Petition to protest the City Council’s merging/eliminating citizen commissions

The City Council needs to re-think and re-do its current plan

By Roberta Millstein

Elaine Roberts Musser has put together a petition protesting the City Council's recent decision to move forward with merging some commissions, which would reduce expert citizen input into City matters and effectively eliminate some of the issues that commissions currently are able to address.  The petition asks for the City Council to stop its current direction and to give the proposed commission merging a better,  more thorough, and more inclusive analysis. I have no connection with petition, other than having signed it myself — I am just passing along the word.

The petition is located here: https://www.change.org/p/reverse-city-council-decision-to-move-forward-with-merging-commissions-1e9f0d8d-0697-4f45-85ad-6a7720e2b8b3

(There are more signers than it would seem from the webpage, as ERM was collecting signatures prior to putting the Change.org online).

If you follow the link, you will see the reasons given for objecting to the Council's decision.  The petition ends with the follow requests:

1. Immediately reverse their preliminary action of approving moving forward with the concept of merging commissions;
2. Then a) send the City Council staff report on merging commissions to each affected commission, b) to provide full and proper feedback on the merger plan to the City Council, c) so it could consider the merger plan in a future council discussion

Here are some previous Davisite articles on this topic, to provide further context:

• https://newdavisite.wordpress.com/2024/01/28/city-comissions-merger-proposals-are-ill-conceived-testify-tuesday/
• https://newdavisite.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/council-to-eliminate-tree-commission-tuesday/
• https://newdavisite.wordpress.com/2024/01/30/council-to-commit-to-de-commissioning-commissions/
• https://newdavisite.wordpress.com/2024/02/01/please-dont-eliminate-my-favorite-commissions/

I gave recorded public comment at the Council meeting where the initial decision — the one that the petition is asking to be overturned — was made.  My remarks read in part:

Today I draw on my 10+ years as a member of the Open Space and Habitat Commission, including time as the commission’s Chair.

I am very concerned about the proposal to consolidate some of the City Commissions. For one thing, fewer commissions means fewer commissioners, and that means we have a reduction in the valuable input from all of our knowledgeable community experts. It means that we have fewer people who are connected to City governance and who can reach out to still more community members. It means that fewer items can be addressed, reducing the scope of citizen input into important issues in Davis.

In other words, it means less democracy in Davis, remembering that voting is really only a small part of democracy. Remember how many citizens turned out to discuss Gaza and Israel. That’s just one illustration of how Davis citizens want to be involved. But they need to be given means to do that in constructive ways. That’s one of the things commissions are for, even if they are currently underutilized for that purpose.

Remember also that in the last few years, there were conversations about improving commission/staff/Council communication and coordination. What happened to those efforts? Why weren’t more people consulted in making this staff proposal, including current commissioners (not just chairs), past commissioners, and the general public? There was a conversation in place, but then that got dropped, and instead we get this democracy-reducing proposal.

For these and other reasons that have been mentioned, I urge you to sign the petition as well.