever reach the ballot box could turn on input from the public.
District elections
The committee already has given a tentative thumbs-down to district elections, the most divisive issue it has faced. The straw vote was 10-6, but several members have said they will bring an open mind to Saturday’s public forum.
Advocates say that if the city were sliced up into seven electoral districts, City Council members would be more accountable to voters. Currently, Santa Rosa, like 92 percent of the state’s 484 cities, has citywide elections for its seven council members.
Supporters argue district elections would bring some geographic diversity to the council because every section of the city would have a representative.
And they claim that by shrinking the size of the area in which candidates would need to campaign, costs would drop and political newcomers would be able to serve, resulting in a more economically diverse council.
Questions also have been raised about whether the city, with a 29 percent Latino population, could face a lawsuit alleging minorities are being disenfranchised by an unequal electoral process.
Opponents of the idea say there is diversity on the council. They point to Mayor Ernesto Olivares, who is Latino, Councilman John Sawyer, who is gay, and former Councilman Lee Pierce, who is black.
“I don’t see anything that’s broken here that needs to be fixed,” said committee member Herb Williams, a campaign consultant who worked for Olivares, Sawyer and Pierce.
Critics also worry that chopping up the city into districts risks the “balkanization” of city politics. City Council members should be looking out for the city as a whole, not just issues in their own back yards, they argue. They also say election costs will ultimately rise once special interests get involved.
They note that district elections won’t necessarily bring economic diversity to the council because people with regular jobs can’t afford the time commitment.
“I don’t care how many districts you create, you’re going to have an elite group that can afford to serve,” said committee member Patty Cisco, chairwoman of the city’s Planning Commission.
Binding arbitration
Police and firefighters can’t go on strike. State law prevents it. That reduces their bargaining power and leverage in negotiations with the city. To offset this imbalance, voters in 1996 added a charter requirement for contract disputes with public safety groups to be settled by binding arbitration. Neither side has invoked the process, but it remains controversial.
Labor groups argue the measure put them on a more even footing with the city and ushered in an era of good labor relations. Critics claim it gives the unions too much power and is indirectly responsible for the long upward march in pay and pensions for police officers and firefighters.
Discussions about the issue took a detour, however, when the committee agreed to delay a vote on putting the issue before voters until they knew what changes police and firefighters might accept.
Currently, an arbitrator is supposed to take into account several factors in ruling on contract disputes, including the pay workers in comparable cities receive and “financial condition of the City of Santa Rosa.”
A three-member subcommittee met with public safety labor representatives and hammered out language that more clearly defines the city’s ability to pay. These include when the city has a general fund deficit, can’t pay third parties, or has declared a fiscal emergency. The full committee hasn’t yet addressed the proposal.
Directly elected mayor
The mayor of Santa Rosa is selected for a two-year term by the council majority. In some cities, such as Petaluma, the mayor is elected directly by voters.
If the mayor doesn’t have enough allies on the council, however, it can be an honorary post with limited power.
Petaluma Mayor David Glass told the committee that there are several challenges to being elected directly. If the field is fragmented, the winner of the mayor’s seat could turn out to be “completely out of synch with almost all of the community,” he said.
Pam Torliatt, mayor of Petaluma from 2007 to 2011, said there might be some value in rotating the mayorship to every council member.
Committee members seemed to take those suggestions to heart, with the committee voting unanimously against the idea.
“I’m pretty clear in my own mind that an elected mayor in the present situation doesn’t make sense,” committee member Bill Carle said.
Community Advisory Board
The 14-member Community Advisory Board was created to represent the views of the broader community on issues important to the City Council.
Voters established it through the previous charter review process 10 years ago, but most agree it has yet to live up to its potential.
The committee heard a presentation from board members, who outlined how the board’s role has changed over time and how many feel it is operating well at the moment.
City Manager Kathy Millison has asked the charter committee to hold off on making recommendations on the board’s structure or mission until she has time to discuss whether the City Council has ideas for tweaks short of a charter amendment.
Some committee members worry that if they wait too long, they’ll run out of time.
Pension flexibility
Early in the process, the charter committee unanimously agreed to remove language from the charter requiring city workers to receive pensions through the state Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS. The move was seen as a way to give the city flexibility should it seek to switch to a different pension model.
You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.
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While public roadways crumble and while public education is cut back, the public employee pension system CalPERS authorizes itself to steal another $167 million dollars from the bankrupt state of California.
Does anyone recall reading the liars posting right here on the Press Demo Blog who denied that the public pension systems (not just CalPers) were supported by tax dollars??
The headline below is this mornings news in Sacramento. The Press Democrat attempts to stifle truth and refuses to publish such information.
———————
CalPERS OKs Reduction In Investment Forecast, Costing State Extra $167 Million Per Year
By Dale Kasler
Published: Wednesday, Mar. 14, 2012
Graeme Wellington chants that government should stop wasting time asking for “ideas” from the public.
Uh, yeah. Right.
No point in the public getting involved and exposing the criminality of government called public pensions.
For one thing, Graeme, you cannot balance the budget while the public pensions are criminally excessive and out of control. You did notice that CalPers is right now moving to steal more tax money to support itself, right?
No on direct election of Mayor. Santa Rosa doesn’t need a mayor Daily, things are bad enough already.
No on binding arbitration for safety. It has had the affect of only driving up safety pensions, benefit and salary costs to the city for nothing in return.
End the Community Advisory Board. That’s why we have a city council and the bureaucracy.
As another poster said, cut the baloney and cut the budget. That’s what a good council would do to begin to turn the city around. And a turnaround is long past due.
The Liberal textbook definition of Diversity is this:
1.The unqualified are now qualified…and hired.
2.The producers are inherently evil.
3.Everything that made America great is even more evil.
4. Shut up.
5. We said shut up. Now.
The only decision our elected leaders need to make is to balance the budget using only the massive amounts of money they already receive. Quit creating time wasting issues like plastic bag bans and getting “ideas” from the public. The public is dumber than the elected leaders for the most part. The common man is far too common.
Balance the budget. Cut the baloney. How’s that for public input?
Regarding the so-called diversity issue….as Martin Luther King Jr. once said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Let us unite to make this dream a reality in politics as well as in real life.
Once again, they don’t give the public enough notice! This is a once-a-decade meeting, discussing important issues that affect us all, so how come they only gave us less than 24 hours notice?
So called “diversity” does nothing but divide us. It does not united us. What is needed is common sense thinking about how to make Santa Rosa a more viable place to work, live and play.
Right now Santa Rosa is failing in all of these areas. Too many homeless attracted to the area by liberal welfare benefits. Too many houses underwater and more to come. Businesses moving out not in. The schools broke and broken.
How will diversity solve these problems? It won’t and it never has.
If a candidate has some answers to problem solving, lets hear it and let the voters decide. Right now, we only hear from the left where the answer is we are not spending enough and more entitlements will solve the problems.
The correct answer is look to quality, not quanity in how government and government spending should be carried out in everything government does.
Diversity only brings more squabbling over limited resources. It doesn’t solve problems, it only divides.
Pointing to the 3 council members as proof of “diversity” is ridiculous. Olivares is an insider, a retired cop; Sawyer is hardly the champion of gay rights; Pierce (under the guidance of Herb Williams) didn’t even include pictures in his literature the first time around, so no one would know he was black. <–Look at what an incredibly diverse council we have! Look at how incredibly diverse the charter review committee is, you know, the people chosen by the council! This is a game for insiders, and no one else need apply. Why do you think Gullixson is against it?
The other side in favor of directly elected mayor is that since the people elected him, he represents their views. If that doesn’t work with the council, then maybe they need to think that they are out of touch. Having the council elect the mayor simply reinforces their agendas. Doesn’t democracy work better (albeit less efficiently) when all participants have to hear and argue each opinion whether it agrees with them or not?
District elections are an issue that should bring together the entire spectrum of Santa Rosa voters, independent of political affiliation or viewpoint. Let the people decide!