Preface to thinking about Measure Q Tax and council election
By Alan Hirsch
I write this having attended more City Council and Commission meetings than all current council members, and all but a few community members.
For years now, I have seen city government fail to harness our community’s education and social capital wealth since the failure of the 2014 R&D Business Park initiative. The community has not leveraged its charmed geography—a unique rural area highly accessible via I-80 & rail service between the Bay Area & State Capitol. And proximity to UC Davis, a major research university that brings billions in grant dollars to our community. We are ideally located to incubate a wealth of startups and attract businesses. This should be giving us a robust tax base and providing a rich offering of city services.
Instead, we are failing. So, we now need to raise our sale taxes and we seem to have been forced to site new affordable housing next to the freeway, land that should have been used for new startups and businesses to build our city’s tax base. I note council decided not to site housing on Russell at a redone Trader Joes Mall across from the University this year. And Community resistance to student housing on Russell Fields 6 year back, close to our downtown, forced students to live in dorms in West Village 1 mile from our downtown shopping area- where they don’t feed out sales tax base.
It used to be noted at council meetings that Davis’s greatest asset is its involved and educated residents. No longer. Instead, city staff and council, though their actions, indicate they don’t believe this anymore. It used to be residents could express their insight and expertise by being involved in an independent city commission. Full commissions used to bring up new ideas, and even vote to disagree with the council, even over ballot measures. No more. People volunteering for commissions are told by staff that their role is to serve the current council’s policy, even though this contradicts the not-yet-updated official Commission Handbook that recalls the old way: “Commissions are independent.”
The gridlock preceded this, but the City has over the last two years reduced by over 25% the number of community members who participate through commissions…and now the city is proposing to restrict items commissioners can even talk about: any one member of council can slow or block a discussion item on a commission agenda. Staff has over the years sometimes subtly, but often through policy changes, used the Brown Open Meeting Act to make commission meetings more formal with less free flowing discussions, especially constricting public engagement. Even the right of the public to hand out unreviewed material to commissioners has been challenged. Current new policy is that only developers can show PowerPoints to council and commissions at a public hearing.
The fact is I-80 was quietly advanced for years without any input from City’s Transportation Commission- or citizen that are world-class expert at UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies is troubling. The same goes for failure to engage world-class Arboriculture expert at the University or volunteers at Tree Davis in the city’s urban forestry program.
As I write this, I acknowledge that the city is hard to govern (see Councilman Will Arnold’s piece) because there are many involved and with often contradictory voices who advocate different visions- many have shifted first to skepticism and then cynicism after years of being ignored. But city hall response has not been to rethink the process to rebuild trust and find common ground and harmonize the diversity, but instead to push through plans – most of which meet failure if they are forced to be tested at the ballot box. Measure Q is the latest skirmish.
I am not accusing council or staff of corruption or ill-intention: I just note a shift in culture where city staff seems to view themselves as a service delivery organization so concerned residents are reduced to “customers.” This metaphor transforms community involvement to a friction that slows staff from “getting things done.” Public involvement is often ignored until someone raises legal issues of transparency and public participation. As a defensive mechanism, City’s process of community involvement seems to be reduce to legal minimum to minimize the public criticism. This is a death spiral of mistrust and nihilism toward any city initiative by some of most involved and concerned citizens.
One might think less public engagement is a reasonable trade off, but one can look at the opportunity cost of not allowing engagement of community expertise, especially university faculty – or the consequences of alienation of the most informed and civically engaged members of community. This might be linked to repeated failures to build consensus to pass J/R votes to increase our tax base and build housing.
The tree policy is a classic example. After Tree Davis Identified that the tree ordinance was failing, over the last ten years, the Tree Commission has three times drafted a revision of the Tree Ordinance, and three times the city staff failed to advance this draft for consideration to City Council. The council has finally responded – in last year– by disbanding the Tree Commission. Many other activists have similar stories of City Staff not supporting, or delaying for years community driven innovations and initiatives (e.g. The Housing Trust Fund) while council stood by.
A new General Plan won’t fix this alienation: the plan to hire an outside consultant won’t address a dysfunctional planning process that grows out of this culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” Peter Drucker famously said.
We need to heal and rebuild trust via a new culture of collaboration, one where city staff believes its job is to go beyond the bare minimum community engagement required by law.
MY BIAS for the council election therefore is selecting among candidates someone who will change the “go along/get along with staff” default of council. One who is not afraid of conflict, dissent or admitting mistakes.
I love Davis, and have, and will continue to endorse most tax measures and land annexation (growth) measures as this seem to be the best the process can do, so Yes on Q seem to be best we can do these days). But the decline of Davis is clear for all to see.
I hope the election for district 2 to replace Will Arnold on council will select someone who goes beyond the go-along/get along attitude that fails to look inward but just blames community members for the problem. I believe Dillon Horton is the that person who both knows the city process and has that temperament. But anyone, even a current council person can be step up with courage and be a catalyst to ask for a change in city hall culture.
We need to get beyond the blame-game.
Davisite 
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