SR Council Watch

Maxwell Court – Tale of a Derailing

2010-03-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

The asphalt plant of Maxwell Court

Maxwell Court – Sly Maneuvers to Derail TOD

How is it that a progressive City Council majority, a visionary City Manager and (pinch yourself) hard-nosed local environmentalists are all on track to undermine SMART and Transit-oriented Development? My peek through the glass darkly suggests the answer is a tale of special pleading, bureaucratic maneuvering and clever use of innuendo.

The core issue is how far the City should go to give special breaks to property owners of Maxwell Court, which is the industrial area featuring the asphalt plant pictured above tucked along the rail line just south of College and right between the two future SMART railroad stations.

In 2007 the Council led by an enthusiastic Mayor Blanchard approved the Station Area Specific Plan (SASP) to move toward a SMART 21st century city central core. Among other steps, SASP rezones Maxwell Court properties from industrial to residential, retail and live-work uses.

The change is not forced. As is usual practice, the property owners could continue current uses in perpetuity. The expectation is, however, that market forces will drive up Maxwell Court land prices when SMART gets going and owners will rush to sell to developers.

Rezoning does have a mild hooker to encourage progress. If the asphalt plant or other property use is discontinued for six months, then by current City Code, the new zoning would apply thereafter. Property owners complained they might get stuck with vacancies and might have trouble getting improvement loans. Given that the economy is not projected to pick up until the end of this year, City officials offered a longer grace period (say a year or two) and other special breaks to help the owners survive vacancies, as well as to finance rebuilding or rehabs.

The owners snubbed their noses at the offer, and insisted on being taken out of the SASP, period. Then they grudgingly accepted a “compromise” proposal for a ten-year exemption from rezoning.

Ten years is unjustified special treatment, and caving in would go back on the SASP, undermine SMART, mock the declared priority for TOD, and be patently unfair to every other property owner who has played by the rules.

So, why are progressives in and out of City Hall ready to sign on?

The trail to the answer seems to have started with the idea that going the extra mile, or in this case the extra ten years, for the Maxwell Court owners would show that the Council supports business. Bad call – two years is pro-business; ten years is pandering to special interests. Smart politics? I doubt it, because November campaigning will be as mean and misleading as it always is, whichever way this one goes.

But the notion has persisted and been amplified by a second ploy – a claim we need to keep Maxwell Court as is because there isn’t "enough" light industrial/industrial land available in and around the city. That’s plain wrong, since Maxwell Court is about 30 acres and there are over 1,000 acres zoned for those uses within the Urban Growth Boundary, much of it currently vacant.

The two dubious claims were followed by sly innuendo - staff advised community reps to sign off on the 10-year ”compromise,” because the Council was seen to be leaning toward a General Plan amendment that would take Maxwell Court out of the SASP entirely. That outcome would indeed be worse, but it’s a doubtful proposition and very hard to check, because on such issues, Council Members can be reluctant to take stands in advance until they study up and then gauge colleagues at the session itself.

So, the staff assertion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – if everybody signs on in advance, there is no serious opposition at the Council session, and the “compromise,” which is no compromise at all, slides by.

Would that be so bad? The case of the Asphalt Plant vs. SMART is not an end of the world issue, but it goes to the heart of planning for the city’s future. It is too important to “slide by.”

Community reps should stand on their principles, and Council Members should have to explain in public just why they would favor special interests in this case.

After all, in the last election, one of the big winning campaign promises was “the strength to say No to Special Interests."

The county-wide energy retrofit --- will it really fit?

2010-03-26T17:12:00.000-07:00

The county-wide retrofit program -- how well will it really fit?

Everybody wants the county-wide building retrofit program to succeed and reduce greenhouse gases. And there have been fulsome promises it will do so. But as roll-out approaches, there are grave concerns the retrofit program proposal won’t actually fit all that well.

Santa Rosa is supporting the program with $150,000, equal to 10% of a block grant expected from the feds. The City Council should take the opportunity when it votes on the funding next Tuesday to speak up on behalf of less well-to-do homeowners, more appropriate programs, older home conservation and employment of at risk youth.

Is there really cause for concern here? The program is being developed by the non-profit Climate Protection Campaign (CPC) in collaboration with the County’s new Regional Climate Protection Authority (RCPA). They say it is just the ticket – per the RCPA website, a property owner signs up and gets a test from a contractor, who then proposes an “integrated whole building solution” and explains financing options. Details will be forthcoming when the program is announced, perhaps next month.

So what’s to worry about? Lots, according to some knowledgeable people who have been to the restricted-attendance stakeholder meetings.

Here’s the list that has come to my attention:

-High cost of program to homeowner: Contractor tests, also known as audits, can be an expensive component, and total costs of the average CPC/RCPA proposed single home retrofit program seems likely to run well over $5,000 (some have suggested closer to $10,000). Such big up-front outlays can take years to recover from utility bill savings. CPC is mum on the cost threshold for now.

-Overkill design: The retrofit standards bandied about so far appear to be exceptionally high for our mild climate, with talk of air-tight sealing of one's entire house, along with wall and ceiling insulation to values well above what is reasonably needed here. CPC has not yet revealed guidelines and details.

Older houses: Probably well over 25% of the City’s housing stock is old enough to merit special treatment (e.g., preserve existing energy efficient features like wood-framed windows and sealing behind stucco exteriors). CPC has given nods to the principle, but so far has not announced any responsive actions.

Universality: There seems no provision for, or even interest in, helping the do-it-yourselfer or home-owner with cash flow problems. Simple techniques like weatherstripping, basic insulation, and inside or outside storm windows can greatly improve energy efficiency to lower utility bills without need for contractor audits, CPC program staff reviews, assessments and verifications. And rental housing – about 40% of the county stock – will be dealt with “later.”

Transparency: The stakeholder meetings since December have been by invitation only. Not good when rumors fly that there have been proposals – apparently taken seriously – for measures like hiking water rates of homeowners who don’t voluntarily sign up or otherwise demonstrate compliance at a kind of first-tier level

Hype: the publicity materials talk about 40% of GHG emissions coming from housing, and a targetted 168,000 tons CO2 reductions. But there are other numbers like the fact that at best the program would result in meeting 12% of the county-wide reduction target, and would be closer to 5% if you don’t include rentals and commercial building retrofits.

Social conscience: CPC has smiled in the direction of using programs likeYouth Build Santa Rosa and Eco-workforce which would put at-risk youth on the job for things like storm windows and gray water systems. So far, however, there seems no meaningful provision to take advantage of such possibilities.

That's not exactly an inconsequential or short list, and it's possible of course that such concerns will fade away when CPC finally shows its cards and rolls out the program.

But it wouldn’t hurt if City Council Members made clear next Tuesday in connection with their vote to contribute $150,000 that they hope to see a retrofit program which in addition to contractor-based “whole house solutions” will also provide information on low cost measures, encourage cash-strapped do-it-yourselfers, promote jobs for at-risk youth, feature best practices for older houses, and steer as much of the grant money as possible to low-income homeowners rather than into program overhead for extensive staff reviews and the like.

Playing Monopoly...with movie theaters

2010-03-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

Playing Monopoly...with movie theaters

Back in 1999 with help from the City Council of the time, Roxy Stadium 14 developer Larry Wasem played Movie Theater Monopoly in Santa Rosa and ended up with control of the key game cards for Downtown. Now, he and partner Dan Tocchini are moving to take over the whole cinema board with a cut-throat leasing maneuver to snatch the Rialto property away from Ky Boyd’s widely admired management.

Today’s city leaders should pull out all the stops to help Boyd land safely on the right place. The Rialto has become a real asset for our fair city -- keeping a Boyd-run theater somewhere in town would truly serve the public interest to promote competitive choice, quality art, and business engagement in the community.

When the Roxy proposal originally came forward, the main focus of the then pro-developer City Council was how far to go to insure a good bottom line for investors. At the public hearing in August 1999, City Manager Blackman and Council Member Martini warmly supported Wasem’s argument that to justify the risk, the City should not only ante up free parking, but also impose conditions for any other new multiplexes that might later try to come in.

The final deal was a good one for Wasem and partners. Gulled by the vision of Roxy-driven downtown revitalization, the Council approved 20-years of free access to city parking for theater patrons along with a message of support for the Wasem monopoly in the form of an explicit requirement for “an economic study and a public hearing for new theater complexes.” An additional provision that would have also required an expensive Environmental Impact Report (EIR) was dropped only because the City Attorney pointed out that the City, not the new applicant, might have to bear the cost.

Was the deal a good one for the City? Arguably, downtown would be less vibrant if today it held only the 3rd Street Cinema, and maybe the United Artist complex, if the latter had survived at its Mendocino Ave. spot.

On the other hand, the City gave up substantial parking revenues, and the Roxy never became the hoped-for downtown magnet since most of its patrons come and go from the attached city garage without hanging around to shop or eat nearby. The departure of Traverso's from the Roxy's immediate environs is testimony to the latter point.

In 1999, the broader public interests – benefits of competition, variety of movie fare, cultural attractions and community engagement – were essentially absent from the Council's discussion. Ten years later, these elements are front and center because the Rialto’s decade of operation in the community has demonstrated their value, not least of which has been Boyd’s altruistic and generous support to a wide range of local social programs.

But in 2010, the investor bottom line is back with a vengeance. The arrangement by which Wasem assumed management of the Rialto property from its owners has allowed him to kick Boyd out as of August 31 and extend his theater monopoly.

When the Wasem/Tocchini partnership takes over, Santa Rosans may get an occasional art film at a "new" Rialto. Anything more forthcoming than that, however, will require a change of operating style that is hard to imagine and inconsistent with the partners' record to date.

For his part, Boyd has made clear he will explore every avenue that could lead to the Rialto’s staying on in Santa Rosa. The many fans of the theater and beneficiaries of its largesse are speaking out in his support and obviously will do whatever they can to help.

Public officials also need to step up to the plate. Big kudos to County Supervisor Shirlee Zane, who reportedly was quick off the mark to ask the developer of the RR Sq. SMART site whether a new venue for the Rialto would be a possibility there.

Santa Rosa city officials should forcefully join in -- looking for ways to give as big a boost to Boyd as the earlier Council gave to the Roxy backers.

The Downtown Asphalt Plant vs. SMART

2010-03-10T22:08:00.000-08:00

Backpedaling on the Station Area Plan - undermining SMART and TOD

Backroom politicking for special treatment is calling into question the depth of the City’s commitment to implement the Station Area Specific Plan (SASP).

Word is that a small group of property owners have been offered a ten-year exemption from SASP rezoning -- that's a sweetheart deal that would work to undermine not only the SASP itself, but also SMART and Transit-Oriented-Development (TOD). The proposal should be smartly rejected when and if it gets to the full Council.

The special pleaders are owners of properties, including downtown’s only asphalt plant along with light industrial shops, in Maxwell Court, located south of College Ave. between the railroad tracks and Dutton Ave. The parcels, lying about mid-way between the two projected SMART stations, are ideal for higher density residential and mixed uses to support the SMART vision and 21st century development close on the city center.

Not that the Maxwell Court owners are being forced to change anything for years to come. What’s there now can stay indefinitely, since the requirement to adapt to the new zoning would kick in only if a current property use (e.g., the asphalt plant or a machine shop) is discontinued for a specified period of time. The City has offered better treatment than the six-month grace period now in the City Code, but the Maxwell Court owners want way more than everyone else gets.

And it seems they have been promised extra special treatment with a blanket exemption from rezoning until 5 years after the SMART train is up and running – that adds up to a decade. Is such an exceptional break justified by the current economic woes? Hardly – last month's projection by the County Economic development Board is that the local economy will have bounced back higher than pre-recession levels by late 2011 or 2012.

What’s bad about being so generous to a small group of property owners without real justification is the message it sends about the City’s readiness to implement the Station Area Plan. Higher density, transit-oriented development is crucial to both support SMART and advance sustainability and climate protection goals.

In fact, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission was so impressed that it made the SASP environs a Priority Development Area, which markedly enhances the city’s eligibility for grant funding. Now is no time to change the City’s course.

There is also a question of equity for other property owners, notably in West End. They played by the rules when they sought exemptions during the SASP hearing process leading to Council approval in October 2007, but were turned down.

At the time, one Maxwell Court landlord also made an appeal, but failed to persuade the Council, chaired by Mayor Bob Blanchard, an enthusiastic supporter of the SASP vision.

The irony is that today's progressives, environmentalists and city planners had expected the present Council to be if anything more supportive than past Councils of the forward-looking principles embedded in the SASP.

It looks, however, like the Smart Growth vision approved by a pro-developer Mayor in 2007 is about to be walked back under the leadership of a progressive Mayor in 2010. That’s surely moving our fair city in the wrong direction.

Cutting City Costs

2010-03-01T22:49:00.000-08:00

Cutting City costs – the restructuring key

Last Tuesday’s (2/23) Council discussion of an early retirement incentive proposal made two things clear: A) to stay solvent the City desperately needs to cut staff positions and/or pay packages, and B) the proposed retirement incentive plan is something of a crap shoot.

Restructuring of the City's staffing pattern was touched on only lightly. Too bad, because that is the real key to progress – and that’s where the focus should be.

The underlying problem is that the Council must balance the General Fund budget by slashing another $8 to 9 million from expenditures this coming fiscal year, and more deep cuts look unavoidable again next year. Given that about 75% of the General Fund goes to personnel costs, the lion’s share has to come from some combination of cutting positions and compensation packages.

The retirement incentive would encourage eligible workers to leave now with a “golden handshake” bonus. For every participating employee, a position will be taken off the books. Voila! Money saved!

Wait! Not so fast, said some Council Members. It’s all too much like rolling dice – there is no way to tell which or how many of the 315 eligibles would bite. There could be very few takers or as many as 75, the maximum. Indeed, questioning brought out that the City might conceivably have to shell out well over $2 million for the bonuses.

Moreover, the payback would start only after a delay of about six months and wouldn’t be complete for a year or so. To bridge the gap, the bonuses would have to be paid from reserves, already projected to be down $7 million or more below target level by year’s end.

The hit on reserves was reason enough for the Council majority to defer action. They also wanted to learn whether an alternative, privately managed program called PARS could be used to string out the impact of any enhanced payouts to retirees.

Deferral was the right move, but the far better reason to hold off on golden handshakes is the Council has yet to address the real keystone of any long-term solution – namely, an overall restructuring plan for the City’s staffing pattern. Chief Financial Officer David Heath hinted at the vital missing piece when he remarked on Tuesday that the big picture is hard to see until the restructuring plan is known.

Heath’s comment was classic understatement. The fact is that within months the City will have to make extensive staffing table revisions and lay out how many employees at what grade and pay levels the City can afford...including public safety employees who are excluded from the incentive program. Until at least an outline of City-wide restructuring is on the table, everyone is whistling in the dark, and it doesn't make much sense to borrow money for an expensive sweetener to benefit a random few.

Restructuring on the scale needed is a humongous task. City employees have to be closely consulted and treated as fairly as possible, positions must be eliminated based on hard-nosed management principles, compensation packages must remain competitive, and of course the bottom line has to come out within the City’s ability to pay.

With the budget year only four months away, it’s high time to plan for serious restructuring - transparent to the Council, the public and above all the employees themselves.
..

Pay Cuts and Golden Handshakes

2010-02-19T10:32:00.000-08:00

City budget woes - pay cuts and golden handshakes

Given that the City is drowning in red ink, it is puzzling to see near $1 million worth of golden handshakes proposed on next Tuesday’s (2/23) Council agenda. Can such “sweeteners” be justifiable when all indications are that pay must be cut for serving city employees?

The proposal, set forth in the Council agenda item posted HERE, is to encourage early retirement by offering certain employees “one week’s base pay for each year of completed City service up to a maximum of $60,000. The average incentive payout is estimated to be closer to $35,000.”

The cost to the City is estimated as between $700,000 and $1 million. A hefty sum!

So, where does the money come from to pay for the incentives? The staff report says the program “will be funded by salary savings from participating departments,” presumably, the savings from what the report calls “vacant positions that can be eliminated from the budget” as a result of early retirements.

Stripped to the essentials, the point seems to be that a number of positions could be vacated and the City would save up to $1 million.

That’s badly needed money. If the positions can be carried as vacant, then why shouldn’t the City simply use its power to eliminate them now and put the money elsewhere? That would also put the City in a better position to address its ongoing structural deficit by reorganizing to achieve a more affordable, less top-heavy, staffing table in the future?

If that sounds draconian, it is. And it goes against the implication that the City needs an incentive to “encourage” early retirement. The staff report doesn’t say why encouragement is necessary, or why it is a better alternative to simply cutting out the positions, but the usual argument is that long-serving employees deserve compassionate treatment and should be rewarded for their exemplary contributions over the years.

That’s true. But as brought out in last year’s budget discussions, City pension costs have climbed well beyond our ability to pay, so they have to be scaled back with a two-tier hiring policy that reduces benefits for new hires, while allowing employees on the rolls to keep what they have .

The employees who would be encouraged to retire are in the first tier. One could say they already have a sweetener in the form of pension pay-outs on a level that most new hires will not enjoy. And cutting out the positions of employees eligible to draw generous pensions is hardly the same thing as dismissing a younger employee who has to head straight to the unemployment office.

It is of course desirable to give a golden handshake to old friends and loyal servants ... unless as in this case, the money to do so will at the end of the day be taken from the pay of those employees left behind.

The Exit Exam, the School Board and ...

2010-02-04T13:45:00.000-08:00

The Exit Exam, the School Board and ... District Elections

On February 10, the Santa Rosa School Board will re-look its policy that forbids high school students from walking in graduation until they pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), even if they have completed all other requirements. The Board’s action in 2007 made Santa Rosa the only district in Sonoma County that won’t offer a certificate of completion, which allows participation in graduation ceremonies, but is not equivalent to a diploma.

By state law, students must pass the CAHSEE to get a diploma. Board President Carvolth argued at the time of the Board's 2007 decision, that it would send a message to students saying “You can’t do it,” if the Board were to let them walk without passing the CAHSEE After a stormy session, she and like-minded board members voted 5-2 for what they evidently saw as upholding standards and providing the right encouragement.

On the other side, representatives and friends of the Latino community passionately argued that the focus should be on motivating Latino students to stay with it to the end in school, and on recognizing them when they do so. Latino family members come from all over to do just that for seniors at graduation time. To deny a certificate of completion to a handful of unsuccessful test-takers is culturally insensitive and unjustified -- and in real life, no one need fear that future employers or colleges will mistake a certificate of completion for a diploma.

Opinions may differ, but what one cannot dispute is that the impact of the policy falls disproportionately and unfairly on the Latino community. While over 90% of all seniors typically pass the CAHSEE, the few who don’t are almost all Latino kids, who grew up with Spanish spoken at home.

Thus, there are important issues of community input and minority representation involved here. But the School Board, which is elected at-large with all candidates running city-wide, has only one Latina – Laura Gonzalez. One of seven is 14.3%.

That’s way out of whack with today’s student population. The latest statistics posted on the Santa Rosa School District website are for October 2007, and show Latino enrollment near 31% for SR secondary schools and at 52.5% for elementary. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to read the significance of those numbers.

When the School Board takes up the matter again on Feb. 10, it should listen to Ms. Gonzalez and the voices of the Latino community. There is no compelling case to over-ride the views of those in our society most affected by the decision.

Which brings me to District Elections for School Boards. Just about a year ago, in the face of a lawsuit by the San Francisco-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, the School District in Madera County changed from at-large to district elections, and soon thereafter, 28 of 32 districts in Fresno County followed suit. The percentages of Latino students are much higher over in that part of the Central Valley, but the principle was the one at issue right here in Santa Rosa – are the views of diverse elements in the community being given due weight, and if not, is our current at-large voting system part of the problem?

The Political State of the City

2010-01-31T20:43:00.000-08:00

The Political State of the City – Our Local Tea Party?

A recent partisan attack on “elected officials” of the city and county calls for a closer look at what this local tea party is all about. Is there real substance to complaints about City Council economic policy, or is it just special interest pleading? And can it be set aside to help the Council deal with the budget crisis?

The latest salvo took the form of an op-ed piece (PD January 24) by the President of the Taxpayers Association, with the explicit endorsement of the Sonoma County Alliance and the North Bay Builders Exchange. The piece continued the rhetorical assault led by developer and construction interests that have tried in particular to paint the SR City Council as somehow unfriendly to business.

I say partisan and political because the hostile commentary and the PD coverage of it never seems to mention the Council majority’s support for local business. You will not find praise for such actions as the Mayor’s personal involvement in garnering $14 million early financing for RR Sq. projects, or the Council’s aggressive promotion of downtown business and support for the new GoLocal movement, or the Council majority’s role in protecting locally-owned businesses threatened by the Lowe’s big-box proposal, or the Mayor’s pro-active outreach to the business community and the Chamber of Commerce.

Ignoring those factors, the critics have hammered away on three main themes: namely what they see as too much environmental protection, a negative business climate and dangers of labor union influence. What are the germs of truth, if any, in these charges?

Let’s take environment first. The PD op-ed piece called on officials to “resist abuse of environmental laws.” Abuse?? The major controversies on this score in 2009 involved the Lowe’s, Fountaingrove Lodge and Dutra projects – at issue were considerations of unmitigatable traffic impacts, defense of heritage oaks and hillside vistas, and concern for use of restored wetlands.

The arguments in those cases hardly constituted “abuse of environmental laws” by rational definitions, but they are anathema to the old-line developer and construction interests. And, all the Santa Rosa development tussles have involved a range of considerations from neighbors’ concerns to local business to affordable housing. Although the PD’s Pete Golis grouses about an “environmental majority,” such an animal doesn’t exist in today’s world of multiple progressive interests.

Moving on with similar Rovian verbiage, the PD op-ed item alleged “growing antipathy toward private business.” Here, one major specific has been complaints about permitting requirements and there may be a germ of truth to it, but the City and the Council have in fact worked hard to be responsive and to “fast track” deserving projects. What’s missing from the picture as presented by developers is history – the City’s permitting procedures and requirements were set up by previous City Councils fully sympathetic to developer interests. It’s pure politicking to try to pin blame on the current Council.

The allegations about “antipathy” and “climate” also often cite the rejection of Lowe’s (despite the clear Council support for local business mentioned above) and Wal-mart (the result of a court case, not Council action) and sometimes the current Council’s questions about using $5 million or so in City funds for a 545-space downtown parking garage, which would be at best underutilized for years. In any case, the garage project, like the one pushed by previous very pro-developer Councils, failed because financing wasn’t to be found for such an iffy proposition – not because of Council action.

As for the third main theme, some of the most caustic language has been directed against labor initiatives. The recent Community Benefits Agreement for Sonoma Mountain Village sparked outrage against notions like local hire quotas and a living wage. Those aspects are broadly acceptable to a range of businesspersons in our city, but they conjure up nightmares for developers and builders seeking the lowest possible costs to maintain high profits.

What does all this add up to? In short, the political agenda going into 2010 has been artfully framed by pro-development interests that wrap themselves in the cloak of “business.”

That is political maneuvering, and it suggests local developers and construction moguls are more interested in November elections than working constructively with the Council of the day.

And that bodes ill for our fair city at a time when all sides need to work together with the interim City Manager to deal with a budget crisis that has very serious short- and long-term implications. Perhaps that is part of the developer-driven strategy since any cure for the on-going structural deficit will necessarily involve higher fees for development, which as the Public Works Director recently testified doesn’t pay its own way by a long shot, leaving taxpayers to make up the difference by funding new infrastructure and service demands.

Can the factions be pulled together? Doubtful, since developers have much more to gain by an election victory in November than by budget compromise in February. Presumably, they are also emboldened by the warm support they receive from a Press Democrat editorial policy mired in the 1990s.

Now that last point is a possible topic for the upcoming symposium “How Can New Media Empower Community for 2010?” - February 3 at 7 pm in the City Council Chambers. Come if you can.

Bob Blanchard and Maxwell Court

2010-01-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

Maxwell Court – What Would Bob Blanchard Do?

Bubbling just out of public view, a controversy over Station Area Plan land use is already clouded by red herring suggestions about who on the City Council is or isn’t “for business.” Before we all get sidetracked (again) by finger-pointing over Council splits, it is instructive to recall what the late Bob Blanchard -- one of the City’s most respected pro-development Mayors -- had to say about the Plan and its vision.

First, let’s quickly recap the issue. Within the Station Area Specific Plan (SASP), the area known as Maxwell Court, lying south of College between Cleveland Ave to the east and Dutton to the west, is currently zoned for light industrial, and now has a range of such uses from artist studios to asphalt plants. In October 2007, with Blanchard presiding, the City Council approved the SASP, including its provisions to rezone the Maxwell Court area to “Transit Village Medium,” which requires residential uses and does not permit industrial. The City is ready to begin implementation.

But belatedly, Maxwell Court property owners are mounting a full court press to stop rezoning and keep their industrial options open forever. They claim the Plan concept is unfair to them, in particular with requirements to eventually conform to the SASP Transit Village model, potential lack of alternative sites for their businesses and possible financing problems during any transition period. They want essentially to opt out of the SASP.

The problem is that keeping Maxwell Court indefinitely for industrial uses would put a huge dent in the SASP vision for development to capitalize on the SMART train, add attractive neighborhoods near downtown and help meet the city’s future housing needs. SASP proponents say legitimate needs of Maxwell Court land owners for financing capacity and alternative sites can be accommodated, the transition will be a long time in coming, and land values there are almost certain to increase over time.

So, is it really all that important to uphold the SASP vision when balanced against such commercial interests? Given the mistrust stirred up by politically-motivated charges against current Council Members, a good place to start deliberation is to ask what the unassailably pro-business Mayor Bob Blanchard was up to when he led approval of the SASP in the first place.

Blanchard was not a man to mince words. "This is a very big deal," he told the Press Democrat on the eve of the Council approval in 2007. "It lays out the strategy to develop a very significant area of town that would become the first transit-oriented development in Santa Rosa."

Did he know about Maxwell Court? Surely, because the proposed zoning change was a major attraction of the Plan at the time. The same PD article went on to note: “(The SASP) primary goal is allowing more residential units per acre, particularly in areas along Cleveland Avenue, Wilson Street and Sebastopol Road that now are mostly industrial.”

In short, Blanchard showed the way on this one with his unambiguous public pronouncement in support of the SASP vision – “a very big deal.” Now, two years later, let’s hope the notion of going back on the SASP can be put to rest without further ado, and the Maxwell Court folks will follow our late Mayor's lead. The starting point should be reconfirmation of the shared SASP vision, and from there it should not be impossible to find compromise, as Blanchard himself often sought to do, without sacrifice of principle.

Destructive PD criticism (cont.)

2010-01-12T15:49:00.000-08:00

Destructive PD criticism (cont.)

The Press Democrat is obsessed with the”split” on our City Council. The Council has in fact always been split because that's the way people have voted – the problem is not the split itself, but the unwillingness of the minority, abetted by the paper, to accept political losses graciously and move on to make constructive contributions.

Picking up on the 4-3 vote that chose Wayne Goldberg as interim City Manager, the PD editorial today (01/11) decried the Council "split" and went on to the inane and posturing conclusion that “it will take more than four votes” to persuade voters to accept the need for new tax revenues.

The editorial doesn’t assign blame directly for the split – but the commentary follows on Pete Golis’ recent backhand slap at what he misleadingly calls the Council’s “environmental majority.” And it is consistent with the paper’s on-going Foxy campaign of implicit support for the Council minority, olde developer friends and City employee union leaders (while slamming other unions right and left).

The PD piece after praising out-going City Manager Kolin for extending “best wishes and support” to Goldberg, winds up with a pious expression of hope that Council Members will work together.

If the editorial writers really understood the import of those words, they would tell Council Member Sawyer that it's not too late to apologize for his petulant and disrespectful public attack on the Mayor’s leadership when he came out on the short end of the 4-3 “split” vote on Goldberg. And they would publicly call upon the Council minority to follow Kolin’s example in deed and word.

Finally, the PD editorial page would do the city a service by unambiguously pledging its own support for Goldberg and the Mayor’s efforts to stay focused on substance.

SR Groundwater Cold War and Zane’s Diplomatic Foray

2010-01-10T16:36:00.000-08:00

Groundwater Cold Wars and Zane’s Diplomatic Foray

Kudos to Shirlee Zane for bravery and diplomacy. Her op-ed piece (Press Democrat 01/04/10) broke the taboo on serious discussion of groundwater management, and she did it with the soft touch of appeal for cooperation from all stakeholders. Regulating groundwater in the Santa Rosa plain is a long overdue no-brainer, so one hopes that Zane’s initiative will stiffen our Utilities Department to stick its oar in these waters – better late than never.

Groundwater under the Santa Rosa Plain is becoming increasingly critical for Santa Rosa’s future water supply. This is so not just because the City may need to rely more on wells, but also because goundwater is seamlessly related to our main supply from the Russian River – what happens to one affects the other. And contamination locally is also a looming issue according to the feds.

As things stand today, there are no meaningful controls on well-drilling in our fair city or county. Anyone can drill virtually anywhere. The most graphic illustration of today’s unfairness and uncertainly is surely the picture of a retired couple holding on to the family home with its little old well, who wake up one morning to find that an unrestricted big-bore hole sunk nearby overnight by a rich agriculturalist or developer has sucked their well dry. And virtually every such new well pulls some water from our rivers or lakes.

In Santa Rosa, the water ante has been upped considerably by new doubts as to Santa Rosa’s supplies. The latest Utilities Dept. assessment lists groundwater as one of the four sources we must henceforth rely on. The City has been drilling test holes and the US Geological Survey is studying local groundwater basins.

Santa Rosa has 1/3 of all country residents, and our Utilities Department should have been out in front on groundwater. It is high time to get started on some sort of regime to manage this valuable resource.

In fact, it made sense years ago to do that, but California being California, there has been a virtual cold war over water supplies, and most authorities, including our Utilities Department, have simply bowed to powerful agriculture and development interests. Only 20 or so local governments, mostly in the South, have established Adjudicated Groundwater Basins as legal mechanisms for some measure of central regulation.

The diplomat in Zane led her to start with proposal for stakeholders to get together and consider a voluntary non-regulatory plan similar to that recently adopted for Sonoma Valley. Eminently sensible! I hope it works, but the realist in me says the shadow of an Adjudication Basin helped make the Sonoma Valley agreement possible, and someone needs to keep the big stick handy, if out of sight, when talk starts about an arrangement for the Santa Rosa Plain.

More to the point at this stage, however, our Board of Public Utilities should jump in the boat with Zane and push away from the dock on the groundwater issue. There is no need to hold up a declaration in principle in order to wait for results of the USGS survey or resolve the contretemps with the County over the pipeline. No matter how much groundwater we have or don’t have, it should be managed for the good of all.

Trash Hauling and Santa Rosa Politics

2010-01-07T17:34:00.000-08:00

Trash Hauling and Santa Rosa Politics

It was touted as a great deal, but does the proposed no-bid extension of the City’s trash hauling contract really contain a free lunch for the starving General Fund? Frankly, it is still very hard to tell, given the political lard and oblique presentation served up at the City Council session last Tuesday (01/05). Hopefully, the next round will provide a better fix on just what the deal means for budget benefit and future rate hikes.

As for politics in the background, city negotiator Scoles reported that local political consultant Herb Williams was a principal negotiator on the other side for the proposal, which franchise holder North Bay Corp. (NBC) put on the table way back in April 2008. (In 2008, Williams managed the winning political campaigns of three current Council Members, including Ernesto Olivares who reported nearly $7,000 in outstanding campaign debts owed to Williams’ firm as of June 30, 2009.)

Many of Tuesday’s comments mirrored politicized approaches familiar from last year’s election campaign. Partisans ignored substance to make appeals for uncritical acceptance of the NBC proposal, and one took an off-topic swipe at the Council majority for past opposition to a big box store. That faction included the City’s big three employee labor unions – civilian, police and fire – which all have reps on the Political Action Committee of the pro-developer Sonoma County Alliance.

In the same vein, a number of partisan speakers strongly implied that NBC’s proposal was exceptionally generous in large part because the company’s owner, James Ratto, loves our fair city. While Mr. Ratto should get full credit for donations to local charities, the rhetoric was still a bit over the top for some, who would cynically observe it is easy to be philanthropic if you can, as Ratto did in 2009, pocket a tidy $1.3 million gain from selling to the City for $4.1 million a downtown building purchased only four years earlier for $2.8 million – and do that in a real estate market that had otherwise plunged like a rock.

It is not that partisanship was absent from the other side, namely those opposing the extension. The major ethical difference on Tuesday, however, was that opponents were not arguing to put City money in particular pockets, but rather to open the process up to competition. The bottom line, as some pointed out, was that ratepayers and Council Members, partisans or otherwise, cannot truly judge whether the extension is a good deal unless they have some clear evidence that competitors would not in fact offer up more advantageous bids for the franchise.

Competitive bidding aside, there were in fact many unanswered questions about the environmental and financial aspects of the contract and all its legal perplexities. The Council Subcommittee was not given a chance to review the document until mid-November 2009, leaving far too little time for a serious look at the complex, pre-negotiated package before it was laid before the full Council on January 5.

Moreover, the City staff presentation was clearly one-sided, written to “sell” the deal rather than present the Council with straight analysis of facts and options.

Mayor Gorin zeroed in on the City’s flimflam move to make a ten-year extension sound like a five-year extension. Other wily word-smithing in the staff report talked of “free” street sweeping services, which are in fact to be provided in the first instance as an indirect way of paying off penalties claimed by the City after past year audits of NBC performance shortfalls. And any non-lawyer ratepayer would find it nearly impossible to figure out how large the inevitable ratehikes will be and when they will hit.

Still, the City budget is hurting bad, and the ten-year extension is worth a lot of money to NBC. As Council Member Wysocky suggested, today’s tough times may yet justify a no-bid extension if -- and it's a big IF -- key outstanding issues can be resolved. Five Council Members agreed on the need for more thorough evaluation -- only Sawyer and Olivares were ready to sign off without further ado.

This franchise contract is worth big bucks and a no-bid extension decision should not be taken on the basis of partisan faith, slippery-worded staff summaries or incomplete Council review. When the matter does come back, the Council should be sure three major questions are satsfactorilyanswered: what are the real net benefits and guarantees; what exactly should ratepayers expect to pay and when; and has every reasonable measure been built in to promote recycling and environmental sustainability.

Why are they so angry?

2009-12-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

Why are they so angry?

When tough times loom, Americans are supposed to accept political disappointments gracefully and pledge their help to the common good.

Not so in Santa Rosa. After last Tuesday's (12/15) City Council vote to select Wayne Goldberg as interim City Manager, Council Member Sawyer loosed a venomous attack on the majority, and his two like-minded Council colleagues along with the Press Democrat editorial staff also chose the route of unseemly pique.

Why such anger over an interim appointment for only six months or so? What’s the problem? Process? Personal qualifications? Policy? Or perhaps, as Mike McCoy slyly hinted in January when Sawyer was ousted from the County Transportation Authority, it’s just that the Olde Guardistas have trouble realizing they lost the election last year?

Take the process issue. Sawyer unleashed a string of querulous adjectives to berate the process and then attacked the Mayor personally on the point. But Mayor Gorin pointed out that the Council “as a whole” had agreed on the procedure and on whom to interview – in the end, Sawyer’s only discernable objection was that he didn’t like the outcome.

The outcome was, of course, Goldberg over Scoles. Council Member Bender and the PD editorial cited Scoles experience acting as City Manager. Okay, but on the other side, there’s no denying that Goldberg’s long service with the City gives him superior knowledge of the issues across the board. It is an unreasonable political stretch to argue that Scoles was somehow the obligatory choice.

Council Member Olivares said he feared an adverse impact on City staff. That too seems an unreasonable political stretch, given that Scoles is little known to most City staff, having operated pretty much out of sight and out of mind.

How about policy? That gets closer to the bone, since the developer community cited slow processing when they engineered Goldberg’s transfer out of the Community Development Department. But with Goldberg long gone from the processing loop, developers are still yawping about delays in project approvals – the issue was never Goldberg himself, but how much weight should be given to environmental, design and community considerations.

Raking up those old coals, the PD said Goldberg’s appointment is divisive because it makes pro-developer folks unhappy. But to appoint the relatively unknown Scoles over Goldberg would be even more divisive by offending the substantial constituencies that admire Goldberg’s record with the City and saw his transfer out of CD as kow-towing to special interests.

Whatever one’s perspective on who was the better man for the job, there was no overwhelming reason to reject the decision of the Council majority. There was no prospect of reversal, and the rational next step with the City’s interests at heart would have been to set aside differences and pledge cooperation. To do otherwise could only exacerbate the divisions and compound the difficulties.

But emotion and frustration obviously overrode the rational.

And what the minority three and the PD rejected was not the selection process, but the electoral process. Council Member Wysocky insightfully noted that Council Members are responsible to the electorate – and all seven presumably voted with that in mind. The decision should be respected as such.

It’s probably too much to expect apologies in the circumstances, but not too late to recognize that democracy was at work and start the New Year off accordingly.

Downtown Meets Economic Reality

2009-12-09T23:51:00.000-08:00

Downtown Meets Economic Reality

The last of the questionable schemes initiated by previous City Councils to develop downtown has had its showdown with economic reality and flunked the financing test. The White House hotel cum parking garage project was abandoned today (12/9) by both the City and the developer, hopefully allowing our fair city to move on from the dreary and unsuccessful visions of a high-rise auto-dependent city center. We've had better advice, and it's time to take it.

The city's disastrous downtown planning sequence started nearly a decade ago when pro-development forces long in control of the City Council decided high-rise building projects and an over-sized subsidized garage would best befit our status as the biggest little city between Portland and San Francisco. After winning a 6 to 1 majority on the Council in 2004, they reworked the zoning code to encourage buildings of ten stories and higher for downtown, and pressed ahead on a new parking garage of at least 545 spaces (talk at one time reached 800 or more).

The expense of such structures made them unrealistic from the get-go, but in the heady days before the credit crunch, the sky was the limit for developers, financiers and Olde Guard leaders on the City Council. The City insistence on a big co-located garage killed the first White House project proposal when cost outran financing. More or less the same overall problem seems to have doomed the latest hotel proposal, since City officials cited difficulties of getting “assurances the hotel and a garage would get built together,” along with “credit market” and construction “uncertainties.” Economic realities, not progressive City Council views, proved decisive

Nonetheless, the Press Democrat story (12/9) couldn’t resist mention of Lowe’s and WalMart as if the earlier demise of these two projects was in the same basket as the failure of the downtown proposal. Any such implication is economic nonsense – the fact is that our downtown and hundreds like it have been slowly strangled by competition from just those kind of big-box stores and shopping malls. Even pro-development Council Member John Sawyer had to concede that it was Barnes and Noble, not progressive pressures, that started his downtown news-store business on the road to closure.

In any case, the White House project is a goner, and the current Council will have its first real opportunity to put forth a viable downtown vision. Technically, the14-story Comstock high-rise along Third St. is still on the table, but almost no one thinks it will get financing ...ever.

So, how can our fair city make economic reality work for downtown development instead of against it? In 2007 the visiting Mayors Institute on City Design recommended use of the arts and nature to enhance the downtown setting, spoke against more parking construction, praised the idea of a city cultural center, and urged tough action to bring absentee landlords to the table. Advice from progressive developer Triad Communities ran on similar lines, stressing the need for innovative approaches to reject 1980s auto-dependency and get with 21st century sustainability, SMART, perhaps a City Cultural Center anchor, walkability and innovative planning.

These themes also resonate with State and Federal programs coming to the fore in support of transit oriented development, alternative transportation, energy efficiency, complete streets, and higher, but realistic, housing densities. At the same time, projections of a gradual economic recovery with stricter credit guidelines argue for doable projects that would look more like RRSq., 4th St. and “complete” city neighborhoods, than the skyscrapers of the San Francisco financial district.

In short, it’s high time to put paid to high-rises and high-capacity garages – and to reconsider good advice that’s been there all along.

2009-12-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

Water rate hikes

Water costs flow uphill it seems, and we undoubtedly need to pay more to keep us and our gardens from going thirsty through 2010. Justification for a second round of rate hikes in 2011 is, however, less clear to many ratepayers, who feel caught in a Catch 22, somehow penalized to pay more because they used less water this past summer.

The case is pretty persuasive for the 8% water and 7% sewer rate increases to start in January 2010. For starters, Santa Rosans cannot avoid paying the recent 19.9% increase in the cost of the water supplied to us by the Sonoma County Water Authority (SCWA). On top of that, the Utilities Department has made funding commitments that cannot be turned around overnight – like bond service and maintenance contracts. Given all the City’s other fiscal problems, 2010 is not the time to force our budget to eat the County’s price hike as well as rob Peter to pay Paul for financial commitments, even if there may have been a better way to manage things in recent years.

That said, our City water officials need to present a much clearer picture of how our water works work to get stronger citizen support for further increases. For one thing, the incentive to conserve will evaporate if the end result is seen to be just more rate hikes; and for another ratepayers may well revolt if they do not understand why the rates keep going up and up.

The Utilities Department has some great water conservation projects and a fine record of delivering quality water to the tap. But its information on costs and rates often seems incomplete at best, and its budget explanations are confusing.

Take for example, last February’s City staff report advising the Council a summer ‘Stage 1' conservation program was essential. It all sounded free – the program, said the report, required “no changes to the rate structure,” and “the Catastrophic Reserve will be used if needed...to compensate for revenue reductions and increased expenses.” End of explanation – leaving ratepayers on their own to figure out this was all just like using a credit card, and higher rates to make up for falling revenues were surely going to come due before too long.

Also short of info, the staff report for tomorrow’s City Council meeting says “the wastewater enterprise’s largest single expenditure is debt service payments. Debt service costs rose by over $3 million in 2009/10 due to the structuring of older debt service payments and the beginning of principal payments on newer debt.” That’s pretty skimpy information for such an important chunk of the action – a lack of detail that begs questions like how old debt got structured to cost more now, what the newer debt is for, and whether it might have been spread out more advantageously.

As for official explanations of rates, the overlap of billing categories led to the confusion about why saving water this summer means higher rates. The City sets its usage fee to collect more per gallon than it has to pay for that gallon. The higher fee encourages conservation, and the “profit” is used to pay for part of fixed system costs. The separate “fixed fee” entry on the on the bill is there only to “help”cover maintenance and repair – it’s set too low to meet all such costs, so when revenue from usage goes down, we also run short of money for maintenance, etc. Not rocket science, but it took some of us a while to get it.

Also difficult to grasp is the connection fee – the City info sheet for the Dec. 8 hearing says “Costs associated with growth and new development are paid for from connection fees.” Okay....but
City officials told the PD (12/06 article), that the recent big drop in connection fees means a loss of “revenue to operate the system.” Makes it hard to see what pays for what.

The uncertainties in the rate hike explanations are compounded by doubts over where the City is going with its lawsuit against SCWA, whether there is really enough water for a Santa Rosa with 233,000 residents (vs. our current 160,000 or so), how to manage groundwater in our basin, and what the ultimate costs will be for the expensive recycled water facilities looming ever larger in our future.

The bottom (water) line is that we can blame SCWA’s wholesale price increases to justify the first round of 2010 rate hikes. From there, the ratepayer revolt in Rohnert Park and one still brewing in Petaluma suggest our Board of Public Utilities would be wise to come up with more convincing explanations to underpin the additional increases proposed for 2011 and beyond.

Community Values – the PD and the ADC

2009-12-01T22:38:00.000-08:00

Community Values – the PD and the ADC

A Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) is a contract between on one side a developer who agrees to provide certain benefits, and on the other side a community group or groups that agree to support the developer’s project.

Recently, signatures on our County’s first-ever CBA committed the Sonoma Mountain Village (SMV) project in Rohnert Park to give preferential treatment to six labor unions; pay prevailing wages; support the SMART train; and meet the highest green-building standards. In return the Accountable Development Coalition (ADC) as the community side of the deal pledged to back the project, including with testimony at public hearings.

Are CBAs like this a good thing or a bad thing? If you support community engagement in governance, CBAs are a great new “emerging tool,” pioneered in California and coming into use across the country. Community organizations can apply them to obtain benefits – such as prevailing wages, low-income housing, environmental protections and child care – which are otherwise not necessarily assured by local governments in the traditional approval process.

On the opposing side, some developers and construction companies fulminate against CBAs as merely mobilization of political influence to require that projects use union labor. The local developer and construction industry establishment was quick with harsh criticism -- one veteran Santa Rosa Planning Commissioner even likened ADC to the Chicago Mafia. Old ways die hard around here.

For its part, the pro-development Press Democrat editorial staff found it near impossible to say much good about the SMV-ADC agreement. Its opinion piece (11/30) would only concede that “Such a deal may make sense for a private developer who’s looking to minimize opposition and to market its project a certain way.” Not exactly praise, or even recognition of benefits for the community at large.

But the PD did acknowledge in its backhanded way that the next local CBA could “benefit the entire community not just the members of (ADC). ” That remark referred to discussions now underway between community groups and developers of the SMART site around Railroad Square. In context, the PD editorial was expressing concern over what it called the “growing power and influence” of the ADC, and the SMART Board's reported preference for ADC as the negotiating partner for the CBA-to-be.

In fact, the ADC has not insisted on being the exclusive representative for the community side of a SMART site CBA. Nonetheless, there is confusion over whether SMART wants it that way, how and with whom the two different developers will proceed on negotiations, and whether West End Neighborhood Association reps can get their oar in to argue that any affordable housing be for seniors only.

Sorting out those disparate interests will not be easy, but the inherent messiness of any such negotiating process should not obscure the value and purpose of CBAs: namely, constructive community engagement.

The Codding-ADC handshake attracted so much attention precisely because it was a dramatic change from past practice. The accomplishment responded to persistent grassroots pressure "to greatly increase citizen and neighborhood participation and responsibility” (as the notion is expressed in Santa Rosa's City Charter).

The ADC’s strength is that it is working to achieve that objective with a broadly-based labor, environmentalist and social justice alliance. The Press Democrat’s failing is that it doesn’t seem to have much notion of what community engagement means or how to go about “greatly increasing” it.

Square Deal in the Works for Downtown?

2009-11-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

Square Deal in the Works for Downtown?

The committee working on reunification of Courthouse Square -- having priced the full project well out of reach for the foreseeable future -- is considering moving from gab to action with a simplified first stage which would close off the square itself, but without any fancy bells, whistles or waterwalls.

Some kind of phased approach has considerable promise, but the latest initiative has serious drawbacks and the Courthouse Sq. jury of interested citizens seems once again on its way to hopeless deadlock. Can our fair city find a way to move to early closure?

Let’s start by getting up to date.

First, what’s the ultimate plan? As square watchers know, planning has been steadily moving forward, based on a tree-studded design with a huge glass waterfall wall, an arbor of lighting overhead, and pavilion areas for performances and gatherings. Neighborhood participants on the committee even managed after hard slugging to get some facilities in there for children.

What about traffic? City staff have done a lot of good work on that issue. They have put forward credible proposals to detour vehicles around a future closed-off square via B and E Streets, and the initial plans for changes to B Street and Healdsburg Ave. are already well along.

And the price tag? The cost of constructing the grand new square itself has ballooned to somewhere around $14 million since it was approved less than three years ago. And we all know it won't stop there!

Who pays? The Council has promised that zero dollars of the $14 million (or however much) will come from the City’s General Fund. Boosters believe money will be found under philanthropic and government grant trees like the $25 million that funded the Prince Greenway, named after its most generous donor. Some of the rest of us are skeptical about the money-raising appeal (and symbolism) of a giant waterwall in the age of sustainability – the Prince Greenway was quite a different kettle of fish.

So, what’s the new proposal? In order to get the project off the ground, so to speak, the idea is reportedly to tap city redevelopment funds for a few hundred thousand to close off the square, fill the street with gravel or grass, and hire a couple of staff persons to program crowd-pleasing activities.

Will it fly? To no one’s surprise, sides are squaring off for and against the rush to closure on grounds that either it goes too far or not far enough. Some fear it’s premature to run the risk of scaring off shoppers in tough economic times, especially without some exceptional measure to revitalize the dead zone on the west side (such as by reopening Exchange Street, which originally ran along the western edge). Using redevelopment money for temporary program staff is also facing a very tough sell.

For other square-watchers, it would be better to try a series of temporary closures, say over weekends, to test the traffic flow and reassure the public. Traffic aside, 75% of Santa Rosans, according to a budget survey last year, were leery of the reunification plan fearing an eventual tax bite – the idea of raiding redevelopment funds at this juncture will strike many as mocking the promise of no City money (technically of course, redevelopment money is not the General Fund, but still...).

The underlying problem, it seems to me, is not so much the split in the square, but the splits among downtown stakeholders. A second major effort to bring Courthouse Square business interests together into a Business Improvement District failed recently amid bitter wrangling. More broadly, the kernel of public support for reunification was never strong and has been greatly undermined by the grand cost of the grand design.

Truth be told, I like the idea of reunifying the square as a place for happenings, and to recapture some of our city’s sense of history and character. An early trial effort – weekend or holiday closures – could move us off the dime.

If even that is not possible, maybe it’s time to ..uh...go back to square one.

2009-11-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

Sorting through the Garbage Franchise

Our fair city’s franchise contract for garbage collection is a big deal - reportedly worth “between $150 and 200 million” in business over its first ten year period ending in 2012. So, it’s fair to take a close look at the City Administration's recommendation that tomorrow (11/17) the City Council approve giving the current contractor, North Bay Corp., in effect another ten years from 2012 to 2022 without competitive bidding.

The staff Report (available here) presents what sounds like a good deal that would provide “financial benefit” to the City of about $4.9 million annually and another onetime $590,000. But those figures include money the City would get anyway from fees and audit claims -- the important question is really what’s the net benefit, and I for one have not been able to sort that out from the City’s presentation.

For starters, the word-smithing of the City staff Report comes across like a company sales pitch. It specifies a five-year extension, but it’s really for ten years since the City would be required to offer a second five years if the company is in compliance with the contract – that’s pretty artificial when you ask yourself what would the City do at any point if the company was not in compliance with the contract? A five + five formula is easier to sell, it seems, than a simple ten.

Also, a rate impact table in the staff report says Santa Rosa “currently has very competitive collection rates.” But the numbers all compare our city to other much smaller local jurisdictions, and one is left to wonder why Santa Rosa isn’t benefiting more from economies of scale.

More importantly, the Report makes references to unspecified amounts claimed by the City from audit findings for 2008 and about $600,000 still claimed from 2005-2007. It is, however, impossible to tell from the Report what payments North Bay is making to satisfy these claims -- there are references, but no numbers, on the one hand to “providing additional uncompensated services” and on the other to "outstanding issues," apparently including unresolved claims.

The new street-sweeping service is presumably not an audit claim trade-off, since the Deputy City Manager told the PD that North Bay would have the right to “recoup” those and other costs from ratepayers. So, the street-sweeping change-over is just a clever way, I suppose, of switching the cost of street-sweeping from tax revenues to trash collection customers. An interesting approach that's not discussed, however, anywhere in the Report.

In any case, the heart of the matter is whether a sweetheart no-bid extension is justified to help out our crisis-ridden General Fund. The answer to that would seem to require some discussion of why the City hasn't sought, or isn't seeking, higher franchise returns through competitive bidding. It would also help to have clearer data on inflow to the General Fund from settling of audit claims against North Bay, and a better understanding of whether there are other options advantageous to the City for the street-sweeping switcheroo.

Finally, there is in the background an issue of transparency and public engagement. The 11/17 Council agenda item says the North Bay contract extension request has been “reviewed by the Council's Solid Waste Subcommittee.” That’s a pretty skimpy report from a subcommittee of unspecified membership and (best I can tell) unpublicized meetings concerning an extension proposal first made way back in April 2008 for one of the City's biggest contracts.

Having served on the Budget Deficit Advisory Group through last year’s crisis, I am keenly aware of the desperate need to shore up the General Fund. But, to belabor the point deliberately, the City Council needs to be sure the City is getting its full due from a no-bid extension for a franchise contract that ultimately involves upwards of $200 million in business over its projected ten year life.

The Press Democrat and Fox News

2009-11-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

Fox in the News at the Press Democrat

The hallmarks of biased news – exemplified by the Fox media empire – are selectivity and leading questions. The Press Democrat is no Fox, but the paper can tilt away from objectivity when it comes to its favored developers and projects.

The PD rushed the basics into print yesterday (11/3), when it learned Santa Rosa is losing Jeff Kolin, one of California’s most respected City Managers (currently President of the City Managers’ Department of the League of California Cities). That's an important story for our fair city.

But it only took a few lines for its staff reporter to get to the spin: “Kolin, 57, said his decision had nothing to do with disagreements with the council over development. Many observers viewed Kolin as a pro-business voice at City Hall, one that sometimes conflicted with the current council majority, which critics say has stifled economic growth.”

The leading question about “disagreements” works as a set up for the reference to “many observers” and harsh “critics.” Hmmm.... no names given, but do we hear echoes of prominent PD coverage given to Keith Woods and William Gallaher who objected loudly when the City demanded revisions of the latter’s out-sized tree-whacking project for Fountaingrove?

Surely not views of the developers of the on-going Railroad Square project, for which the new Council helped get almost $15 million in financing.

Nor voices of the many local businessmen whom the Council vigorously defended by short-stopping a bigbox application.

“Stifled economic growth”??? – give me a break.

The article goes on to selectively discuss a Kolin-Council exchange over a favored PD project, the White House garage. Sure, there’s room in the piece somewhere for this angle, but right up front with very little context?

Once you get past this PD version of sexy news content and read on down the page, you find out that the incumbent of the Beverly Hills job is getting paid $325,000 vs. Kolin’s current $230,000. Do you suppose he would have passed up that kind of salary differential if it hadn’t been for those “disagreements” with the City Council? I doubt it! Oh, and by the way, the PD adds discreetly, Kolin has family in the South.

Don’t get me wrong – the PD has some fine professional reporters, both veteran and younger writers, on whom I rely heavily for objective news about what’s going on in Santa Rosa. Call me old-fashioned and boring, but on stories like this, I do wish the PD would be less Fox-y and more NYTimes-y.

2009-09-19T22:39:00.000-07:00

The Day the Water Bubble Burst

On September 15, 2009, the Sonoma County water bubble burst when Supervisors voted to deep-six a grand design, known as the “Water Plan,” intended to increase future supplies of the wet stuff. After over 15 years of work, the Sonoma County Water Authority (SCWA) no longer saw any prospect of success for the Plan’s central elements: an application to the State for more diversions from the Russian River and building a pipeline to move more water from Lake Sonoma to consumers like those in Santa Rosa.

County Supervisors, acting in their dual capacity as SCWA Directors, bowed to funding and environmental problems. The pipeline and associated facilities would cost $600 million or more, and a recent federal “Biological Opinion” is forcing SCWA not only to reduce water flows in one of its major conduits, Dry Creek, but also to rehab the stream at a cost that could exceed $100 million. Factor in greenhouse gas considerations (from pumping) along with a probable decrease of supply from Eel River diversions, and the SCWA Water Plan could no longer be kept afloat.

In the short term, Santa Rosans won’t go thirsty. The City’s 2008 Water Supply Assessment (WSA) credibly asserted we can sustain projected population growth until 2015 with existing supplies. In fact, said the WSA, those existing supplies can carry us until 2018, as long as the City refrains from connecting up a significant number of services that now use private wells.

Against the above background, it’s hard to grasp why Santa Rosa officials asked the courts to prevent SCWA from withdrawing its water rights application and abandoning the Water Plan. To a water issue newbie, neither of these objectives made much sense – the State was virtually certain to refuse to give SCWA more water rights, and the pipeline really would cost too much money, not to mention adverse environmental impacts. No surprise then, that the judge tossed the City suit overboard.

In their defense, however, city officials were pursuing more subtle objectives. One was the legal argument that any local authority in California should hold its place in a water rights queue to protect its claim in the event that an odd drop unexpectedly becomes available later. An SCWA press release suggested some flexibility on this issue, so the City may have scored a small point.

A second City objective was to buy time to wring more specific information out of SCWA for redoing city plans that depend heavily on SCWA water supplies in the out years from 2015 to 2035. This is far more critical than it might appear, because in all this, Santa Rosa's serious underlying problem, greatly aggravated by the pipeline’s disappearance, is to demonstrate the City will have enough water to carry out its current General Plan. That document projects a population increase from just over 160,000 today to more than 233,000 in 2035 -- and that's a lot of new water faucets.

The City's 2008 Water Supply Assessment, mentioned above, was required by law (SB 610) to identify adequate future water for all development foreseen in the General Plan. The WSA asserted that after existing supplies are tapped out in 2015/18, enough water could be found from a combination of SCWA and groundwater supplies plus, if necessary, recycled water and conservation. Sounds good, but with or without the pipeline, this formulation masked some serious causes for doubt -- shaky assumptions about SCWA projections, unknowns about groundwater sustainability, and uncertainties about public willingness to accept “stringent” conservation measures as well as potentially high costs of recycle programs.

Put another way, the WSA relied on buckets of “paper water;” that is to say, it assumed supplies that most probably won’t in fact be available when the time comes to open additional taps. But pro-growth City Council Members (and County Supervisors) for years have encouraged optimistic supply projections like those in the now defunct “Water Plan” in order to justify expansive development. When the WSA came up for approval in November 2008, the Council Members in power before last year’s election readily signed off on its questionable long range findings – except for Council Member Jacobi, who voted “no.”

That continued the traditional pattern. But now that the bubble has burst, what comes next for Santa Rosa?

If the City faces up to new realities, it will urgently revisit the 2008 WSA and do a lot more than just rework SCWA supply numbers. It must begin to formulate a groundwater management regime (recommended by the Sonoma County Grand Jury in 2004), and take whatever preliminary steps it can to get a handle on groundwater use until essential data comes in from studies to be completed in 2010. It must get moving with new recycle programs and “off peak” storage facilities, while laying out clear scenarios for ratepayers so they can evaluate fee increases required to finance such facilities. It must help people better understand what the limits might be for conservation, and show how its burdens (and benefits) can be fairly distributed.

Above all, the City must relook development plans for the years after 2015/18 and meet the spirit as well as the letter of recent State laws (SB 610 and SB 212) designed to assure that enough real, wet, water will be there when faucets are turned on in 2035.

City Council Campaign Debts

2009-09-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

City Council Candidate Campaign Debts – Do They Matter?

Does it matter whether the campaign committee of a City Council Member owes money to the firm of a consultant who happens also to advise clients with a financial interest in official City decisions? The question has been asked before – the latest campaign finance reports raise the issue anew and bring to mind suggestions made during the campaign itself for a lobbyist registration ordinance.

In 2005, a Press Democrat article by Mike McCoy profiled local political and business consultant Herb Williams. Under the subheading, “CONCERNS OVER INFLUENCE,” the article reported, “The sometimes-dual representation has raised concerns about the influence Williams wields, particularly in Santa Rosa.”

The PD story continued, “Those who know Williams said the postelection bond he forms with those he helps elect provides him and his clients with one clear-cut advantage - access.” McCoy quoted a former Petaluma Council Member as saying, “There is no question you are loyal to those you go to war with. Is he (Williams) hired by people because he has access? Undoubtedly.”

Not much has changed in the Santa Rosa electoral picture to reassure those who shared the concerns reported by McCoy over four years ago. Williams still manages campaigns and reportedly consults for local firms with bottom lines affected by City decisions. And “postelection bonds,” to take a phrase from the PD article, seem evident in the most recent Recipient Committee Campaign Statements (Forms 460) on receipts and expenditures covering the period from January 1 through June 30, 2009; the reports are on the city website here.

According to the Form 460 filing, Council Member Ernesto Olivares’ campaign committee owed Delphi – Williams’ firm – a minimum of $6,946.02 from beginning to end of the January through June period. That amount was listed for unpaid bills as of June 30 covering professional services, postage, delivery and messenger service. Campaign committees of Council Members Sawyer and Bender also both reported paying off bills to Delphi sometime after January 1, but in their cases, there were no debts left unpaid as of June 30.

The Form 460 filed by the committee of another Williams 2008 City Council campaign client, Bobbi Hoff, shows her campaign owed Delphi $8,560.47 from the beginning through the end of the January-June period. Ms. Hoff lost the election, so she is not a City Council Member, but her website says she currently (09/10/09) “serves on the City of Santa Rosa Refuse Committee.” The refuse collection arrangement in Santa Rosa is a multi-million dollar deal – in the words of a March 2009 Press Democrat editorial, one of the “most lucrative franchises controlled by local government.” The paper has also reported in the past that Williams has represented the franchise holder.

All this seems relevant to what McCoy and his Petaluma friend were talking about when it came to “concerns over influence” and "postelection bonds." Although there is nothing in the snippets of information on Forms 460 to show that anyone has done anything untoward, in my 30 years as a Federal Government employee, I was advised many times that even if everything is 100+ percent above board, appearances matter.

Campaign finance regulation is a slippery beast, and only so much can be done at the local level – we already have a $500 limit on individual contributions and a $45,000 cap on total campaign spending will kick in next year. Along with local ordinances, California law controls many aspects of campaign finances, but it is incomplete or ambiguous on certain key points.

That still leaves the other half of the “sometimes-dual representation” issue pointed up by the Press Democrat noted above. That arises when an individual or his/her firm consults not only for candidates, but also for other clients with financial interests in City business.

One mechanism to shed some light on who’s who in such situations is a lobbyist registration ordinance. A number of California municipalities require lobbyists to register – such ordinances can be enacted and implemented at virtually no cost to the city budget, relying for enforcement on State perjury laws and/or the simple expedient of banning anyone caught in a violation from doing further business with the City.

The idea of a lobbyist registration ordinance for Santa Rosa was broached in our 2008 City Council campaign, but seems to have since disappeared from public screens. The recent Form 460 filings suggest it might be worthwhile to pull it up again.

Pro-business City Council

2009-09-02T17:01:00.000-07:00

Our Pro-business City Council

It turns out we have a pro-business City Council, strongly supportive of our local entrepreneurs and family establishments. In the epic battle of Lowe’s vs. local business, the Council's progressive majority came down firmly in favor of the latter. That was the right thing to do, although regrettably some bad ideas linger on about how to plan for the 21st century.

Yesterday (9/1), the Council heard – over and over again – the many strong arguments against adding a Lowe’s store to the Santa Rosa Ave. strip mall. The list of adverse impacts included worsening traffic congestion, loss of affordable housing sites, lowering of wage scales, reduced revenues for local charities and financial out-flows via big corporation headquarters back east. In the end, however, the Council's decision turned on whether Lowe’s would really bring in new money or just siphon it away from existing stores in a saturated market, killing off home-grown businesses in the process.

City Manager Kolin sounded almost desperate when he unabashedly affirmed his passion for city revenue. Council Members Bender and Olivares joined him in blithely turning aside evidence there will be little or no net gain in jobs or sales tax. They were on the one hand seduced by Lowe’s self-serving assertion that untold numbers of Santa Rosans now drive to Cotati just so they can shop at Lowe’s; and on the other hand haunted by the dubious “threat” that Lowe’s might go to, say, Windsor.

When Council Member Wysocky described cut-throat competition between tax jurisdictions to get big box stores as a self-defeating “race to the bottom,” Kolin pointedly referred to the 24% of Santa Rosa sales tax revenue that comes in from non-city residents. But that simplistic assertion finesses many mutual dependencies between our 9 cities and the County itself. There is no reason to negotiate away such an advantage, and it’s wrong to use the number as an argument to beggar thy neighbor rather than to roll it out as a starting point that would put Santa Rosa in the driver’s seat for devising new regional approaches to better cope with California’s malfunctioning local tax structure.

In fact, not so long ago, top planners from around Sonoma County got together and had a go at that very task. Studies had shown that with the exception of business-to-business activity, retail markets in the region were saturated, so the planners made a sensible proposal to moderate competition between cities in the latter categories. At the time, however, political leaders, hewing to the Kolin-Bender-Olivares line, shot the idea down in flames.

But that was then – before the cold slap of the sustainability imperative.

Yesterday, the creme de la creme of Santa Rosa’s local business firms turned out at the Council meeting to say we can’t go on building strip malls and expect to sustain a vibrant and equitable local economy. Side by side with the business brass, a host of citizens sensitive to environmental, housing and labor issues took the microphone to say we can’t go on trading local concerns away for doubtful gains in sales tax revenues.

That’s an unusual political line-up for Santa Rosa, and there were two big reasons why. First, many progressives and local business leaders recognize that in today’s economy (and more so in tomorrow’s), the old model of city development, heavily dependent on the auto and big box-anchors, no longer makes sense when all factors are taken into consideration. Second, local developer and construction moguls normally found in the same pro-development corner with Bender and company, had little to gain from intervening when their own projects were not at stake and their friends in the retail business were threatened by outside competitors.

But the economic development rationalizations voiced to favor Lowe’s will hardly go away just because they lost out in yesterday's debate. Local developers will keep the arguments front and center to justify more congestion, poor urban design, cutting down trees, using scarce water and putting up outsize buildings, when such measures are necessary to make projects “pencil out."

Still, the Lowe’s debate highlighted the strong threads of common cause between City Council progressives and local business leaders. It is not anti-business to ask tough questions about the adverse impacts of development projects.

Got parking! ..Now for the Hard Part

2009-08-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

Got parking! ..Now for the Hard Part

The Parking Professor made clear we can do wonders by using “performance pricing” to manage our ample parking supply. Next comes the harder part of adding more oomph to the drawing power of downtown. Post-Shoup, it seems even more obvious that Santa Rosa’s out-moded proposal for a big ole city-financed garage just won’t do the job.

In his presentation to the City Council yesterday (08/11), Dr. Donald Shoup pointed to the enormous success of Old Pasadena as an example of good parking policy at work. I looked at the pictures of the place on the web, and guess what...there’s a strong resemblance to our very own 4th Street and Railroad Square. The Old Pas' website invites you to “stroll tree-lined streets...shop in sunshine...(enjoy) old world charm, modern convenience.”

In other words, we’ve got a fine head start if we want to go the Old Pasadena route. The secret seems to be lively shops and restaurants set in inviting, open street-scapes, all matched up with a sensible parking regime. In the photos, there's nary a shadow from a tall glassy concrete office high-rise like the ones our development establishment has been trying to shoe-horn into downtown Santa Rosa, hoping to entice them with a subsidized parking garage on the White House site.

Mayor Gorin cut to the heart of the establishment argument by asking Dr. Shoup about the reluctance of banks to finance development projects downtown unless parking is assured up front. The Professor responded that the City should not tell the developer how much or how little parking to provide. The message, as I heard it, was ‘let market forces rule.’ And a city-financed garage is hardly a true market force in this picture.

Someone recently called my attention to the decisive role City-provided free parking played in bringing the Roxy Theater to downtown instead of to a Santa Rosa Ave. site south of Highway 12. The idea was not only to have more movies, but also to bring more people downtown to shop.

So, today we have the theater, but we live with a prison-like wall on Second St. and an ugly streetscape that has defeated best efforts to make a minimally safe and pleasant Transit Mall. Worst of all, one of our true downtown magnets is no more – Traverso’s was driven out to the ‘burbs. Meanwhile, Roxy theater-goers drive in and drive out, but most don’t stay around to patronize other downtown businesses.

And, yes, the City is still shelling out for free parking. (Don’t even try to fit all this into a GHG reduction strategy!) Maybe better the Roxy should have been left to that spot south of Hwy12!

One of Professor Shoups’s strong principles is that cites should use parking revenues for streetscape improvements and amenities. Santa Rosa today has $4.7 million available, but it is all earmarked for the White House garage. One has to wonder whether the funds might have been drawn on to create a nice spot for Traverso’s rather than hoarding the money to finance 545 more parking spaces, most of which we don’t even need if you take Dr. Shoup’s advice on using the capacity we already have.

The White House garage part of the SR parking picture comes back before the Council on September 15. Before listening to Dr. Shoup’s presentation, I had thought the smart thing to do would be to cut the size down drastically -- what Shoup has called "more rational estimation of parking demand." 180 or so spaces would meet the subsidy demanded by the proposed boutique hotel project, and to put more on top of that risks spending good city money on excess capacity that will not pay its way for years, if ever. After listening to the Professor, I'm tempted to say the City should go all the way back to square one, forget the White House garage and give market forces fuller play.

Garage or no, Professor Shoup’s forceful presentation seems certain to bring beneficial changes in pricing policies fro parking. With luck, his insights will also inspire the powers that be – inside and outside the City administration – to look for more creative ways to make use of the $4.7 million in the parking revenue kitty.

If the Shoup Fits...

2009-08-04T05:37:00.000-07:00

If the Shoup Fits, Will Santa Rosa Wear It?

It is hard to understate the potential importance of UCLA Professor Donald Shoup's visit to Santa Rosa for a presentation on parking policy to the City Council on Tuesday next (08/11). The right parking policy for downtown is crucial for our business community; parking reform is crucial for regional climate protection goals; and understanding of the subject is crucial for an informed decision on the City's proposal to finance a multi-million dollar 545-space garage on the White House site.

The flyer for the Shoup event says it will focus on finding "right-priced parking" for Santa Rosa and other Sonoma County cities. Some idea of where the Professor is coming from can be gleaned from the first link on his personal website (here), which provides a review of his work highlighting among other points: a) "performance pricing" of curbside spaces to keep 15% empty so new arrivals can in effect pull right into a space; b) "parking benefit districts" that invest parking revenues for improvements in sidewalks, street trees, repairs and other amenities; and c) "more rational estimation of parking demand."

Those ideas have a radical ring for some in Santa Rosa. But they are fast gaining currency elsewhere -- in places like San Francisco, which seems on the verge of major change to a Shoupian approach, and Old Pasadena, where Shoup's ideas have been adopted with considerable success. In Santa Rosa, the establishment has clung to belief in more and cheaper spaces, although a rising number of voices are now arguing for new approaches.

Our City to its credit has moved toward market pricing for curbside parking downtown. Its overall policy, however, has yet to come to come up with realistic estimates of future demand, address under-utilization of present capacity or give adequate attention to alternative approaches for reducing auto-dependency. Professor Shoup's insights can shed much needed light on more than just how much to charge for parking on and off the curb in downtown (the term properly includes the areas of both Courthouse and RR Squares).

Indeed, county-wide climate protection goals may be the biggest beneficiary of the Professor's visit. His theories are already pressing in upon us through two regional organizations that hold vital keys to our future: the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). ABAG is actively exploring "parking reform as an essential part of the Bay Area's approach to climate protection."

The Sonoma County Transportation Authority's brand new draft Comprehensive Transportation Plan points up the importance of parking policy, although it is softly worded on grounds that parking is under local, not county, jurisdiction. All well and good, but more forceful leadership is needed if we are to meet GHG reduction goals, and fortunately, the Sonoma County Transportation and Land Use Coalition has drafted a strong parking policy recommendation to SCTA that fits the bill. It draws heavily on Professor Shoup's theories and surely merits SCTA adoption.

MTC is on similar tracks to grapple with climate protection, pressing for action on alternative forms of transportation and creative ideas for new approaches to parking. In this vein, MTC Planning Director Kimsey recently wrote to the California Clean Air Resource Board urging a State policy that discourages public subsidies for parking garages. In Sacramento, a bill (SB 518) narrowly failed in the Senate this year that would have prohibited junior college boards from subsidizing parking garages in most circumstances.

Santa Rosa's proposal to subsidize a 545-space White House garage has not been listed as a specific topic for Shoup to address while here, but those who will decide the future of the garage should factor in ideas coming out of his visit. City staff has argued that the current system exempting commercial development projects downtown fits Shoup's view that developers should not be required to provide any minimum number of parking spaces -- in fact, however, the City's proposal retains a de facto requirement for a minimum parking capacity and simply substitutes a city-subsidized garage for a developer-financed facility.

In a 2006 article,* Shoup praised Palo Alto and Pasadena, both of which wanted more off-street parking, for requiring developers to pay in lieu fees to the city instead of building the spaces themselves. This system was recommended to Santa Rosa in 2006 by consultants, but the City has delayed action, giving preference to its plan for one last big garage to be financed from the City's own parking revenues.

In any case, it's time for a searching review of city parking policies. The last City Council discussion that questioned whether we are headed in the right direction on downtown parking was greeted by the establishment with knee-jerk adherence to previous policies and baseless charges that any change would be "anti-business." Hopefully, Professor Shoup's presence and research-based recommnedations will encounter more open minds.

*Shoup and Mukhija, "Quantity versus Quality in Off-Street Parking Requirements," Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer 2006.

Bulldozing the Way to Fountaingrove

2009-07-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

Bulldozing the Way to Fountaingrove

If developer Bill Gallaher had proposed a design for his Fountaingrove Lodge that fit better with the surroundings and preserved at least 50% of the site's fine old trees, it probably would have been approved long ago. Instead, he has insisted on an outsized, tree-chomping plan and continues a bulldozing PR campaign to get his way.

This morning’s (07/27) Press Democrat carried Gallaher’s latest PR salvo, in which he alleged the City was “kicking him in the teeth” with planning process delays. Keith Woods, long-time pro-growth advocate, chimed in to assert the City government is “strangling” development.

What balderdash!! Just consider this PD report from three weeks (6/30) ago: “With the help of Santa Rosa officials, the developers of the ambitious housing and commercial project were awarded an $11.4 million state grant to be used primarily for street, water and sewer work. The city agreed to kick in another $3.7 million...” (emphasis added) The article of course refers to the New RR Sq. project led by developer John Stewart. "Strangling?" Give me a break!

Although the Fountaingrove Lodge design has reportedly been tweaked again in response to City criticisms, Gallaher and his company, Aegis Senior Living, have spent most of their time advancing arguments, like this morning's assertions, that have little or nothing to with the central issues of appropriate size and environmental protection.

Aegis earlier rolled out its legal top gun with aggressive letters, one implicitly threatening action against a City Council Member for alleged personal bias and the other taking the City to task for planning delays. I haven’t seen the two letters, but by all accounts, neither has much to say in response to the design and environmental criticisms.

That is not to say it’s bad to clear the air on all aspects of the project. Avid supporters have alleged the debate was “not about trees,” but rather opposition to a gay and lesbian retirement community. Neighbors in the project area vigorously dispute this. Out of curiosity, incidentally, I checked official election statistics for the three precincts running along Fountaingrove Parkway east from Mendocino and found that 59+% supported gays and lesbians in November 2008 by voting against Prop 8.

At the May Planning Commission hearing, all these perspectives came out into the open one more time. Citizens made their views known for and against, the applicant railed against planners and planning requirements, staff professionally laid out the issues. When the dust settled, the Commission turned the project down, leaving the door open to reconsideration.

Commissioner Bartley, a former chair of the Commission with a reputation as a staunch advocate for growth, delivered the most cogent comment of the night. He observed that “it is about trees” and design – that’s what the Planning Commission does. He also chided Aegis for its handling of the Varenna application, its previous mega-project in Fountaingrove.

Judging from this morning’s outburst in the PD, it doesn’t seem Mr. Gallaher was listening.

JC Culinary Arts Center – SR Planning Hash

2009-07-07T19:19:00.000-07:00

JC Culinary Arts Center – SR Planning Hash

It looked like a great recipe – take a fresh plan to turn a stretch of Mendocino Avenue into a Parisian-style boulevard and fold in a wonderful new SR Junior College Culinary Arts Center to give it class and style. But, alas, unless the JC unexpectedly reverses course at the Design Review Board July 16, we’re in for something much less inspiring.

The Mendocino Avenue Corridor Plan (MACP), in the works since 2007 with JC participation, was approved by the City Council in May of this year. It’s cutting-edge stuff – showing how to turn the mundane Mendo stretch from College to Steele Lane into a more beautiful, safer, eminently walkable, more usable space for residents, students, and businesses.

The Culinary Arts Center, a hands-on teaching facility with a restaurant open to the public, will be built on a JC-owned lot at the corner of Mendocino and Carr. It could provide the “perfect interface” with the MACP – an inviting front entrance on Mendocino with sidewalk dining.

Voila!...except that the JC has ignored key MACP guidelines throughout its design process and instead now insists on placing the Culinary Arts Center's entrance around the corner, leaving show windows on Mendocino so passers-by can peep in to watch student chefs at work. One wonders why – as best I can tell, the window-gawking arrangement, long in place at the Center’s current location on 7th St., has done nothing for the Center itself or for street ambiance in its block.

Can’t change now, says the JC Administration, because redesign costs would be too high. So why didn’t the JC get together with the other two main stakeholders – City and neighbors– to talk the issues out before sending it's design off to State authorities in February without telling either the City or neighbors?

The JC has pointed fingers at the City, but in truth, the episode recalls the JC Administration’s “let them eat cake” attitude when finalizing its parking garage in 2004. At the time, a lawsuit by the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition led to the current Hwy 101 overpass project, and the JC Neighborhood Association had to hire an independent traffic engineer to convince the College and the City to provide for a sensible traffic interface at the Mendocino entrance.

But who can afford lawsuits or outside consultants these days? And there seems little chance the JC Administration would respond to a soap box appeal that it be a better citizen itself.

Hope springs eternal for the DRB meeting on the 16th, but it looks like we’ll be left with another example of the planning hash that has too often denied Santa Rosa its best opportunities when establishment powers bulldozed their way over top-notch planners and concerned neighbors.

Competing Downtown Visions

2009-06-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

Getting Ready for Shoup: (I) Competing Downtown Visions

Donald Shoup is not yet a household name, but his fame is spreading fast. A UCLA Professor, he is America’s revolutionary thinker on parking, and he is coming to talk parking issues with our City Council on August 11.

Our fair city has over $10 million in accumulated parking fees, a bunch of real estate downtown, a Redevelopment Agency, and a grand plan to reunify Courthouse Sq. How can we best use these considerable assets to build for the future and – for Dr. Shoup – how does parking fit in?

There are in fact two quite different downtown visions acknowledged by the City. The first and more familiar is the “high-rise core” concept, vigorously pushed by the local developer and architect establishment. Funding difficulties threw a huge spanner into the works even before the recession, but proponents still think in terms of luring big office buildings by providing city-financed parking up front.

The second vision for downtown sprang recently from the input of more ordinary citizens and has been captured as Santa Rosa 2030. For starters, residents were asked to say "what they like about their city.” The first response was “preserve the small town feel” – that hardly seems to support the notion of concrete behemoths marching down Third St., and indeed, there is no mention of high-rises in the 2030 plan.

Asked next what they’d like to change, citizens led off with “a more vital downtown.” The City’s Santa Rosa 2030 brochure (on the web here) outlines “three key initiatives” for realizing this goal: 1) an SR Creek Walk; 2) a Performing Arts Center; and 3) a new SR Civic Center. All three would run along the creek, which would be opened up from the concrete tunnel that now takes it unseen between Sonoma Ave. and Second St. from E St. to SR Ave., where it emerges as the Prince Greenway.

The city/arts center concept picks up on ideas that have been around for some time, albeit pushed unceremoniously aside by the high-risers. The visiting Mayor’s Institute on City Design in 2007 grasped the potential of the SR 2030 approach and recommended that our city “embrace the arts as a catalyst for downtown development...and create a world-class planning culture and capacity with public sector leadership.” Well-known planner Curt Johansen of Triad Communities found the concept an exciting anchor for downtown development.

The SR2030 vision is not really compatible with the high-rise alternative. The symbolic centerpiece of the latter is the 14-story Comstock building at Third and D, approved by the City but still unable to secure financing. If it is ever built, however, the Comstock's fortress-like mass and sun-blocking roof line would loom over almost any version of a Civic and Performing Arts Center that Santa Rosa could conceivably afford.

The hope for those of us who favor SR2030 and see little civic benefit from the Comstock’s out-sized bulk and high-end luxury apartments is that soaring construction costs will ultimately kill the project. Or lop it to a more small-town scale, as happened to its nearby cousin, The Rises office building, now called 700 Third St. and trimmed from 12 to six floors, maybe less..

The bad news is that the lingering office block vision continues to drive downtown planning. Its auto-dependent allure was evident at the last hearing on the White House parking garage, when city officials asserted the jumbo garage, costing roughly $15 million (plus another $10 million or so for bond carrying costs), is essential to attract new construction downtown. The first 180 of the garage's 545 city-financed spaces would go to subsidize the proposed boutique hotel; the remaining 360 or so would be available for new downtown office building projects which are not now required to pay for the parking demand they generate.

Professor Shoup will shed much-needed light on the vexing issues of how much of what kind of parking is right for Santa Rosa’s downtown, and how it should be funded. Judging from his articles, though, he does not provide one-size-fits-all solutions, so we and our City Council will still be on the hook to come up with a viable, sensible and consistent downtown vision.

EMS Fees - Vital Revenue Source or Tricky New Tax?

2009-06-09T23:26:00.000-07:00

EMS Fees - Vital Revenue Source or Tricky New Tax?

On June 16, the City Council will consider charging residents $350 every time they place a 911 call that brings a Fire Department engine to provide an emergency medical service (EMS). Is that fair since we already pay taxes for fire department operations? And is it necessary since a private ambulance always shows up within minutes anyway?

Let’s start with more basic questions that people like me have long had trouble understanding. Why do both a fire engine and an ambulance show up for a 911 medical call? Who pays for the ambulance service? We pay taxes for the Fire Department, so why double up with user fees – will fees for dousing fires or for police calls be next? Isn’t there a better system for EMS calls?

Take the ambulance service question first. Who pays? – it ain’t cheap at $1,407 base rate per transport, plus medicines, etc. The answer is: the patient or in most cases, his/her medical insurance (Kaiser and Medicare lead the list in SR). With Santa Rosa’s high 911 call volume, it’s a profitable business, and companies vie to win the County franchise for exclusive rights in the SR district. The current franchise holder is American Medical Response West (AMR) – the County pays nothing to AMR, and AMR doesn’t pay for the franchise, except for a relatively small charge to cover the County oversight.

The County awards the franchise based on performance, in particular the ambulance company’s ability to deliver high standard life support personnel/equipment in timely fashion. As of July 1 inside the Santa Rosa urban area, that means for 90% of Code 3, i.e. high priority, 911 responses, an Advanced Life Support (ALS) paramedic must be on scene within less than 7 minutes from dispatch (now, it’s less than 8 minutes), and a transport ambulance unit must arrive on scene within 12 minutes. The County monitors performance, and fines AMR whenever an ALS paramedic fails to arrive within 12 minutes. (Responses between 8 and 11:59 minutes are not fined, but they count against the 90% target.)

So why the Fire Department too? Well, for starters, the Fire Dept. will tell you its response time standard is faster – only 6 minutes, and it averages 5. Moreover, in some case two paramedics (one on the FD engine, the other on the ambulance) are better than one to handle the emergency, and a Fire engine crew can perform any non-medical tasks that may or may not have been properly reported in the 911 call. Important additions, but arguably marginal – rural Santa Rosans live with a response standard of 30 minutes for a Code 3 call..

Not surprisingly, the underlying interests really have to do with ...yes, money. On the one hand, Fire Departments across the country are lobbying hard to get or keep an EMS role. Why? Because the number of calls for fire emergencies has been going down due to improved building codes and fire prevention practices. So, if Fire Departments just did fire services, their size would be shrinking (or costs per fireperson skyrocketing). In Santa Rosa approximately 65% of Fire Department 911 calls are EMS. And insurance companies won’t pay for Fire Department calls.

An ambulances service like AMR here for its part, is happy to have the Fire Department in the game. By terms of the AMR franchise contract, AMR gets credit whether the first paramedic on the scene is SRFD or an AMR employee. This is a kind of scratch both backs arrangement whereby AMR pays for the training of SRFD paramedics.

The deal helps AMR meet their commitment to have an ALS paramedic on the scene within 7 minutes. In the middle of the night, for example, AMR may have only 5 ambulances ready to go, while the Fire Department has 11 engines on duty ‘round the clock and therefore provides faster response to most locations. Also for a Code 3 call, day or night, typically the Fire Dept. engine responds at full speed with sirens and lights, allowing the AMR ambulance to proceed to the scene more safely with little or no use of clear-the-way signals.

And the option of setting up a single municipal system is not available. Since the early 1980s, it has been illegal for cities or their fire departments to run an ambulance service that competes with the private sector. (Petaluma, incidentally, has a single, government-operated system because it started before the legal situation changed.)

Where does all this leave us on the question of adding a new fee? The benefit would be an estimated $1.5 million to help cover the current $24 million dollar annual cost for the Fire Operations budget. It would become the third source of EMS funding, adding on to the taxes paid into the General Fund and the insurance companies’ payments that keep AMR running.

For me (and most of the readers of this blog, I bet), it’s a good deal. I don’t ever expect to place a 911 EMS call, and I won’t sign up for the subscription option. In sum, I would knock wood and gamble on getting a free ride while others pony up.

But that leaves me uneasy. The $350 per call burden will fall on those less able to pay or who probably already have a bunch of medical expenses. And such jury-rigging makes it harder and harder to come to grips with the rising costs of public safety and medical services – like by ending the artificial restriction that forces duplication in the name of non-competition with the private sector.

On balance, I wouldn’t vote for the proposed fee.

By way of PS, let me again express my dismay, as I did in a previous blog, over the information put out thus far by the City and Fire Department. The item is listed on the June 16 agenda as a “Subscription Fee,” when the essence of it is really a $350 per call fee with an option to pay $4 per month as a "subscription" – which saves you money only if you expect to need more than one call per 7 years per address, presumably a consideration mainly for apartment buildings, hotels etc. Also misleading, the SRFD FAQs last March touted Sonoma City as having an EMS fee program without ever mentioning that Sonoma has only Fire Dept. EMS coverage. There is no private ambulance participation in its 911 program because the call volume there is too low to be profitable – in sum, no valid parallel to SR's situation.

And finally, the idea bruited about by some that charging a fee would reduce repeated or unnecessary calls from particular addresses is a red herring. Even if it had that effect, it wouldn't reduce the number of fire personnel one iota and it wouldn't cut operating costs by more than a miniscule percentage.

The First 180 Days – Assessing the New City Council

2009-06-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

The First 180 Days – Assessing the New City Council

This week marked six months in office for our first-ever progressive City Council – so, what difference has it made? Well...certainly, there's been no revolution yet!

Nonetheless, there has been forward motion on key issues, a welcome shift to more inclusive representation of our city residents, and a long over-due questioning of growth mantras trumpeted by past Councils. That's a pretty good start by some lights. In these parts, however, old ways die hard, and time is slipping by.

Despite campaign rhetoric, the biggest item on the post-election agenda, namely the budget debate, did not become a defining event in political terms. Council members – all seven – did what they had to do by slashing staff and services, and confronting the high costs of personnel and public safety. Assuming Sacramento steals only a middling fraction of our treasury, the Council’s band-aids will cover the gaps for 2009/2010 – more painful decisions will come all too soon when salaries, health and pension benefits must be renegotiated for contracts covering police, fire and civilian employees.

Budget aside, the first sign of policy change came right after the election results, when developers on the Green Building Advisory Committee shifted ground to accept higher green point standards for new construction. That paved the way for a February Council meeting, at which despite a lot of hand-wringing testimony from opponents, the Council gave direction for a mandatory ordinance with the guideline raised from 50 to 100 LEED points. Good start, although the ordinance is still aborning with talk of “late summer” delivery.

The most pervasive differences thus far have come from the redistribution of seats on the city’s boards and commissions. No longer are these bodies so completely dominated by representatives of the development, real estate and construction industries. New Chairs like Vicki Duggan on the Planning Commission, Ken MacNab on the Design Review Board and Bryan Much on the Cultural Heritage Board and their colleagues have brought broader, more inclusive perspectives into government. One evident result has been more critical looks at the kind of development that threatens to further choke our streets with traffic, despoil our surroundings and outstrip our water supplies.

Judging by the sturm and drang which permeated certain public hearings since the New Year, some large-scale developers, echoed by the Press Democrat, remain intent on defending business as usual. Pro-growth forces lobbied hard for approval of the Lowe’s EIR, keeping the 545-space downtown parking garage, and eliminating inclusionary housing features in the General Plan revision. On Lowe’s, the threat of a lawsuit spooked the Council into reversing a well-founded Planning Commission recommendation against certification of the EIR.

Mayor Gorin has reached out to the business community by making key transition appointments to city boards, meeting with business representatives, and engaging the business community in policy discussion on the model of the Green Building Advisory Committee. To some degree, one can even say the new Council is emerging as a defender of local and small business interests of the kind uncovered when the PD recently surveyed its readers and found significant opposition to big box stores.

Overall, the new Council has taken significant steps in progressive directions. Higher priority to alternative transportation has followed from the naming of top vote-getter Gary Wysocky to the important Sonoma County Transportation Authority; strengthened measures for a green building ordinance and a more inclusionary housing policy are on track; a Mayor’s Task Force on Climate Change and Sustainability is underway; and a downsized option for the proposed White House garage will at least be considered.

At the same time, however, implementation of the mandate from last November’s election has been slowed. That said, one should not underestimate the difficulties Council Members face from fiscal realities, time-consuming demands of week-to-week business and the counter-punches from big development interests.

Still, more impetus to the progressive side of the agenda should be possible. Low-cost ideas mentioned during the campaign that merit more active consideration include measures to increase citizen involvement in city government, adoption of Community Impact Reports for large development projects, requiring lobbyists to register, and examination of how and when to put District Elections on the ballot. And more visibility might be given to the Sustainability Task Force by flushing it out of the bureaucratic thicket and making it a Subcommittee chaired by a Council member, meeting monthly in public on the model of the Downtown Subcommittee.

Looking to the next six months, here’s hoping for a second wind!

Development Approvals – Round 1 to Lawyers, Round 2 Coming Up

2009-05-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

Development Project Approvals:Round 1 to Lawyers, Round 2 Coming Up

Recession or no, significant development projects– in particular Fountaingrove Lodge (FGL) and Lowe’s – continue to wend their way forward in hopes of City approval. In the first round, threats of lawsuits from the applicants appear to have been a driving force behind City Council acceptance of both Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs), but the Planning Commission hopefully will “take back” the process when Round 2 starts tomorrow (5/2 8) with its hearing on FGL.

The certification of EIRs has lately become something of a charade in our fair city. In the most recent case, the Planning Commission documented significant flaws in the EIR submitted by Lowe’s, but when the corporation appealed, the Council overturned the Planning Commission. The Council majority was apparently persuaded to do so by the City Manager and City Attorney, not so much on grounds the EIR was adequate, but more so because they feared a costly lawsuit if Lowe’s was turned down and sued the City.

Previous SR Planning Commissions and City Councils, with their strong pro-developer policy approach, tended to virtually rubber stamp EIRs from corporate applicants. If there was determined opposition, as in the recent Wal-Mart EIR submission, it came from citizen and labor groups who called in their own lawyers, went to court and convinced a judge the document was inadequate. The way the system works, the City does not have the prime liability when citizens sue in such cases, so City Administration has a de facto financial incentive to approve EIRs and even projects, leaving citizens to fund opposition lawsuits, rather than risking City liability by disapproving.

This situation surely helped inspire aggressive legal letter writing from the applicants for the FGL project. Their recent unprecedented missive, alleging Council Member Dupre was personally biased for her opposition to the FGL EIR, has been widely publicized. The corporation’s legal beagle later wrote a second letter sent to all the Council Members as well as city officials, which the Press Democrat did not deem newsworthy, complaining about delays and implicitly threatening some sort of action if the FGL project is not approved in timely fashion.

But approving an EIR is one thing, approving a project itself is another. City Councils can find it easier to defend project disapprovals in court, and the perception of a Council policy change was undoubtedly one of the factors that caused Wal-Mart to give up on its application rather than try again with a revised EIR. (The pro-development Press Democrat pummeled the new Council for being somehow against business, although a subsequent survey of its own readers revealed strong support for local businesses that are threatened by big boxes like Wal-Mart.)

Against the background of the second FGL hard-ball letter and previous marketing efforts to frame the issue as one of gay/lesbian opportunity, City Planner Erin Morris deserves commendation for forthrightly stating the environmental and design problems posed by the FGL project. Interviewed by the PD, she cited incompatible site design arising from the very large buildings proposed for the project and the potential loss of 350 out of 500 trees, many of which are heritage oaks.

The new Planning Commission under Chair Vicki Duggan also gets high marks for professional examination of the Lowe’s EIR, even though the Council failed to uphold its recommendation against certification. The Commission’s record so far gives people like me confidence that it will continue to address issues on their merits, and put planning on a sounder footing than has been the case in the past, when Fountaingrove projects marched inexorably up and over the ridgetop.

Most Santa Rosans would undoubtedly be more than happy to see Fountaingrove Lodge become a reality for gays and lesbians, for prospective occupants of its affordable housing component and for whomever else might aspire to move into this beautiful location. I suspect such a favorable view is held by all the Planning Commissioners and City Council Members. as well as by neighbors in the area. But that does not mean the environmental and design issues should be ignored to help the developers increase bottom line profits.

Going into Round 2 for the Lodge – with Lowe’s presumably to follow – there is still a nagging question of whether at the end of the day sound planning principles can stand up to the legal and marketing machinations of the corporations involved.

Garage on the Tip of the Iceberg

2009-05-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

Garage on the Tip of the Iceberg

To build or not to build? That is the question for the proposed jumbo public parking garage downtown. Whether the answer will be yes or no, the debate has opened a serious relook at the future development and sustainability of our fair city’s central district.

Tension crackled throughout the Council’s five-hour discussion last Tuesday (4/28/09) over downtown development strategy. On the one side: familiar arguments from city officials and a local developer that the city must provide parking up front to attract employment-producing commercial buildings and associated residential construction for a “vibrant” downtown. On the other side: nagging doubts that such a strategy will ever succeed, and growing suspicions there are better alternatives to fit this day and age.

At the Council meeting, city officials again and again stressed the need for a new garage with at least 545 spaces to meet their projections for near-term parking requirements and to pull in development projects. Santa Rosa developer Hugh Futrell supported them with assertions that the city has to provide parking because developers simply will not take on the cost of paying for expensive garage spaces downtown.

But other experts and consultants have advised the city that the “parking first” strategy will not work. New approaches are needed to attract development and to finance parking. Indeed, our city’s experience seems to bear them out – downtown has had excess parking capacity for years, but that has brought no real surge of development.

While none of the outsiders has offered a tailored plan for downtown Santa Rosa, their advice has pointed in some key directions. For starters, the city needs to retool its eviscerated Parking Assessment District, which has been unable to levy new assessments since 1996. It needs to rethink planning to promote alternative transportation in a big way. It needs a vision of downtown (defined to include Railroad Square!) that would catalyze development not by building garages, but by attracting people – perhaps focused on a grand new city center, on arts and entertainment, not high-rise office buildings.

And won’t another garage just encourage continued auto-dependency? When Mayor Gorin asked where the City’s sustainability goals fit in, city officials were thrown on the defensive – they opined that “changes in behavior” to use alternative transportation would only come later, dependent on multiple other factors. Councilmember Olivares in effect supported them by arguing that the proposed garage is essential for the future, regardless.

In between struggles with such cosmic issues, the Council dealt with urgent decisions on the White House project itself. The first task was extending negotiations on the proposal from developer MetroPacific to build a hotel on condition that the city provide it with 180 parking spaces. The second was to confirm the size of the proposed public garage to cover parking not only for hotel requirements, but also to meet additional demand per city estimates. At 545 spaces, the total cost, including interest on debt, would likely be on the order of $30 million.*

With such a large sum at stake, Councilmember Wysocky, a CPA in real life, lasered in on cost and justification for the garage. Does it have to be so large? Are future parking revenues fully adequate to repay the bond without adverse impacts on future parking fees and maintenance of existing facilities? City officials were hard pressed to provide simple and convincing answers since parking demand is hypothetical by nature and precise garage costs depend on further design work.

In the end, officials agreed to bring back refined estimates and analysis of an additional option to reduce the garage by one floor which could mean 100 fewer spaces and a saving of possibly as much as $5 million.* At the same time, the Council approved extending negotiations with MetroPacific on the hotel, while the City Attorney will study whether the selection process would have to be done all over again if the garage is downsized.

Far less clear is where the Council’s bristling debate might lead on broader development and parking issues. The current strategy for downtown is not only unpromising, but also headed into a cul de sac – even assuming the proposed White House projects go forward, city officials have conceded the garage is the last the City can construct “without identifying a new funding source.”

Is yet another prolonged powwow on downtown’s future called for? Old timers cringe at the thought, but the single best idea that percolated through the Council discussion on Tuesday was probably the call for renewed public discussion to seek out better strategies for today’s economic and environmental realities.
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*Footnote re garage costs: The proposed garage would be the first to be financed by a city bond to be paid off from future parking revenues. Total cost for 500 spaces would likely be on the order of $30 million, comprising $15 million for the bond to finance construction plus another $15 million for debt service over the life of the bond. My numbers assume a cost per space of $30,000 (roughly the reported cost for the new SRJC garage), although estimates range from below $25,00 to above $35,000 depending on design and other factors.

Politicizing City Planning – Bad for Everybody

2009-04-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

Politicizing City Planning – Bad for Everybody

“How can I miss you when you won’t go away?” That title of an old country-western song captures the essence of the position taken by the Chamber of Commerce on the General Plan 2035 Revision set for further hearings before the Planning Commission on April 23.

The Chamber’s Close to Home piece in today’s Press Democrat didn’t move one inch further than what its Executive VP and the Sonoma County Alliance CEO said at the first hearing on April 2. That’s not surprising because their primary goal is clearly to wish away key provisions of the Station Area Plan.

But the Station Area Plan has broad support and was approved by the City Council in October 2007. The Chamber op-ed piece therefore doesn’t mention the Plan by name. And when one doesn’t want to debate on substance, one attacks process. That’s politics, not constructive criticism.

On that tack, the Chamber whinges that it “wasn’t consulted.” I’m sure it didn’t get a gilt-edged card by special messenger, but it did get all the planning notices and could well have joined Burbank Housing and others (including me) at the public workshop last October. Instead, the Chamber has simply held back until now, replaying the same pro-developer arguments that fell short when the SAP was approved in 2007. (The Chamber, for example, carries forward developer objections to the unit-based trigger for on-site affordable housing, even though that system is used by 150 of 151 jurisdictions in California with inclusionary housing programs!)

Tjhe worst aspect of the Chamber’s rear-guard politicking is its attempt to pluck heart-strings by implying GP 2035 somehow actually reduces jobs because its projection of employment is lower than before. That’s pretty close to killing the messenger – the Chamber knows full well that a) the numbers are forecasts, not related to job policies and b) there was a change of methodology. Moreover, it is disingenuous at best for the Chamber to object to rezoning for residences on grounds that no one works in residences – except maybe maintenance persons and/or spouses who still don’t get paid. Pretending to stand up for jobs in this case is also putting politics ahead of constructive criticism.

Equally off base is the Chamber’s effort to resurrect the 1994 SE and SW Area Plans as if they hadn’t been massaged, updated and incorporated into City planning through two General Plan revisions. The Chamber makes no substantive argument for that position either. So, it’s stalling and stalling is a political tactic, not constructive criticism.

More’s the pity, because the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce is in truth a vital pillar of our fair city. It does an awful lot of good stuff, not only directly promoting economic activity, but also getting behind green building and greenhouse gas reductions, and supporting adult education and English language programs. We need the Chamber’s constructive engagement in long-range planning.

So why is it playing politics to turn back the clock and fight inclusionary housing policies that have already been approved by the City Council and stand high in public opinion? Connecting dots leads to the obvious beneficiaries of the Chamber’s position on GP 2035, namely big local developers. They have long been among the most influential players within the Chamber – most famously perhaps when they lined the Chamber up to oppose Urban Growth Boundaries a decade ago.

After the April 2 hearing, I thought it might be a good idea for the Planning Commission to move ahead just on the housing element. But that doesn’t work because the General Plan needs to be an integral document to comply with state requirements as well as to do what it is supposed to do for the city.

So, I’m back to urging the Chamber to do the right thing and get off the dime. Its staff surely knows all the issues in detail -- the Chamber after all has a $1,600,000 annual budget and 17 employees, so it ought to be able to stop stalling and help the Planning Commission get on with the General Plan Revision to meet the State’s June deadline.

Myth Busting - The Downtown Garage Subsidy

2009-04-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Myth Busting - The Downtown Garage Subsidy

Some myths die hard. Here are six that should be killed off and buried before the proposed publicly-financed downtown garage on the White House site comes up for City Council decision on April 28:

Myth 1: The proposed 545-space publicly-financed garage is not really a subsidy for developers.

--Facts: Developers of a commercial/office building are typically required by zoning codes to provide enough parking spaces to cover the demand generated by their projects. This is true for most cities and for all of Santa Rosa except downtown. Developers in Santa Rosa’s downtown center are exempt from this requirement, and the city has been willing to make up -- that means subsidize -- the difference with a publicly-financed garage.

The subsidy is clear when you look at what would happen if a second developer should propose to build a 6-story office building east of E St. identical to the one Monahan Pacific is now applying to build west of E St. on The Rises site:

Myth 2: Downtown property owners have been paying parking assessment fees since the 1950s and therefore have legitimate "expectations" for special treatment and zoning code exemption.

--Facts: The property owners in the downtown parking district are already receiving full value for the money they paid as assessments which have been used to pay for the now existing parking facilities within the downtown district. The assessment payments do not cover parking demand generated by new construction. Hired by the city in 2006 to study downtown parking, Walker Parking Consultants conferred with the City Attorney on this point and concluded unambiguously in their Nov. 2006 Report that if an owner builds on a downtown property, any "increased parking requirement does not oblige the City to make additional parking available."

Myth 3: If the city doesn't build this parking garage, it will discourage future development.

--Facts: There is no showing that building public garages is the better mousetrap to which development will come. A team from the highly-respected Mayors' Institute on City Design visited Santa Rosa and strongly recommended against another garage at this time. Nationally known developers, Triad Communities, withdrew from the White House project, saying Santa Rosa’s downtown “is seriously overparked and in need of a rethinking of its entire pedestrian/transit and jobs/housing balance approach.” The 2006 Walker Report found that charging developers for parking demand created by their projects "is unlikely to be a problem in Santa Rosa" for the city’s economic development.

Myth 4: This proposed garage will be the "last" in the downtown series.

--Facts: The proposed garage will in fact be the first to be publicly financed. Because of Proposition 218, passed in 1996, no more garages will be built under the city’s downtown assessment system, so the last garage in that series was the one at 7th and B, built about 1990 with pay-off scheduled for FY 2014/2015.

Myth 5: The bigger the garage, the better for the associated hotel project.

--Facts: The current hotel proposal needs a maximum of less than 200 parking spaces. The city is forcing the hotel developer to be the agent for construction (though not of course financing) of a larger garage in order to have excess additional spaces to subsidize hoped-for new projects such as the proposed Monahan Pacific 6-story office building on the old Rises site down the block from the hotel.

Myth 6: Anyone who favors downsizing the garage is "anti-business."

--Facts: The bond proposed to finance the garage will be guaranteed by the General Fund and paid off from public sources, so it is the responsibility of the City Administration and Council to assure that every nickel is justified. Downsizing means lower cost, and money saved (which could be several million dollars) by reducing the debt service obligation could be used for other initiatives to better support downtown business and/or promote development.

Down the Up Staircase – Stalling on the Housing Plan

2009-04-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

Down the Up Staircase – Stalling on the Housing Plan

The April 2 Planning Commission (PC) Public Hearing didn’t get the community cooperation it should have for revision of the General Plan Housing Element. More constructive input will be needed at the next session April 23 to craft a sound housing policy for our city's own good as well as to meet the June deadline imposed by State law.

The April 2 PC hearing brought forth some helpful criticism on the draft Housing Element, but that was almost overshadowed by a bank of unproductive fog with all the earmarks of stalling for time. A few key stakeholders proved unwilling to engage, even though they have understood the gut issues for the last two years, and the city invited community comment more than six months ago.

There is, to be sure, lingering angst out there among both neighbors and developers. Neighbors are vexed, because many are only now becoming aware that parcels next door to their homes were earlier designated for higher density construction. Developers and the construction industry still have heartburn from the policy changes put in train when the City Council way back in October 2007 approved the Station Area Plan (SAP), which presaged requirements for more on-site affordable housing.

These are not unreasonable concerns. But there is a perfectly good process to vet those issues, and it has in fact been underway since the City Council signed off on the workplan for the Housing Element revision in July 2007. Parts of our community have participated with good faith efforts.

My kudos for Good Neighborhood-level Planners go to Northwest SR neighbors. They defined their concerns, met with a city planner in advance of the hearing, and on April 2 made their appeal to the Planning Commissioners for amendment of the draft. Win or lose, the cards are on the table.

Corresponding accolades in the developer category go to John Lowry of Burbank Housing. He joined in the planning process when it first got underway last October, discussed the issues of interest to him with city planners, and on April 2 put forth his case for flexible implementation of the new SAP guidelines.

Near the less productive end of the Community Input Scale, I confess to being perplexed by the unwillingness of the Chamber of Commerce and Sonoma County Alliance to explain their positions, at least on the main points. They essentially asked to kick the can down the road, even though the two well-staffed organizations surely have a solid grasp of the central housing policy issues which have been out in the open since the City Council signed off on the SAP 18 months ago. As key players, they owe it to the PC (and the rest of us) to unveil their concerns and proposals.

Nor should peripheral issues be invoked to evade hammering out an updated Housing Element. It is true the current draft General Plan Revision also carries forward a number of other policies, including elements of the old Southeast and Southwest Area Plans, which were both put through the wringer of the 2002 General Plan revision. Several people argued at the PC to hold up action on the entire revision to 'save' these two Plans, perhaps in hopes of undoing subsequent restrictions on development in those areas. Fair enough, but as several Commissioners proposed, let’s get on with the Housing Element and come back to such matters another day.

A final word of reproof goes to those who professed at the April 2 hearing to have been somehow ignored or “not invited to the table.” Crocodile tears! They all know as well as I do that one simple phone call or email would have been enough to set up a meeting with city planning staff for an update briefing and discussion of their concerns at any time after the Council approved the workplan in mid-2007.

Fortunately, Planning Commissioners, clearly less crotchety and more forgiving than I am, did the right thing by continuing the Public Hearing until April 23 to allow for more community input. Let’s hope the remaining key stakeholders will turn forward, focus on substance, lay out their proposals, and help move the Housing Element on up the stairs to meet the June deadline.

Destructive Criticism from the PD

2009-03-29T21:12:00.000-07:00

Destructive Criticism from the Press Democrat

Today’s editorial in the Press Democrat has no redeeming features. Unable, it seems, to offer a single constructive idea to help the local economy, the paper chases its tail by saying the new City Council is not anti-business, but it should declare “business is not the enemy.” Textbook circular reasoning!

What is more painful to encounter than PD circumlocution, however, is the selectivity of an editorial staff that ignores significant information and clings to the views of old developer allies.

Let’s start with the PD’s title: “SR Council should at least agree that the facts have changed.” What in the world is the paper on about? It has itself been full of commentary about “new directions” and a “new majority” at City Hall. All seven Council members have talked at length for weeks on the pain of budget decisions and the flagging economy, while frequently debating the pros and cons of ways to go green in response to new realities.

The PD seems completely unaware that Mayor Gorin has met with the Sonoma County Alliance and Chamber of Commerce officials to discuss their concerns and seek to work with business on urgent measures. Or that the City’s Budget Deficit Advisory Group has very strong representation from the business community – Pat Kilkenny and Sue Nelson.

Moreover, it is obvious that the Council majority has given greater priority to the search for new approaches to cope with high energy prices and global warming threats. But there is no mention in the PD editorial of the single best piece of economic news in our back yard – the $100 million fund just set up for County loans to improve home and business energy performance. The City Council, new and old, was very quick off the mark to encourage, support and then approve City participation in this program.

Perhaps the PD does not give much credence to the words it earlier reported from Chris Lynch, Executive VP of the Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce: “There are a lot of areas where there is agreement (between the Chamber and the City Council),” Lynch said. “We see, too, that good, green business in the long run makes you money.”

Finally, the PD editorial staff fails to take seriously the threat of big boxes to drive out local small business owners and even large ones like Friedmans (can you imagine Lowe’s rescuing what became the Luther Burbank Center or funding the Friedman Center on Mayotte?). Instead the PD continues to criticize Council decisions by giving pride of place to the views of old political allies like Keith Woods and Joe Keith, who both featured prominently in the Derek Moore article cited by the editorial.

Against that background the PD editorial today rang hollow when it struck a pose of objectivity by saying it would be “unfair” and “too early” to label the new Council as “anti-business.” And then went on to do exactly that by concluding with a stirring call for the Council to “make clear that the business community is not the enemy.” Who in the world ever said it was?

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ps - For an editorial that makes much of “new facts,” one wonders where the PD gets its information. The paper writes the county has grown “just 1.4 percent over the past 8 years.” Compare that with the County website, which says, “Since 2000, the population has increased by 23,006 or 5.0%.” (SoCo website link here.)

Opening shots for 2010

2009-03-25T21:49:00.000-07:00

Opening shots for 2010

Gird yourself! City Council campaign 2010 is underway as Council Members from the losing Team have started firing political shots with some help from our local daily. The tactic is divisive and unwarranted in the midst of a budget crisis – if I believed in the Easter Bunny, I would say it should hurt their chances come election time.

The Press Democrat on March 21 carried a long report titled “Santa Rosa Council’s new direction.” Most striking to me was the blatantly political attack verbiage from Council Members Bender, Sawyer and Olivares. Consider the following from the PD article:

– Bender “called the new political vision ‘anti-recovery’ and feared her colleagues were being blinded by their beliefs.”

– Sawyer said, “Given the current majority on the Council...I challenge you to get anything built in this city...” He alleged a “lack of balance” in the majority’s approach.

– Olivares “contends that scaling back the amount of parking (on the White House site) could ‘sabotage’ economic development efforts.”

This kind of talk is divisive politicking, not discussion of substance. It's clearly aimed in large part to frame an agenda for electioneering in 2010.

The other four Council Members quoted in the article responded to criticisms, but none accused their Council colleagues of being blind, unbalanced, or saboteurs.

I’ll give the PD some points for suggesting up front in its piece that the new majority might just be “doing what they were elected to do” – a reference to environmental and social justice goals

But the PD’s own predilections to support developers does give its stories a biased twist. In the above report for example, it featured comments on the White House site, but somehow forgot to mention that the previous Council with Sawyer and Bender in the majority “killed” (PD’s word) the last White House project by refusing to downsize the city-financed 545-space parking garage. Now the PD blithely reports that the present Council’s consideration of downsizing the very same 545-space garage could hurt the developer! Politics, maybe?

In any case, I’m just hand-wringing. I don’t have a good solution for the underlying problem, namely the low level of public debate in our fair city at a time when we need meaningful dialog on some very real challenges.

Welcome to the real world of commercial newspapers and ambitious politicians, Jim!

Fresh Air from Zane on Roseland

2009-03-19T17:18:00.000-07:00

Fresh Air from Zane on Roseland

Supervisor Shirlee Zane this morning (3/19) proposed a fresh look at the numbers game hobbling negotiations on City annexation of the county-governed Roseland “hole “ in the Santa Rosa “donut.” Zane’s welcome zinger will hopefully encourage newly elected faces on both sides to reconsider old policy assumptions and move to do what everyone says they want to do – annex the last chunk of Roseland.

I don’t live in Roseland, but it's self-evident to me that the time has come for the City to integrate the remaining county islands. For one thing, law enforcement can be a mess – who is obligated to answer a 911 police call may depend on whether the suspect is standing in the street or on the sidewalk. More generally, the disparities from block to block between city and county services in Roseland aggravate a range of logistic, economic and social problems.

Officially, both city and county agree this final piece of Roseland – some 6,000 residents – should be annexed. Over the years, Santa Rosa has taken in all the surrounding areas, the last time in 1997, when 4,700 Roselanders were integrated with barely a blip on city screens.

In 2005 the city and county started work on finishing the job, but negotiations have been stalled for some time now. The stumbling block is cost estimates, especially for police services. Consultants hired by the city put the added cost of policing about $1 million per year higher than the number calculated by the county’s consultants. Months of staff work have not appreciably narrowed the gap.

Zane zeroed in on the numbers hang-up. Instead of continuing to watch dueling consultants (like lawyers arguing the best case for their respective clients), she called for establishing some single expert body to come up with a more objective assessment. The ensuing discussion at this morning’s Joint Subcommittee meeting brought out that the problem is not just analyzing data, but using differing assumptions on how to calculate costs.

With new faces on both the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors, it’s a good time to relook the old policy assumptions. Both sides may hold to existing positions, but vigorous reexamination would clarify the issues and – let’s clear some air here – respond to perceptions that Santa Rosa officials have been happy to let the matter drift rather than take on the tasks of integrating this diverse neighborhood, however deserving its residents might be.

Wal-Marts and Autos - the PD isn’t getting it

2009-03-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

Wal-Marts and Autos - the PD isn’t getting it

You have to hope that Press Democrat editorialists and reporters read the Tom Friedman column that appeared in the paper last Monday (03/09/09). The thrust of the piece was: “(The crisis of 2008 is) telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’”

In contrast to Friedman, the Press Democrat persists among the declining circle of those happy to keep on trucking with that tired old growth model, including elements like auto-dependency. Chris Smith, a scribe of the snide school, captured the paper’s attitude with a recent column titled, “Is this City Council on anti-auto pilot?;” a question he then answered with an unsupportable insinuation that downsizing the proposed White House garage could drive “all builders” out of Santa Rosa. Give me a break!

More dismaying than Smith’s dubious diversion, however, was the PD’s February 25 editorial with the statement that “(Wal-Mart’s) retreat from Santa Rosa is one more blow to the city’s declining sales tax revenue and one less opportunity for many Santa Rosans to find jobs...” Take that, proponents of smart growth!

But the PD's unqualified assertions are highly debatable and probably wrong. Another Wal-Mart, sandwiched between Wal-Marts in Windsor and Rohnert Park, is far more likely to just take sales revenue and jobs away from existing Santa Rosa businesses, and that approximates a zero-sum game for the city.

The PD’s aggressive editorial with its unyielding confidence in the strategies of years past seems to mark a newspaper staff with its mind made up – stating the case, not arguing it.

The paper’s approach makes a certain amount of sense if you travel in pro-development political circles. From that perspective and looking to 2010, there’s an obvious benefit to criticizing the “new” City Council’s efforts to change things, while finessing the debate about the policies that got us here in the first place and about what kind of change is needed to cope with the unprecedented multi-dimensional crisis that is upon us.

Which brings us back to Friedman’s column and the perils of not taking sustainability seriously – on the economic and social as well as environmental levels. What happens in Santa Rosa is a very small part of Friedman’s global picture, but we are not isolated from the forces at work.

Wooing Wal-Mart and subsidizing office buildings downtown looked smart a decade ago, but that was then. Instead of using its editorial powers to defend business as usual, the PD should open its mind to alternative ways ahead for our fair city and encourage City Council members who are looking for those new paths.

Find the Fee – Murky Memo Art

2009-03-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

Find the Fee – Murky Memo Art

The Fire Department is proposing to charge a new per call fee whenever a city fire engine responds to a request for emergency medical services. That's fair enough – the odd part is that the city has such difficulty in making a straightforward, understandable presentation to the City Council...and us citizens.

Santa Rosans, me among them, have highest regard for our firefighters, especially in their roles of dousing dangerous fires or performing life-saving rescues. However, 64% of fire engine responses, are for emergency medical services (EMS), and what we usually see there is the accompanying private ambulance that rushes the patient off to hospital.

For EMS calls, the Fire Department is set up to send an engine with a paramedic that gets there not only every time, but also very quickly. A private ambulance is also sent to take the patient(s) to hospital. Although medical insurance typically covers the ambulance, private policies may or may not cover the Fire Dept. EMS -- MediCal has a limited benefit; Medicare has none.

Cost recovery for SRFD EMS calls is an option that looks increasingly attractive to a cash-strapped city.

On Tuesday next (03/10), there will in fact be a Study Session to update the City Council on “progress of reviewing the EMS Subscription Program.” The subscription program? Like for magazines, maybe??

You have to read all the way down in the agenda memo (available here) to FAQ #8, second paragraph, to find the true starting point, which is the proposal to impose a new fee of $350 per EMS call. Only then can the reader grasp that the subscription program is insurance you would buy, paying a small amount each month so you don’t have to pay $350 if and when you do call for SRFD EMS.

Charging an EMS fee with or without the subscription feature, is a valid program option. But it has numerous pros, cons and complications, which other cities seem able to present in a straightforward way. I have found memos on the net that run like this: 1) City X should consider charging for Fire Dept. EMS calls; 2) if City X goes that way, it should also consider a membership or subscription program; 3) here is info on major pros and cons, and on models used in other municipalities; and 4) here is what needs to be done to further study and/or implement a program.

Our fair city’s departments and administration, it seems, prefer to sell things like this new fee to the Council, rather than to lay out the choices with the arguments for and against. Another example is the White House project where the city has tried to flog a garage/hotel package deal without making clear to the Council what all the options are.

It’s not that I take umbrage when I’m presented with pre-packaged deals and murky proposals – it’s just that such an approach makes life unnecessarily difficult for elected officials and too often leads to bad policy choices.

Set Goals –Make a Difference

2009-03-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

Set Goals –Make a Difference

Can the City Council’s March 6/7 goal-setting session make a difference? You bet! But only if the Council articulates its new direction and puts a progressive stamp on the inevitable laundry lists of things to do.

A changed mood has been building in our fair city. Progressives captured it well enough last November to break the old mold of Council thinking for the first time in living memory. Now comes the hard part – getting everyone in our city government to work together to better meet the needs of everyone in our community.

Goals-setting should start with a “yes, we can” approach to all three pillars of sustainability. That means not just the environmental, but also the economic and social elements. Thankfully, going green to tackle climate change and save open space is a well established city priority, but the Council should make a convincing statement of intent to go the furthest we can the fastest we can. And include a plan to ascertain just how much water will really come out of our taps in years to come.

Pardon poor punning, but green is also the color of money, and the Council has to get past the old mode business as usual. Instead of pinning hopes on high rises and big boxes, let’s put more priority into helping local small business, more pizazz into promoting heritage and wine country tourism, and more focus on efforts to attract health and educational sector investments. There are programs to do these things already buried in the laundry lists, but that’s the point – we need to make them leap out and give them more oomph.

Under social sustainability, along with programs for seniors, youth and the disadvantaged, I’d put boosting confidence in government high on the list – more transparency, integrity, and neighborhood involvement. Much of this can be done at virtually no cost by strengthening city-citizen contact and access through such measures as: more open Council sub-committee meetings and more public safety outreach; ordinances for lobbyist registration and against “revolving door” employment of high city officials; and (gasp) putting District Elections on the ballot for 2010.

Goals setting leads inexorably to laundry lists (like mine) of things to do – boring but full of essential reference points for actions to take. The challenge for our Council is first, to articulate a new overall sense of direction and second, to build in key indices that will force change where it counts.

Some pundits and city administrators continue to wring their hands over shifting Council direction and sending of new messages. They aren’t getting it – times have changed, and city policies have to change too. Good goals-setting can point the way.

Bully bucks? – suing when you disagree

2009-03-03T15:58:00.000-08:00

Bully bucks? – suing when you disagree

I found it very disturbing to read today that a wealthy developer has threatened suit against a City Council Member because ...well, judging as best one can from the article in the Press Democrat... because the developer, Bill Gallaher, is upset that the Council Member, Marsha Vas Dupre, disagrees with him. That should be unacceptable, and I would suggest every other Council Member renounce Gallaher's threat of legal action, urge Dupre not to recuse herself, and order the City to defend her in court if it comes to that.

First, let's consider what Dupre's duty was on the vote in question. The covering memo from the City stated the Council’s role as determining whether the EIR for Gallaher's Fountaingrove Lodge project "adequately disclos(ed) the environmental impacts."

Was there a legitimate issue? Absolutely – area residents had submitted detailed arguments supporting their view that the EIR did not adequately address a range of environmental concerns, including aesthetics, wildlife habitat, water supply, and other factors. Adequacy is a judgment call, and Dupre agreed with the neighbors, but was outvoted 5-1.

Gallaher and his project thus won the day in convincing fashion. Nonetheless, he now threatens a lawsuit on grounds reported to be that Dupre has a “personal bias” against the project, and that Dupre’s explanation for voting against the project EIR “did not conform to legal requirements.”

All this is on the level of suing a Democrat for being liberal and for stumbling over words during a difficult evening on the dais. There is no grand principle at stake here – whether you agree or disagree, the proponents and the opponents had reasonable points of view.

I recognize there are legal principles that can be used to question the objectivity of an adjudicating official. But aside from the common sense fact that this case is clearly not worth a minute of any judge’s time, there is every reason to refuse to be bullied by a threat such as that put on the table by Mr. Gallaher.

What Council Member does not have beliefs that can be twisted into “personal bias” or has never made a statement in the heat of debate that could be called non-conforming to some abstruse legal requirement? I would guess this case would be thrown out forthwith, but before anyone gets that far, the issue is whether developers should be allowed to bully Council Members with the threat of lawsuits when they don't like a particular vote.

Dupre has acted in the best interest of the City as she sees it – to save City money by avoiding legal action which in any case seems certain to have no effect whatever on the future of Fountaingrove Lodge.

But the underlying best interest of the City is to have City Council Members who speak their mind and are not cowed by threats of lawsuits. The proper response of Dupre's six colleagues is to urge her to stay on the job, insist that Gallaher withdraw his suit, and make clear the City will go to the judicial mat to defend their fellow Council Member.

White Elephant Garage vs. White House Hotel

2009-03-02T10:12:00.000-08:00

White Elephant Garage vs. White House Hotel

Why is it so difficult to separate out an oversize city-financed garage from a privately-financed boutique hotel? Because auto-oriented pro-development forces in the city want it that way.

And today the Press Democrat joined the downtown booster bamboozle brigade with a story that continues to mix up the two. The tenor of the PD headline and its story suggests that downsizing the garage from its current 545-spaces could scuttle the White House hotel project. But the hotel developers, MetroPacific, don’t have any stake in the four or five hundred spaces the city wants – the issue for MetroPacific is the 90 spaces it needs.

Last time a project was on the table, the White Elephant garage killed the whole thing when the developer couldn’t build the city’s monster parking facility at the price the city was able to pay. That’s a fact buried in the PD article, which, however, pays far more attention to the dreams of previous councils that hoped subsidizing pie-in-the-sky future development with an out-sized garage would bring investment.

And that is a bad idea – sage advice from the likes of last year’s visitors from the Mayors Institute on Urban Design, and Curt Johansen, a leading sustainable developer. They have said it’s wrong to build a garage on the better mouse trap theory, hoping developers will come in due time. I can’t see that it is in the citizens’ interest to make the parking public shell out to cover the cost of what will be for years a largely unused garage as a sweetener for developers.

The previous councils that kept trying to build a monster garage were on auto-pilot to auto-dependency. Some council members still buy off on the approach. It’s the thinking that kept Highway 101 in the middle of town against Caltrans advice, split Courthouse Square to keep cars coming through downtown, and subsidized the Roxy Theater with free parking that now benefits the Roxy and almost no one else since most theater patrons in cars come and go without stopping to patronize other businesses.

To facilitate the parking subsidy – in the form of exempting office buildings from zoning requirements to build adequate parking – previous councils have held on to downtown’s castrated Parking Assessment District. In 1996 (like, yes, 12 years ago already) Proposition 218 in effect spelled the end to any collection of assessments, but the “Assessment District” lives on. A 2006 expert study commissioned by the city recommended getting rid of this help-out-developers arrangement, and the city promised an early study on how to do that, but has dragged its heels in hopes, apparently, of getting one more White Elephant under the pro-developer tent before modernizing.

So it’s time for 21st century thinking to tackle downtown development. Subsidize good projects (I would include the hotel proposal), and stop subsidizing developers of office buildings (which we don’t need). Above all, put an end to the idea of making the parking public pay ever higher fees for an out-size garage to keep a couple hundred empty spaces waiting for the day a car will come.

Bamboozling the Council

2009-02-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

The City Council and Bamboozle Briefs

Does our City Council always get the best information on which to base its decisions? Here’s an upcoming agenda example that suggests the Council is sometimes “bamboozled” - a fine old word meaning to frustrate by misdirection or incomplete information. At issue in this instance is whether the City should ask citizens to pony up for a 545-space garage when only 200 spaces are needed by most lights.

On Tuesday next (Feb. 24), the Council will decide whether to extend the negotiating period for the proposed hotel on the White House site with construction of a new city-financed 545-space garage. Most everyone likes the hotel concept, but many have doubts about the size of the parking garage – some like me say 200 spaces is plenty, and it’s an unwarranted subsidy to pay for more, much less 345 more costing millions to build.

On to the bamboozle factor. Here are a few A) questions that have been asked; B) City answers, which seem to me bamboozles; and C) clarifying perspectives which I have gleaned from the City’s own information.:

Question 1: Do we really need a 545-space garage?
City answer: Studies have shown we do need that many or more to meet future demand, and there is already a waiting list for permits downtown.
Perspective: The studies are all grievously out of date, and the most prominent included projection of demand from a 10-story high rise expected by 2006 on the Ledson lot behind Barnes and Noble – say what? And the people waiting for permits are those who want to park right next door to their work rather than walk, as they do now, a couple of blocks; permits are available today in the garage behind the Roxy. OK, so how big should the garage be? Call it about 200, calculated as 90 spaces needed by the proposed hotel plus 100 or so to replace surface parking that will be lost.

Question 2: Is the City obliged to provide parking for downtown?
City answer: We have a Parking Assessment District downtown and property owners who have paid into it over the years now have “expectations.” There could be lawsuits.
Perspective: Really? Experts hired by the City consulted with the City Attorney and then wrote in their November 2006 report: “If the use or density of a property changes…the increased parking requirement does not oblige the City to make additional parking available.” That’s pretty straightforward, I’d say. And the same report makes clear that what property owners paid for through their assessments is the existing parking, not future freebies.

Question 3: Why do we have a 1950s- style downtown Parking Assessment District (PAD) anyway, when virtually every other city in California uses an “in lieu” fee system?
City answer: The PAD has provided for assessments on downtown property owners to fund parking facilities, in return for which new construction is exempt from zoning code requirements to pay for required parking spaces. The PAD was established in the 1950s, and Council decided in the late 1970s to keep it.
Perspective: There’s something missing here. In 1996, the passage of Prop. 218 made it virtually impossible to collect any more assessments under our PAD system, but new development still gets a zoning exemption. In short, our fair city has continued the quid without the quo.

Question 4: No assessments anymore? So how is the garage to be financed?
City answer: A bond will be issued to be paid back from city parking revenues and guaranteed by the General Fund. It is the last garage that can be met by the carrying capacity of the PAD area. Perspective: Whoa, how’s that again? In other words, we will just add on top of future parking fees to collect big money from citizens for years ahead to pay for an over-sized under-utilized garage so any new developer project can be exempt from zoning code requirements?!?

There is more, but you get the drift, and the last question brings us to the nub. The real issue is the City’s contention that it is desirable, even necessary, to first build garages downtown financed by the City so developers will come later. Welcome back to 20th century auto-dependency thinking! And it's flat wrong, according to visitors from the Mayors Institute on City Design and leading experts like Curt Johansen of Triad Communities.

Maybe on reflection after analyzing all the facts, we would keep the policy. That's very hard to believe in today’s SMART world, but if so, the decision should come not pre-packaged from City staff and unknown advisers, but from the City Council on the basis of complete, current and clear information.

The Budget and the Elephant

2009-02-17T15:15:00.000-08:00

The Budget and the Elephant in the Room

This week’s respite from City Council gives extra time to ruminate on resolving the budget deficit. Many say the real problem is personnel costs, especially public safety pay packages. Other proposed fixes run a gamut from capturing enterprise funds to reorganization. Grand rhetoric aside, the best way to do the job is probably the laundry list wrangling that will continue in earnest next week when List 3 is tabled at Council.

First, however, it’s time to move past the misplaced hand-wringing over voter “trust” and Measure O. The voters in fact put their trust in the Council's judgment when they passed the measure which already had in it provisions for the Council to use should unforeseen budget difficulties arise -- the Council acted accordingly. It's time to get on with the discussion of how to allocate the totality of scarce resources.

As for police and fire services, the question is how much of the total tax dollar available to the General Fund in 2009/10 should be spent on public safety. Some Santa Rosa law enforcement personalities argue in effect that the size of the force is the issue, not its cost. Others of us try to get at the problem by asking how much public safety can we afford, and whether it might make sense to draw a line at say 2/3rds of all the money in the General Fund?

According to news reports, the public safety share of the General Fund expenditure was 49% in 2000, 54% in 2004 and now hovers around 64%. Follow that curve on into the future, and the road takes you to Vallejo.

Which brings us to what some people call the elephant in the room, namely the question of whether city personnel costs have begun to exceed the city’s ability to pay? Details have all been out there in public at one time or another: 256 city employees drawing over $100,000 in pay in 2007... public safety retirements as early as age 50 at as much as 90% of salary...3/4ths or so of the General Fund going to personnel costs... and so on.

All that sounds over the top to many. But, wait! As best I can tell, our city employee pay and staffing levels are not significantly out of line with comparable cities in California. To me, that means we have to step back, draw a deep breath and take a comprehensive long-term look. Trouble is, of course, we don't have time to do that and cover the deficit staring us in the face right now.

For the 2009/10 budget, reductions in personnel costs depend essentially on the combination of A) what employees will voluntarily give up from entitlements under existing contracts, and B) what positions and programs are to be eliminated. Negotiations continue on A), and the Council will confront task B) next Tuesday when the next list of proposed cuts is tabled -- the third in the series, aka "List 3."

There are still some who believe there are magic bullets to be had. Those who focus on shifting enterprise funds, however, will have trouble doing things like raising sewer fees to pay police salaries. Those who want to cut waste and trim management numbers will find the city is already onto the case, and those who rant against redevelopment will be disappointed to discover that making redevelopment disappear would bring relatively little additional money into the General Fund.

Or maybe we can reorganize our way to solvency? I doubt it – the plan recently presented to Council multiplied uncertainties and clearly requires thorough vetting of major features. Council members liked some of the consolidation ideas, but otherwise appeared underwhelmed.

If you ask me – and don’t ask me whether anyone asked me – the best way to cover the 2009/10 deficit is by continuing to take up cuts item by item. Council members can just say no on specific items if they wish, and send the City Manager back to come up with a substitute. The process got us through Lists 1 and 2, and can work for List 3.

Massaging laundry lists is messy and painful, but it will get the job done better than putting all the city’s eggs into the public safety basket, buying magic bullets, or going for the big fix with high risk of unintended consequences. That is not to say the city shouldn’t wrestle with the elephants, only that it’s best to pin down the problem of 2009/10 before it does so.

The Fix and the City

2009-02-06T10:04:00.000-08:00

The Fix and the City

The City Manager will put a wide-ranging “reorganization” proposal before the Council next Tuesday (Feb. 10) to get direction, hopefully he says, for implementation by July 1 (say when?). Although it is hard to argue with the small stuff in the plan, the hastily conceived big ticket and policy items need serious work-up and a run through the wringer of citizen review.

First, what’s in the proposed Fix? The City Manager’s memo (posted here) is a wildly uneven collection of: five “consolidations,” one huge “restructuring,” and four miscellaneous items. While it is vaguely pitched to financial realities and changing times, it lacks cost-benefit analysis and coherent strategy.

Citizens have not been invited to participate, but here’s my take on what I find Possibly Good, Definitely Bad, and Not Ready for Prime Time:

The Possibly Good: Of the five “consolidations,” I will give unqualified support to joining of reception duties for the City Manager and City Attorney’s Offices. I will do the same for split funding of the Assistant to the City Manager’s job and consolidation of city marketing and communications functions. (It’s almost unnerving to find such small potatoes on a Big Fix list.)

The other three consolidation proposals are far more substantial, reasonable in concept and worthy of further elaboration to earn Council approval. Integration of public works and park maintenance seems to have high potential for savings, although no numbers have been put forward. The same appears true for combining Administrative Services and Finance, as well as integration of Plan Check Functions, though all these proposals could probably use some independent review and “best practice” comparisons to support the case.

The Definitely Bad: Two proposals give me policy heartburn – 1) gutting of the city's planning capability and 2) the bureaucratic form-another-committee approach to climate change and sustainability. On the first, good overall planning will be essential to get our fair city through the urgent challenges of climate change, continued economic crunches, housing and transportation demands, and grant searches. The critical years are already upon us – downgrading the function and cutting loose our most skilled and experienced planner is the wrong way to go. The Council should flatly reject this ill-advised suggestion.

As for cobbling together a part-time interdepartmental team, such bureaucratic collages make pretty charts, but don’t provide the leadership and continuity essential for critical tasks. Climate change and sustainability merit a lot more “juice.” And while we're at it, let's look for effective measures to increase transparency and open doors for meaningful citizen involvement.

The Not Ready for Prime Time: The idea of separating Parking from Transit and putting it into Economic Development might conceivably be viable, but I doubt it, and it seems folly to contemplate doing so without serious study and community review. Both these activities involve multimillion dollar enterprises, and both are critical to the future development of our fair city.

The second highly questionable big ticket item is to “refocus” Rec. and Parks into a “Neighborhood Services/Community Services model,” with the euphemistic objective of “empowering our neighborhoods to help themselves.” Here we are talking quality of life activities that are near and dear to neighbors from toddlers to seniors. Thorough vetting with the public is called for – as the Council must know from its many past marathon sessions to hear out the citizenry on such issues.

That’s a broad brush review, and it doesn’t do justice to what was surely serious brainstorming by dedicated officials. But brainstorming by definition tosses up a mélange of unrelated ideas, not a coherent whole. This Fix doesn’t fit.

The Council should strip out the few nuggets listed under consolidations, send the rest back for serious work-up and get on with the deliberate process already in train to bring the budget into balance for the coming year.

Yes, We Have No Fiscal Crisis

2009-02-04T21:29:00.000-08:00

Yes, We Have No Fiscal Crisis

Yesterday’s City Council testimony and today’s leak to the Press Democrat on possible police department cuts show that the tense debate over whether to make a “finding of fiscal crisis” is really about the size of our police force. The scuffle is between those on the one side who want to maximize police funding levels and those on the other who want to spread upcoming budget cuts more evenly across city departments.

By common sense definitions, our city is in a fiscal crisis. We are already drawing down reserves, our revenues keep falling and we need to slice another $15 million or so from the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1. Part of the solution should be access to some or all of the $6 to $7 million dollars collected annually under our special sales tax known as Measure O, but that money won’t be fully available unless at least six of our seven Council members agree to a “finding of fiscal crisis.”

Why do we need a“finding” by a Council super-majority to tell us what we already know? Because Measure O – to oversimplify – provides in effect that the money collected to support police, fire and gang prevention programs can be used only after the General Fund puts up as much for public safety as it did in 2004/05. To over-ride this restriction requires the agreement of at least six Council members, according to the terms specified in Measure O itself.

That language made sense (sort of) at the time Measure O was passed, and City coffers were full. The extra tax revenue was intended to beef up law enforcement, so conditions were put in to assure that the Council could not reduce the General Fund contribution to the public safety budget in expectation that Measure O funds would flow in behind to make up the difference.

The people now arguing against a “finding of fiscal crisis” are those who want to maintain spending for public safety – especially on police – as close as possible to today’s levels. If that means we go from 64 to 70 or 80 percent of the General Fund budget, so be it, because in their view public safety is the government’s most important function. That’s how they see things, and they cite the restrictive language of Measure O as a kind of sacred trust with the public to keep it that way.

But Measure O was passed before people realized the economy could go so far south. What does it mean to have the words “fiscal crisis” in the measure if you can’t activate them at a time like this? That’s the view of those – including me – who think the city needs flexibility and a balanced approach in the current situation to not only support programs for police, but also for kids and seniors and homeless.

Our firefighters have been willing to talk about cooperative responses, so it has really come down to police staffing levels. The leak in today’s paper – from a city planning paper that showed a possible 18% reduction of the 256-person police department – was clearly intended to amplify concern that public protection will be diminished if police staffing is cut. That is a legitimate concern to be sure, but we need to keep perspective on how best to divide up our limited income.

So, what do Santa Rosans really want? Most surely want adequate police services, but they would probably disagree on how much is enough. They also seem very upset at the high police compensation levels, but voters themselves opened that door a decade ago when they approved binding arbitration, and in any case, the current police contract has months to run. Finally, Measure O is devilishly complex, so I suspect most citizens are waiting for their elected Council to call the shots for them.

The Council is scheduled to address Measure O next Tuesday, February 10. There is considerable worry around town that two or more Council members will vote against a finding of fiscal crisis. That would leave the city with two unhappy budget options: 1) gut other city departments to maintain public safety funding levels and keep access to Measure O funds, or 2) proceed with balanced cuts to all departments and let Measure O funds accumulate unused. The second option would be the more logical – if the Council decides in effect that we don’t have a fiscal crisis, then we should be able to muddle along until the hold-outs realize we really do have one.

But we can hope it doesn’t come to that. The sensible course in the current emergency is to unblock Measure O funds, and use them to keep public safety activities going as best we can without devastating the rest of the city’s programs.

Positions, politics and policy

2009-01-29T23:53:00.000-08:00

Positions, politics and policy

On Tuesday (1/27), the City Council voted 4 to 3 to name Gary Wysocky to replace John Sawyer as the city’s representative to the Sonoma County Transportation Authority (SCTA). Today’s Press Democrat reports that Sawyer was “steaming mad.”

According to the PD, Sawyer acknowledged his competitor’s right to seek the job, but attacked Wysocky’s supporters, alleging that “The best interests of Santa Rosa are being dismissed (sic) to satisfy the desire of a single council member.”

Bite your tongue, Mr. Sawyer! I can’t believe you really meant to say that Council members who voted for Wysocky don’t have the “best interests” of our city at heart.

What’s this teapot tempest really all about? Experience? Egos? Politics? All those elements may figure in, but the bottom line is policy. Reporter Mike McCoy in his wry way said as much in the article’s lead: “Councilman John Sawyer has found out there’s a new Council majority in town.”

The new council majority is there because Santa Rosans voted it into office. And the ballot results had a lot to do with the fact that all four are, as McCoy put it, “more environmentally leaning.” Wouldn’t citizens find it in their best interest to have a representative on the SCTA that more accurately reflects their electoral preferences than one who has been less than enthusiastic about alternative transportation?

I doubt Sawyer’s intemperate remarks will be given much credence around town. That’s fortunate, but the episode is nonetheless worthy of attention lest people take seriously the notion that experience should trump an electoral mandate for policy change.

When, as in this case of choosing an SCTA representative, there are issues of policy difference, a four to three vote is just what Dr. Citizen ordered.

Openness - the White House and City Hall

2009-01-26T13:13:00.000-08:00

Openness - the White House and City Hall

There is cause for local reflection in today’s Press Democrat editorial praising President Obama for Executive Orders to make his White House transparent. In that spirit, we can strengthen our own house with steps such as opening more meetings to the public and registering lobbyists.

Everybody at our City Hall would surely claim fullest admiration for our new President’s words on the subject: “We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.”

But if pressed, many of Santa Rosa’s senior officials would hedge on just how much openness is in fact good. The big concern is typically that participants in a meeting won’t be candid if the public is watching. That’s true, but such candidness is a virtually worthless benefit as best I can tell from 30 years experience working inside the federal government.

“Candid” in closed meetings means you can cite stereotypes, criticize individuals and propose programs or policies without being held accountable for your words. It often means there is no one present to correct factual errors or argue opposing viewpoints. Candid may be necessary for some personnel and money negotiations, but that’s a limited – and regularly abused – rationale.

The Council, for just one example, has had an Emerging Policy Issues Committee (EPIC) with three Council members and key managers to talk about shuffling priorities around when the need arises. When I asked last year to listen in on its first meeting, I was told California’s Brown Act does not require such meeting to be open because the committee did not include a majority of the Council. That response turns the legislation on its head – the Brown Act was written to open up government, not to provide an excuse for closing the door. (Council members eventually acceded to my presence, but no one bothered to invite me to subsequent EPIC meetings.)

Another example from my personal persnickety experience: certain members of the City Council and County Supervisors had a meeting last fall to get briefed and consider policy direction on Roseland Annexation – closed to the public. What was so secret? And isn’t the President right when he says, “Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”

Let me add that I am arguing here for access not interaction. Time considerations can justify disallowing comment from public peanut galleries. The important thing is to let us peanuts know we can come by to hear and observe, if we want to.

The President’s formulation also spoke to “ensuring the public trust” through openness and transparency. To my mind that covers a related idea that makes sense for Santa Rosa – a requirement that lobbyists register with the city. Numerous cities large and small have adopted such ordinances, which are essentially cost-free and can be very simple to administer, relying for enforcement on California state perjury laws and the city’s power to disbar anyone from doing municipal business.

So, here’s a plea that City Hall take a page from the new Washington book and look at opening things up right here in Santa Rosa. On meetings, the question should always be: Does this event have to be closed? And the answer should be No, unless there are truly compelling reasons – not including convenience, presumed candidness, or fear of embarrassment.

Summing up, we could use more rain outside, but more sunshine inside, City Hall.

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Note: Appropriate to the topic above, I recently corrected my error which limited comments on this blog site. Comments are most welcome - just use the link at the end of any blog.

Changing the Guard on City Commissions

2009-01-17T14:56:00.000-08:00

Changing the Guard on City Commissions

City Boards and Commissions, especially in the hands of forceful leadership, can shape as well as implement city policies, so naming new Chairs is critically important to change policy direction from one administration to the next. Although most of the choices by our first progressive Mayor have received considerable praise, a couple provoked discordant notes from the sidelines. I was ready myself to thwack Ms. Gorin (editorially speaking, that is) for less than a clean sweep, but on the way to the keyboard, I changed my mind. Here’s why:

As a starting point, I agree replacing the Olde Guarde is a very good thing after an election like ours last November – tipping out incumbents sends a strong and useful message that times have changed and a new era is about to dawn. But the other side of the coin is replacements must have an adequate measure of smarts, background knowledge, and drive to hit the ground running. Doing the job right can require an enormous investment of time and effort, which many of the best qualified citizens are unable or unwilling to take on. On the other hand, cutting qualification corners to fill jobs will not serve the city well (classic illustration: “Heck of a job, Brownie!”)

The Planning Commission (PC) is arguably the most important of our oversight boards and fortunately in this case, the right stuff was in place. Mayor Gorin selected Planning Commissioner Vicki Duggan, who had not only gained experience during her tenure to date, but had also demonstrated a strong grasp of the issues along with exceptional dedication (like reading briefs until 2 am for details of the controversial Lowe’s big box store application). She has been well-attuned to public input and sensitive to environmental protection. By contrast, her predecessor, whatever image he may have intended to project, struck many of us as overly biased toward developers and too quick to cut off or dismiss neighborhood views.

Elsewhere, the Mayor took advantage of similarly felicitous circumstances to name chairs to the Design Review Board (DRB), Cultural Heritage Board (CHB) and Community Advisory Board (CAB). For the DRB, the city’s loss has turned out to be its gain – Ken McNab is an outstanding professional city planner who resigned not so long ago from Santa Rosa city employment to take a planning job in Calistoga. While still on our city rolls, among other accomplishments, he won widespread praise for shepherding the Station Area Plan through numerous storms to its acclaimed final form.

Bryan Much, named to be Chair of the CHB, is bright, young, energetic and well versed in the issues from his multiple years on that Board. His predecessor, Dan Flock, who continues on the Board was also very well regarded by preservationists – the hope in this case is that a more enlightened council will capitalize on synergy between old and new chairs to give historic preservation the greater attention it has long deserved. (Disclosure: I live in a historic district and have been seen to hug old houses.)

And Tanya Narath has all the qualifications along with community standing to take on the unique requirements of chairing the CAB. I say “unique,” because in my view the primary job there is to find out whether there is a job. The CAB was formed, as the City Charter puts it, “to greatly increase citizen and neighborhood participation and responsibility.” That never happened because past City Councils have kept CAB distant from any serious engagement in city business – at CAB’s inception, then-Mayor Sharon Wright suggested “weed abatement” would be a good project for it to undertake. A new Council working with Ms. Narath and new appointees to CAB could change all that.

Okay, okay, let’s cut to the quick! Grumble, grumble...those are all fine appointments, but why did Mayor Gorin keep Dick Dowd on as Chair of the Board of Public Utilities?

The avuncular Mr. Dowd is considered a quintessential “Old Guard” insider and not, therefore, likely to take the lead for policy change. Moreover, the BPU’s business is water, and as Chair, he has been associated with pronouncements that among other aspects of water policy, have never satisfactorily explained how city authorities can assert there is plenty of water for build-out through 2035, while just last Friday (Jan. 16), the Press Democrat could report: “We kind of have a disaster in the making here,” Pam Jeane, the Sonoma County Water Agency’s deputy chief engineer of operations, said, referring to the current water situation. Still, as far as I know, Dowd otherwise handled the BPU gavel capably and was not criticized for any particular action.

The BPU is one of those Boards that has a significant learning curve, but unlike the Planning Commission, it has not had the prestige and visibility to attract a populous stream of interested citizens. That is not to say that good members have been lacking – many have come forward and put in more than their fair share of time and toil.

I have heard calls from progressive quarters to turn over the Chair to current Board member Robin Swinth, who has a great reputation and a record of excellent service. I don’t know her personally, but I also hear she has other obligations that prevent her from devoting the time she feels would be needed to do the Chairperson job right at this time. She will, it seems, be available in the Fall, however.

Summing up, I have to agree on reflection, it’s better in this case to wait a shortish time for the right person than to shoehorn in someone of lesser distinction and potential. This is an argument the Mayorapplied to a couple of other Chair re-appointments as well, and she signaled her calculations in this regard at the Council session when she put forward her list and talked of the need for continuity and “mentoring,” ostensibly to develop a better grounding for the extensive duties of board and commission chairs.

I do, however, have some qualms about the general mentoring proposition. I would not, for example, accept the argument in all cases – chair change was mandatory to my way of thinking for the PC and DRB, regardless. Also, it is important to keep in mind that board, commission and indeed city council members are all 100% responsible for their actions from the moment they take the oath of office. I’m happy to have the old crowd give as much advice as it wants to the new team, but those of us seeking clear breaks with past practice on key issues hope to see new members asserting themselves and their convictions from the get-go.

In any case, come February 1, I will be relaxed, ready to thank all the chairs and members of our boards and commissions for their service to our fair city, and to wish them all well inthe months ahead. Before year’s end though, I’ll be checking back to see how well this mentoring concept has worked.

Coming to Grips with Green

2009-01-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

Coming to Grips with Green

Following up on the big public turnout for the Green Building Advisory Committee report in December, the Council is moving ahead on green energy financing and a mandatory green building ordinance. But the new Council seems still searching for a strong enough consensus to take bold action on such issues as it heads toward its big strategic goals-setting session set for March 6/7.

The Council took an easy step on January 6 when it voted to participate – maybe – in a financing district which the County is now "exploring." Pursuant to state legislation (AB 811), the idea in brief is that the County will develop a low-interest loan program for property owners on a voluntary basis to finance renewable energy sources or energy efficiency improvements. Repayments would be made on the property’s tax bill over the life of the improvement.

The Council approved in principle the inclusion of properties within SR city limits. This was not very contentious, given that the Council can do a 180 if it doesn't like the fine points of whatever package the County comes up with. Since last September when Supervisors agreed to pursue the proposal, the County has put forward precious few details and no time-line, but such quibbles of impatience should not diminish the importance or potential of the concept.

On the City’s own turf, the Mayor has called a meeting this week to “review the (Green Building Advisory) Committee recommendations, take inventory of resources already available in the community, and determine how (the private sector is) willing to help.” That is a tall order, and presages the scheduled January 27 presentation to Council of the super-inclusive Community Climate Action Plan (CCAP), coordinated by the non-profit Climate Protection Campaign. The CCAP covers everything with input from almost everybody, and doubtless because of that inclusivity, it is carefully worded on the major divisions revealed at the December Council meeting concerning standards levels and retrofit requirements. It calls for mandatory standards for new buildings “similar to” those imposed by Rohnert Park and would rely on market incentives for retrofits. The Plan's proposals are of course advisory.

Exactly where is our Council headed? Too early to say, judging from an exchange at the January 13 meeting when Council Member Dupre, in connection with the Council's upcoming goals-setting exercise, asked what mechanism might be in store to relate each proposed goal to its green impact, in more or less the same way that a fiscal cost is determined for specific goals. Council Member Sawyer was quick off the mark to seek assurances that the issue was not how to do this, but whether it should be done at all – reflecting, it would seem, the cautious approach of past City Councils. Mayor Gorin allowed as how the importance of doing so would indeed be a topic for the March 6/7 goals session.

The next open test will come on February 10 when the Council again takes up mandatory Green Building Standards. The import of the Council’s direction from December 16 was to lay out considerations for the mandatory level of standards to be imposed on new buildings. From news reports I have seen, Rohnert Park has Silver (above “Certified,” but lower than Gold or Platinum) for large projects, and Napa has Silver across the board.

One should not make too much of the impromptu exchange I noted above involving Dupre and Sawyer, but the upshot did suggest to me there is a ways to go before we see where the Council will set its green bar. One suspects a faster pace and a tad more passion than seen so far will be needed if the ambitious goals already on the Council’s books for greenhouse gas reductions are to be met. The discussion and decisions to be taken on February 10 will hopefully give us a better idea of the new Council’s intentions.

SR Green Buildings-how green, how fast?

2008-12-21T20:59:00.000-08:00

Note: This blog starts a new series -- SR Council Watch. My intention is to provide occasional description and commentary on Santa Rosa City Council actions which are not well covered in the Press Democrat. I once complained when the PD did not report on a Bike and Ped Board recommendation to hold up development in NW until residents’ concerns were better met – not enough reporters to do so, said the PD. Presumably for the same reason, the PD failed to cover the Council debate December 16 on what to do about its Green Building Advisory Committee's Report. Hence, the blog that follows below. And yes, I lied when I said I wouldn’t send you another email from this list – as always, however, I’ll be happy to take you off, or even better, add your friends, relatives and adversaries. j

SR Green Building Standards – how green, how fast?

Upwards of 100 citizens turned out for City Council on Dec. 16 hoping to influence Council action on the report of its Green Building Advisory Committee (GBAC). (Staff and GBAC reports) Everyone loves green, but serious disagreement emerged over a) how fast to move and how high to set the bar for the ‘greenness’ level of new buildings and b) how to handle retrofits of your house and other existing buildings down the line. These pocketbook issues - slated to come back in January - elbowed aside discussion of an important proposal for a special district to finance energy improvements.

The report and the context

Pressure has been growing here for stronger action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase energy efficiency. Residential and commercial structure energy use accounts for 36% of GHG emissions in our county (transportation for nearly 60%), and SR was only the fifth city to introduce mandatory building standards when it did so in December 2007 at relatively low levels.

The GBAC had both environmental and construction industry representation. The psychological weight shifted markedly toward environmentalists after the November 4 City Council elections, and a solid majority of 12 GBAC members signed off on all eight recommendations, in effect underlining the need in their view for early and strong action. Still, five members representing building and realty interests filed a dissenting memo calling for a more voluntary or phased approach and a “confirming vote of the people.”

Three GBAC recommendations on building standards proved lightning rods for controversy at the Dec. 16 Council meeting: rec. C) for mandatory audits to determine an energy-efficiency rating for existing buildings; rec. D) mandating energy efficiency requirements to be met by existing buildings when they are sold (point-of-sale); and rec. E) setting the bar higher for new construction. These three items all raise questions of costs and who will pay them. That in turn energizes three different constituencies: 1) environmentalists who want purposeful action; 2) realtors and builders who want to keep costs down; and 3) lower-income homeowners who fear imposition of budget-busting “taxes” or fees.

The Council gets an earful

The staff report for the Dec. 16 Council meeting foresaw a simple three-stage response to the report: the Council would a) first “accept the report” without any decisive comment; b) allow for evaluation by city departments; and then c) take up fleshed-out staff recommendations in 60-90 days. Citizens by the dozens, however, came forward to say in effect this was not good enough. The by far largest contingent, comprising environmentalists and some supporters from realty and construction sectors, urged the Council to explicitly endorse all eight GBAC recommendations and get on with the job asap. The most appealing logic on the stronger/faster side was that disaster truly looms, and must be countered with win-win activities to both reduce emissions and spur economic activity. They argued further that good policies and loan programs can be put in place to minimize or eliminate up-front payouts and offset costs through savings on energy bills.

A smaller but equally passionate group of realtors and development/construction reps. accepted the desirability of action, but argued against imposing expensive mandatory measures in these tough economic times. They also objected strongly to point-of-sale requirements on grounds many home owners will be saddled with costs they can ill afford.

After the marathon parade of public appearances, the Council tried to come up with a meaningful next step, focusing on the easier issue of revising mandatory standards for new construction. Differences, however, quickly emerged over how high to set the bar and how fast to do so. Council Member Jacobi pushed for immediate approval in principle of the second highest level (gold, which is above silver, but below platinum) and enaction of an implementing ordinance as soon as practical. Her colleagues were more cautious, and Mayor Gorin searched for unanimity – in the end all but Jacobi voted to go for a study session in January, waiting to set the level at that time.

What’s in store?

Odds (from Jim’s smoky crystal ball) are that the Council will move to impose the gold standard on new building after its January study session. Costs in that case will be paid by new buyers and they generally aren’t around to complain. There may be some phasing or generous exemptions, however, in the interest of compromise with realtors/builders.

Mandating audits and improvements for existing structures will be considerably more difficult. Proponents of strong measures argue critical mass will never be reached with voluntary or half-hearted steps. On the other hand, pushing too hard may provoke a critical mass of opposition. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of confusion on just how much is saved from what retrofit, how costs of mandatory audits (up to $700) fit into the picture, and what the fine print will say for special cases. The “trust me” approach of green building activists, be they environmentalists or builders, has not convinced many skeptics among home owners who want more specifics on what it will cost them when.

Missing from Council Members’ discussion on Dec. 16 was any real effort to advance GBAC Recommendation B for a local financing district to fund energy efficiency and renewable energy installation, as authorized by state legislation (AB 811) passed in July. Berkeley and Palm Desert already have such districts, and on Dec. 5 San Diego's mayor proposed an aggressive plan to help homeowners and small businesses buy solar power systems. If Santa Rosa wants to walk its green talk, it needs to get in gear on this one without delay.

Also AWOL from Council consideration Dec. 16 was GBAC Recommendation G that SR set up its own solar power system to generate enough power to meet all (sic) current residential electrical demand from SR consumers. It sounds a bit like Star Wars stuff for some of us, but is surely worthy of serious and urgent consideration.

If you’re an interested citizen, the time to weigh in on all this with Council Members and city officialdom is now!

Jim's City Budget FAQs

2008-11-22T20:13:00.000-08:00

SR Council elections 2008 are over, and this is the last of my entries on this blog. I have conceived the following as a kind of, uh, parting gift. In any case, thanks to all those who took the time to read my entries, and many thanks also for the several kind remarks directed my way.
Cheers and be well, Jim
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City Budget FAQs -- Jim’s (and only Jim’s) FREE and UNADULTERATED explanation of current woes along with a citizens’ guide to the City Council’s Nov. 25 agenda which starts the count-down to solvency.

1. What’s the problem?

-- City revenues have gone south with the national economy, and City income is not enough to cover the bills that come due every month to be paid out of the General Fund. The City is heavily dependent on sales tax and property-related taxes to pay its way, and they have been sinking like a rock.

2. How bad is the problem and what's the City's plan?

-- For the next budget year (FY 09/10) starting July 1, 2009, it now looks like the City’s General Fund will be short at least $10 million, probably closer to $15 million, out of projected expenditures of about $146 million. (BTW, $15 million is just under $100 per SR resident.)

-- The City already made $5 million dollars worth of General Fund cuts for the current year (08/09), but will have to do some more surgery since revenues have continued to flag. The City will present lists of proposed cuts for both years to the City Council on Nov. 25.

3. Wait a minute! The City recently bought the AT&T building for $3 million, is putting millions into reunifying Courthouse Sq, is tearing up streets for new sewer lines, etc., etc.…sounds like there is plenty of dough.

--I wouldn’t have bought Fortress AT&T either, but that money comes from a redevelopment pot and can’t be used for the General Fund; sewer and water services likewise are paid from utilities enterprise monies, which also can’t be used for the General Fund. Ditto for money derived for transit operations and parking facilities. None of these monies can be transferred to the General Fund.

--Courthouse Sq. is a little different in that some of the design costs
came from prior year General Fund money, but the amount ($300,000 if I remember right) is not enough to make much difference anyway. As for the millions needed to do the actual reunification work, so far not a penny is projected to come from the General Fund. (BTW, I hear cost estimates are skyrocketing as the architect faction now wants the most bestest square this side of the Mississippi.)

4. What activities are paid from the General Fund?

-- The General Fund covers staff and operations of core City Department services: police, fire, rec. and parks, public works, community development, administration, and economic development and housing.

5. Why not just cut staff, say 10% across the board, like any business has to do in dire times?

--Actually, that’s just what the city is doing. It eliminated 37 positions from City rolls for 08/09 and is proposing to cut another 61 for 09/10, for a total of 98 which is more than 10% of the 880 or so positions paid from the General Fund.

-- On Nov. 25 the Council will have to consider whether to accept the City proposal and save about $10 million by among other measures: a) axing the 61 positions; b) cutting a list of operational activities, and c) reprogramming some Measure O funds to keep the police budget up. The police reportedly will support reprogramming to get out from under a Catch 22 (see below) feature of Measure O, that would otherwise keep a big chunk of money sitting unused.

-- But Council action approving all the proposals still probably won’t be enough. There will almost certainly have to be additional cuts if and when the deficit continues to climb past the $10 million toward the projected $15 million.

6. Why not also cut salary levels and pensions? Isn’t City staff, especially public safety, just plain overpaid?

--Public Safety officials are well paid thanks: a) to YOU (Santa Rosa citizens) and b) state-wide practices. YOU voted a ballot measure for binding arbitration to assure that police and fire officials get paid at prevailing wages, and prevailing wages all across California are relatively high with exceptionally good pension benefits. And of course one reason is that their jobs put them in harm’s way! In practice, all that probably can’t be changed much unless there is a state-wide movement.

-- As for most other civilian City employees, there are exceptions, but I believe that on average our city workers are paid 5% or more below levels in comparable California cities.

--The City can’t just take out a pencil and reduce City employee compensation, since most employees are on contracts (except mid- and upper-management). Contracts can be changed only when they come up for renewal, or before then, on a voluntary basis. That’s why the main short-term option for the City is to cut positions, not salaries. For employees, the choice is whether to have many of their number laid off or forgo some compensation in order to keep more positions on the books.

--For the short term, discussions are on-going between unions and the City to see what savings might be possible. Some managers and fire department employees have already volunteered to give up scheduled COLA raises this year.

-- For the longer term, the City has started, at least with civilian employees, to reduce pension benefits for all new hires—the Old Guard City Council threw this process off track, but it will likely resume in the new year.

7. Surely there is still fat and duplication that can be cut?

--No doubt. But to give the City its due, it has already found major savings from reductions in vehicle fleet and other operations, and by transferring costs out of the General Fund to other funds, where legal and appropriate.

8. How do we know they are cutting the right things? Like they said they had to cut the Senior Center – until seniors complained.

--The short answer is it’s almost impossible for citizens to get into the guts of City Departments. The chiefs put their preferences on the table, and that’s all we see. Of course the Council can say no to an individual item, and then the department chiefs have to find something else for comparable savings – as happened with the Senior Center.

--Council members and the public have to mostly fly blind on line items since they can’t divine all the options. The list of cuts to be presented on Nov. 25 for example has $71,000 savings from Econ. Dev. & Housing ( $34,000 for business promotion and $37,000 for homeless services), but unless you work there, you probably don’t know there is also a $100,000 contract for the Santa Rosa Main St. organization that could have been put on the block as an alternative.

9. Hmmm...but it sounds like the problem is mostly solved – eliminate the 98 positions, approve the proposed program cuts (maybe fiddle a couple), limp through 09/10 and do it all again for 10/11, no?

-- Maybe not “solved,” but certainly closer to resolution if and only if the Council buys off on the package to be tabled next Tuesday (Nov. 25).

-- One huge item is the Catch 22 built into Measure O for public safety, which authorized a ¼% sales tax that collects up to $7 million per year. The language of the Measure says the monies collected can’t be used to “supplant” General Fund expenditures. To oversimplify, that means that if the City cuts General Fund monies used for police, then it can’t draw on Measure O money, and if the City doesn’t cut General Fund monies used for police, then other city departments (which in good times get only 38% after Public Safety is covered) will have to take the whole brunt of reductions. The only way out of this is for 6 City Council members to declare a “fiscal crisis.”

10. What’s a fiscal crisis, and why wouldn’t the Council want to free up Measure O funds which in any case will be used essentially only for sworn police officers?

-- There is no language in Measure O to describe a fiscal crisis, but for my money (so to speak), if this isn’t one, I don’t expect one in my lifetime.

-- You’ll have to ask Council members why they might oppose rationalizing the use of Measure O money, but the concerns mentioned seem to have two elements: 1) worry about the appearance of somehow going back on the City’s word, even though the money would still go 40-40-20 to police-fire-gang programs, and 2) perceptions that there is still fat to cut elsewhere, or maybe we should draw down City Reserves.

-- Personally, I like a balanced city and can’t see the objections to using Measure O for sworn police officers. As for the City Reserves, they are set at 15% to keep our bond rating up, have a kitty for the next Big One disaster, and cover temporary cash flow problems when revenue dips more than expected. Not unreasonable, I’d say, but not to be graven in stone if revenues continue to slide precipitously.

11. What’s the story on the other big items put out there by the city?

-- Two items “above the line” (meaning they are counted as new income in the City’s proposals to reduce the deficit by $10 million), include: a) a Special Tax District, which is bureaucratese for putting a fee on new development to cover the projected costs to the City of additional services, such as police and fire protection; and b) expanding the refuse collection franchise and recovering underpayments discovered by audit.

-- To close the gap, the Council has to approve these “above the line” items or look for $2 million from somewhere else.

-- Items “below the line” (meaning they are still trial balloons), include: a) persuading more city employees to voluntary forego upcoming pay raises; b) introducing of fees for first responder services, like when you call a fireman to rescue your cat from a tree; and c) increasing the bed-tax on hotel guests.

9. The City is proposing to hold community meetings next year to get citizen input – isn’t that just a big waste of time?

--Maybe, but first,let's ask why are they bothering? I think the answer is partly that the incoming City Council is far more pledged to listen than previous ones, and partly that the City needs some input or “cover” if it is to keep balance in the budget. The tough question revolves around public safety costs which have steadily risen and now account for over 60% of all General Fund expenditures. Gut choices for YOU (Santa Rosa citizens) will be whether you want: a) to balance future budgets by assuring that public safety costs stay somewhere around the current share of the total; b) pay more (e.g., through a sales tax increase) to cover higher public safety costs and still pay for other services at the levels to which we have become accustomed; or c) hold the line on taxes, but cut other city programs to cover public safety costs.

--The City is using models of other municipality budget outreach programs that seem to have worked. Give it a go, I say.

12. I am still not sure I understand all this!

-- Neither am I. And to disclose, I am a public member of the City’s Budget Deficit Advisory Group, but the forgoing opinions, judgments and guesses are all my own doing except for the numbers which I have drawn from public documents.

--If you think this is complicated, have a try at figuring out the best long term solutions, given that even with the last few years of low population growth, the City has been left with expenditures outstripping revenues. Going green and sustainable seems obviously key to me, but influential figures in our fair city still believe development and big box sales tax generators will be essential. Then too, some worry that if we curb development, we'll drive land prices up and just become a somewhat pale imitation of Marin? I don't think so, but that's a whole 'nother story.

Yes we can in Santa Rosa

2008-11-05T14:05:00.000-08:00

The first-ever progressive City Council and its mandate

As change swept America yesterday, our little corner of the nation also contributed a smidgen to history by electing Santa Rosa’s first-ever progressive City Council. Its mandate is mixed and a budget crisis restricts its options, but the door has been opened for an inspired new approach to the challenges facing our fair city.

Four individuals with overlapping progressive agendas -- Gary Wysocky and Marsha Dupre joining froces with Susan Gorin and Veronica Jacobi -- will form a majority on the SR City Council for the next two years. They share desires for greater attention to environmental protection, neighborhoods, diversity, social programs, small business promotion, and the like. They will not be mesmerized, as past Councils have been, by big development projects.

How does one read the election results to divine this new council’s mandate? The strongest undercurrent was clearly public desire for policies based more on sustainability and less on developer influence. Those were themes Wysocky and Dupre put up front in their campaigns, and even the Old Guard candidates found themselves forced to run on a platform – some would call it disingenuous at best – of saying “no to special interests” and advocating environmental protection. All this means that pending issues like the green building ordinance, the General Plan housing element review, and the application for a Lowe’s big box store on Santa Rosa Ave. will have different outcomes from those that have been signaled up to now.

Then too, the election of Police Lieutenant Ernesto Olivares suggests a public interest in both diversity and public order. The new Council in any case is duty-bound to evaluate public safety in light of budget constraints, continuing gang activity, and the pending appointment of a new police chief.

As for diversity, Olivares brings a welcome Latino presence, although somewhat ironically duirng the campaign he spoke out strongly against District Elections, which are favored by a host of that community’s leaders. Many progressives (including me) still hope to see a ballot measure in 2010 for a hybrid system that will assure varied geographical representation and greatly reduce the current need for big bucks to campaign city wide.

In the short term, perhaps the most important instrument of change will be the transformation of city boards and commissions. Past Council appointees, in particular chairpersons, have continued to dominate the Planning Commission, the Design Review Board, and other key bodies. New Council Members will make their own appointments and the next Mayor can name chairpersons -- such new blood should set higher standards for environmental impact reviews, encourage greater sensitivity to neighborhood opinions and, hopefully, provide some pro-active innovative thinking for development that cuts down vehicle miles and promotes a greater sense of community.

Most of the city’s documents on future planning already incorporate a progressive vision. But past Councils and city boards have too often stretched or ignored those plans to permit ridge-line residential construction, scrap sensible zoning downtown, and pursue auto-dependent development. That should change. Other urgencies in the bigger picture include planning for water supply, higher priority for Roseland annexation, and correction of shortcomings in SR UGBs.

Before all that, however, the city’s budget problems require early and painful actions. There are difficult decisions to be taken without delay on city staffing levels and personnel benefits – ideally with maximum collaboration and minimum confrontation, though that is hardly a given. Making the best use of Measure O funds is also critical and that requires a super majority of six Council members. From there every approval of a program cut will hurt some real people, and the most needy are politically the most vulnerable... with winter’s frost already in the air.

The best budget solutions will look ahead to address the city’s long-term financial stability. That means taking a fresh look at revenue sources, promoting new economic endeavors, and (gasp) advancing a sub-regional approach in coordination with neighboring municipalities and the County. One possibility worthy of consideration is forming an advisory task force that would go beyond the usual suspects to bring in local academics and stronger representation from small business as well as from labor and non-profits. In the same vein, the Council might well look anew at how city government is structured, perhaps with zero-based budgeting exercises to start from the ground up.

Facing an economy still in trouble and the fractional politics of Santa Rosa, the tired half-joke is to ask why people in their right mind would seek a City Council seat. One explanation this year is the opportunity to work for better realization of our fair city's potential in the new progressive national framework of President Barack Obama.

The Rove factor

2008-10-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

The “Rove-ing” of Santa Rosa City Council elections

As we go into the home stretch, it is clear this campaign for Santa Rosa City Council seats has been like no other. The Old Guard fueled by developer interests has mobilized slick new strategies, and the New Guard powered by progressive concerns has derived extra help from old friends in the labor and Democrat Party movements. It could be a nail-biter finish.

Big change may be in the wind. Progressive success in 2006, when Susan Gorin and Veronica Jacobi took two of the three open seats, led to what former local columnist Chris Coursey called a “seismic shift” at City Hall. As of mid-2007, the pro-development faction had lost its absolute majority on the Council. Today, citizen concerns about undue developer influence, inadequate attention to environmental protection and unresponsive government jeopardize the long reign of the city’s established political machine.

At the same time – and closely connected – new blood is threatening the grip of pro-growth interests on the County Board of Supervisors. The attractive progressive credentials of Shirlee Zane and Rue Furch are making it difficult, if not impossible, for development and construction moguls to assure election of favorite daughter Sharon Wright and their chosen newbie, Efren Carrillo. The environmental and social stakes for all Santa Rosans are very high – health care, Roseland annexation, greenhouse gas reductions and needed economic restructuring all intertwine between the two jurisdictions.

The leading progressive candidates for City Council walk and talk much like their predecessors. Michael Allen, Marsha Dupre, Lee Pierce and Gary Wysocky plus Judy Kennedy and David Rosas for the two-year term have all been active in grassroots organizations and stand four-square for environmental protection, social justice, and promotion of local commerce.

What’s different this year on the progressive side is the attention to labor issues and the infusion of union resources. For the city council, Allen is a former labor official with a record of bringing parties together to resolve planning and budget issues. Labor has naturally lined up strongly behind him and has also given (mostly moral) support to other progressive candidates for the Council. Most union money and sweat, however, is going into the county campaigns where health care and employee benefit issues loom large.

Reacting to all this progressive ferment, developer interests have taken a campaign route that mirrors strategies associated with Karl Rove. One professor has described this newer mode of campaigns as playing “ not to real issues but to voter fears, emotions and visceral judgments.”

So, the Electoral Machine led by political consultant Herb Williams has put together a slickly packaged slate with simplistic poll-driven themes. The slate’s campaign materials, including TV spots, are disingenuous at best with candidate promises to say “no to special interests” and to be “tough” on city budget matters. In the real world, of course, special interests are paying for their campaigns, and the slate itself springs directly from the Council clique that allowed the budget to grow like topsy all the years it was in power.

The Press Democrat, moving closer to the Fox media mold, has joined the Rovian fray, in part, I would guess, out of adherence to a pro-development ideology and in part out of personal loyalties to Electoral Machine figures Wright, Bender and Sawyer. Thus the PD excoriates a labor pledge, but fails to mention that two of its three endorsed Supervisor candidates have taken the very same pledge. It claims the election is about city budgets, but fails to examine the performance of its endorsed candidates and their mentors who ran up expenditures for a decade and drew down reserves in 2006 for favorite projects. And so on...

We should not of course be surprised that big city politics have come to small town Santa Rosa with something of a vengeance. Many millions of dollars are riding on future development prospects and much hinges on measures yet to be taken to fend off environmental catastrophes.

The intensified politicking has not been all bad. While some mailers have peddled gross distortions, others have put out factual and relevant information about candidate records and funding implications left uncovered by the PD. Also, the numerous candidates’ forums have often featured sophisticated questions and revealing exchanges -- we need more of them next time.

But, coming down to the wire, second hand information from polls of unknown accuracy suggests there is still a high percentage of undecided voters. Given fifteen names against five City Council seats, one worries that the outcome may be decided by Rovian sound bytes and simple name recognition with the intellectual content of a Florida chad.

Personally, I am more optimistic that voters will recognize the need for real change to a progressive agenda. But let’s not leave it all up to mailers and ads – it’s time to send out the emails, get on the phones, walk the streets and wave the placards.

Pledges vs winks and nods

2008-10-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

The Press Democrat and its "special interest" disconnects

The Press Democrat editorial staff is on a tear against written campaign pledges to labor. The paper’s real objective, however, seems to be supporting its favorite candidates and (here I go again) the special interests behind them.

In theory, the PD could have opened a potentially lively discussion on campaign pledges. For instance, is the difference between pledges and ‘winks and nods’ real or apparent? Or, are pledges worth the paper they are written on? And, the heart of the matter, how can voters best judge what candidates will do in office if elected?

But the PD’s editorial on the subject (October 16) skips all that with some pious words about openness. Its editorial subhead, for example, is “voters have a right to know what promises have been made.” On that count, written pledges would seem to be a relatively good thing since they put specific words out there for the voting public to read – not, of course, that any politician can be held to them at the end of the day.

The paper spins its editorial to echo the electioneering tactics of The Team slate for City Council. It does this transparently by suggesting that anyone who signed the union pledge is suspect because the City will have to freeze or roll back employee pay to address the deficit. But ...sigh...the PD has said nothing about the fact that the great bulk of city employees are represented not by the union (SEIU) that asked for the pledge, but by the three employee bargaining units that participate with backers of The Team in the Sonoma County Alliance’s PAC. I'd argue that is an association meriting more editorial discourse than the labor pledge.

The PD concluded its careening editorial with a call for candidates to “make pledges directly to the voters, not special interests.” At face value, that says it’s not so much the pledge, but to whom you make it that’s bad. And leading up to that conclusion, the PD asserts its pages would “certainly call attention” to any candidate that signed a pledge to a developer or business group that had a financial stake in City Council business.

At first, I thought the PD was into black humor. But, regrettably, the editorial staff seems to be genuinely persuaded that as long as the chosen candidates don’t sign written pledges, it’s okay to have an electoral machine backed by developers who have big-money financial interests in the Council’s power over land use.

That’s old news, though, and I won’t further belabor the point here.

What Campaign Finance Reports Don't Say

2008-10-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

Find the money, if you can - and why it matters.

Follow the money, they say in politics. The Press Democrat on Friday (October 10) printed information on campaign finance reports, but did precious little to help readers understand what the data mean. Without a Chris Coursey, the PD these days is woefully short on discussion to put such matters into meaningful context.

Context is important because SR campaign spending is a ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ kind of thing. The mandatory reports filed by the candidates cover contributions received through September 30, but if one defers collection into November, the money doesn’t show up until after votes have been cast. Moreover, separate Independent Expenditures (money spent by supporters independent of the candidate) can be critical, and it’s uncertain at best how much of this money is captured for the public record. Then too, important freebies like public opinion polling information may not show up at all.

Clever campaign strategy can create misleading impressions. The PD’s article on contributions, for example, noted correctly that Bender, Sawyer and other members of The Team reported relatively low income, a fact that at face value blunts past criticism of their developer support and suggests they are running an austere campaign. Hmmm....maybe those TV ad spots on CNN aren’t as expensive as I thought. Not to mention the full page color ad in the PD or the glossy mailer I received or the lengthy public opinion polls. Not exactly running on the cheap!

Independent Expenditures (IE) are also reportable and can involve big money, typically for mailers or ads, sometimes in the form of negative “hit pieces.” But uncertainties of source or content – this applies of course to all sides in a campaign – can make it difficult or impossible to assure that everything is counted. Finally, a particular factor in Santa Rosa is public opinion polling which costs $10,000 to $20,000 per survey. The Team’s “coach,” Herb Williams, does multiple polls year ‘round, a valuable resource that can be made available to his candidates at little or no cost, while others generally struggle to pay for a simple benchmark poll or two.

In sum, it’s virtually impossible to get straightforward fixes on campaign financing before polling day. That’s unfortunate because information on contributions, direct or indirect, can tell the voter a lot about what ideas candidates represent and what goals they can be expected to pursue in office.

So what “special interests” might be behind current campaign financing in Santa Rosa? The October 10 PD article, when it looked at the leading progressives, summarized their sources of funding as “labor, environmental and bicycling advocates, and neighborhood groups and their supporters.” People in that support group would seem to be most interested in the environment and quality of life issues. Even the labor component in this case lines itself up with broad progressive causes, since the unions that represent most city employees are far more closely associated with The Team.

Turning to The Team, the PD article referred to a “wide-ranging list of business and development interests such as homebuilders, engineers, architects and real estate interests.” Wide-ranging?? Excuse me, but that list adds up to a limited, wealthy group of individuals who profit from City development and land-use decisions. Now that’s what I would call “special interests!”

Notwithstanding such contributions, The Team’s strategists are clearly anxious to play down connections between their candidates and the developer community that continues to fund The Team's Electoral Machine. To that end, they have mounted a slick campaign crafted with all the best bells and whistles, while keeping reported campaign income down to a minimum and featuring promises to say “no to special interests.”

"No" to whom?? Excuse me again, but as noted above, The Team's campaign is in fact backed primarily by “special interests” of high concern to SR citizens. That's perhaps the biggest reason why progressives -- count me in -- say it's time for a change.

PD endorsements for SR City Council

2008-10-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

PD endorsements – some new music but discordant notes

Let’s give the Press Democrat credit for not going all the way with the developer-backed slate. Picking three of five from The Team is still substantial support, but those of us who expected an even stronger editorial boost for the local electoral machine are at least morally obliged to consider starting a PD subscription.

The PD demonstrated its measure of independence from The Team by endorsing non-team members, Pierce and Wysocky on their individual merits. Good for the PD! At the same time, it withheld its blessing from Carol Dean on grounds she should honor her pledge not to run, and the editorial didn’t even mention the name of The Team’s fifth member.

As a progressive, I read the PD’s comments on Michael Allen as a virtual endorsement. He is praised for his exceptional CV and for being a “patient listener, problem solver and mediator ...well-versed on contract issues.” Perfect for the job!! But the PD cavils about his union ties and commitment to a living wage ordinance – an editorial board, I would say, that is out of tune with its surroundings.

It’s also too bad the PD didn’t rise above its mean-spirited attack six years ago on Marsha Vas Dupre for her replay of public information about big-money developer contributions to Council candidates in 2002, among them John Sawyer. Marsha has a truly outstanding record of service to the community and deserved better treatment from the PD then...and now. And I was surprised to see the endorsement of police lieutenant Olivares, whose background and record don’t seem to fit the needs for an effective role on the City Council. The recommendations for Bender and Sawyer, the core of the Old Guard, were eminently predictable, despite the appeal of new blood in the veins of Kennedy and Rosas.

The above observations are arguably talking points from a progressive. What jarred my objective side, however, was the PD’s overblown references to “the wisdom of blocking the (police dispatchers) raise” – a statement that shows its editorial board hasn’t grasped the full nexus between city pay and our fiscal crisis. The paper obviously has its own reasons to like John Sawyer and Jane Bender, but the vote in question demonstrated little more than political opportunism and lack of true leadership.

More revealing than the vote itself was the mishandling of the issue. Sawyer as Mayor should have ensured that pay raise deferrals were considered on a collaborative basis as part of the negotiating package. Instead, he and former Mayor Bender waited to sandbag the agreement at the last and most public moment. The result has not only undermined confidence in the negotiating process, but also put at risk the “two-tier” system, which until that vote, was on track to save the city millions over coming years by reducing benefits for all new hires.

Be all that as it may, it is comforting to see the PD's 40% divergence from the Electoral Machine slate running under its The Team logo. Not yet the right overall editorial direction for some of us, but the more discernibly independent path is welcome news.

Truth in ads and endorsements

2008-10-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

Truth in ads and endorsements – The Team candidates and machine politics

Slick well-heeled Washington-style electioneering has come to the race for Santa Rosa City Council seats! The full page ad in today’s Press Democrat for the slate running as The Team is classic spin – evading accountability and pandering to poll results.

The thrust of the campaign ad is that some unspecified “special interests” are responsible for the city’s fiscal crisis, but candidates wearing The Team label will say no to these interests and, even better, balance the budget without cuts in services or cost to taxpayers. That is the old “trust us” argumentation aimed at an issue on voters’ minds as shown by year-round polling

Let’s look at key aspects of the ad: who’s responsible for past city decisions that presaged the current deficit, what “special interests” played roles, and what’s possible for the future. And a word on what’s really at issue for those who endorse and those who vote.

For starters, who should be held accountable for approving a city budget structure that ran into trouble when the economy tanked? For that, you don’t have to look far to see who has called the shots. Majorities on the City Council for at least 20 years have been controlled by the associates and backers of The Team itself.

One of their bigger misfires came about when The Team’s core – Jane Bender and John Sawyer, along with the late Bob Blanchard – controlled the Council majority that only two years ago in 2006 slashed city budget reserves by $6 million. The money went to fund favorite projects like Bender’s Courthouse Sq. Reunification and Mike Martini’s Place to Play Park (which, even after that infusion, needed another $1 million in city funding to cover unanticipated costs). At the time, these same Council members told the PD that “the city is protected financially.” Those words have to call into question the accountability, judgment and promises of those at the heart of The Team.

And what or who are the unidentified “special interests” in the ad? Perhaps the Sierra Club? Or the developers of Skyhawk? No, the ad’s sly reference would seem to hit at unions, since employee pay and benefits account for over 70% of city General Fund costs. In August The Team made a big show of vetoing the package negotiated weeks before with 55 civilian police employees, who belong to the Service Employee International Union. But SEIU represents only a very small proportion of city workers, and The Team incumbents as recently as February approved an if anything more generous package for the far larger general civilian employee unit.

The fact is the “special interests” that have most strained the city budget are the three city unions that cover the great bulk of the city workforce. And all three are in political bed with The Team’s primary support organization, the Sonoma County Alliance (SCA). Representatives of police, firefighters and civilian employees sit on the SCA Political Action Committee, which this year is chaired by none other than the leader of the civilian employees’ largest bargaining unit.

As for the future, The Team’s claim that it will say just say no and balance the budget is clearly a poll-driven election ploy. Their new ad uses the phrase, “cuts across the board,” words that have featured in their calls for city pay reductions. But in the short term pay cuts depend on voluntary action by employees to defer their own raises, and credit for that goes only to the employees themselves, not to The Team. And for the long term, The Team is patently ridiculous when it promises it will balance the budget without cutting services or increasing costs – voodoo economics at its worst.

The Press Democrat’s editorial director, Paul Gullixson, has written (PD Sept. 7, 2008) about what the paper is looking for in City Council candidates: “We want to hear how candidates plan to confront the fiscal challenges that await them. ...There are no easy answers to these challenges.” Gullixson is totally right – there are solutions, but they will be painful and they must involve collaborative effort above all with city employees, not the bombast issuing from The Team.

The kind of standard Gullixson puts forth would seem to rule out endorsement of a team that not only promises the moon, but slyly evades accountability for its record. Based on the Press Democrat’s record over two decades or more, however, political observers expect the paper to throw its weight behind most or all of The Team.

That would be too bad, because when you strip away election rhetoric, the underlying issue is whether development machine politics with the big bucks for slick ads will continue to put majorities on the City Council. And whether our only daily newspaper will follow the spirit of its own advice, or again help the SR Electoral Machine maintain its grip of twenty years and counting.

"The Team" -- what's on its agenda?

2008-10-04T16:41:00.000-07:00

The Team -- would they do anything differently this time?

The five candidates for SR City Council running together as The Team have not presented any detailed written agenda, but their campaign promises echo one another. What are they saying and what would they do if elected? This blog presents my best guess (see my Sept. 26 piece for a parallel look at leading progressives).

First, just to be sure we are on common ground, The Team is, of course, the five candidates listed on campaign posters with The Team as a logo: City Council incumbents Jane Bender, John Sawyer and Carol Dean, plus police officer Ernesto Olivares and CPA Bobbi Hoff. This slate -- the only self-identified "team" as far back as most of us can remember -- is closely associated with members of past Council majorities, local political consultant Herb Williams and the Sonoma County Alliance, which has strong participation by developer and construction interests.

On what basis can we project policies that members of The Team would likely promote if elected? .I have drawn here from their campaign materials and statements they have given to the Press Democrat, and also extrapolated clues from the nature of their endorsements and supporters. Before launching, however, I have to add that I have not spoken with any of The Team members on this topic, and I apologize in advance for any misinterpretation of their words.

That said, here’s my take on intentions that lie behind The Team’s campaign statements:

Cluster I – make “tough” budget decisions and grow the economy

1 – cut city pay. The Team candidates have made much of their proposals to cut city employee pay, including calls for “10% across the board” reductions. The Team incumbents on the Council after approving contracts for the city’s larger units earlier this year, in August vetoed a negotiated pay package for civilian police dispatchers (who are still considering their response). But otherwise, cutting pay – or more realistically deferring raises – in the near term depends on contract provisions and, if invoked, on binding arbitration for Public Safety officials as approved by SR voters in 1996. What really counts, therefore, is not The Team’s rhetoric, but the good will of employees to voluntarily forgo raises, as executive staff and firefighters have already done on their own.

2 – balance the budget. Like virtually all other candidates, The Team wants to balance the budget with tough-minded reviews to make city operations more efficient and cut or reduce program spending. And like other candidates, The Team is short on specifics – when a list of measures was put to the Council on Sept. 30, The Team incumbents went with the mainstream by arguing to keep the Senior Center and Burbank Home and Gardens without identifying offsetting savings. They have protected the relatively limited city expenditures that support business promotion, and otherwise, when push comes to shove, they will continue to select programs to cut largely by listening to the squeaking wheels of public opinion.

3 – promote development. Looking to longer term city revenue needs when the national economy rebounds, The Team leaders promise to work for, in Bender’s words, “commercial and retail growth.” This equates to continued competition for new big box and mall stores, along with encouragement of major residential construction projects. Although rising costs have pretty much killed years of effort by The Team and predecessors to attract high-rise construction, development of downtown will remain at the top of the group’s agenda, including the proposed 545 space parking garage to be financed by parking fees, approval of office buildings and, further down the road, perhaps reviving promotion of a new city hall complex. Sawyer has also plumped for infill projects with higher density “than neighborhoods might like.”

Cluster II – no major change for environmental protection and social programs

4 - guarded approach for environmental protection. SMART is actively supported by The Team, which has also focused on city operations, such as more fuel-efficient vehicles, and suggested promotion of financing arrangements to help homeowners and businesses make greater use of solar energy. From there, however, The Team will remain sensitive to business cost concerns, and therefore cautious toward building regulation. More generally, it has an ideological bent that will keep it sympathetic to developers and guarded in its response to pressures from environmentalists for stronger action on GHG, water planning and other environmental issues.

5 – little or no change for affordable housing. Santa Rosa has met affordable housing targets for low and moderate income residents, and The Team will support continuation of current policies. They may be open to proposals for closing the long-standing shortfall in very low income housing and for achieving a better distribution of affordable housing across the city, but their inclination, as with environmental protection, is to give full weight to developer and construction views.

Cluster III – rely on current government institutions

6 – no to district elections. The Team will oppose any form of district elections and work to keep the current system, which Olivares has described as “perfect.” The presence of Olivares, giving The Team a Latino member, reflects an approach that relies on personalities rather than on systemic change. In this vein, The Team is likely to maintain past Council promotion of diversity through appointments to city boards and commissions, a policy that has led to significant progress, although minorities remain underrepresented in key areas.

7 - stick with existing institutions. Others have urged better mechanisms for transparency and citizen involvement, but The Team evinces confidence in existing institutions and the current planning process. It will not be very interested in proposals such as those for establishment of an office for neighborhood involvement.

8 – caution on visions. The visioning process, exemplified by the Station Area Plan, will enjoy on-going support in principle from The Team, as its members recognize the need for forward planning and better anticipation of future needs. But The Team will continue to be cautious on implementation, tending to support short-term development goals over long-term visions when specific projects are put on the table.

That’s hardly an exhaustive list, but, taking the items together, I find The Team can be expected to carry forward the approach of past SR City Councils. The Team and its associates, who have dominated the City Council for 20 years, deny they could have foreseen or prepared for the current fiscal crisis, and they believe pro-development policies remain the best way forward for our fair city. When this group talks of change, it seems to mean intensified efforts to attract “commercial and retail development.” It accepts in principle the desirability to become more “green” and more protective of resources such as water, but not to the extent of letting the pendulum swing too far away from core developer interests.

In sum, for better or worse, The Team is the continuity slate.

Notes from the trash can – the case for a lobbying ordinance

2008-10-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

Notes from the trash can – the case for a lobbying ordinance

During the League of Women Voters candidates forum on Monday, there were references made to Herb Williams, the well-known “coach” of The Team slate. Some candidates bristled at any possible hint of an influence issue, but candidate Michael Allen suggested that Santa Rosa might do well to have a registration requirement for lobbyists.

From my 30 years’ experience as a federal bureaucrat under standing orders to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety, I think Allen has a very good point. Here’s why.

First, let’s be clear – this is about transparency and promoting public trust in government. No one is in any way suggesting or implying misconduct of any kind.

But there has been past cause for concern here in Santa Rosa over lobbying activities. As the Press Democrat reported in 1998, then-members of the City Council Sharon Wright and Janet Condron were fined a total of $17,500 by the state Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC), following a two-year investigation at the “behest of council watchdog Geoff Johnson, who accused (them) of being paid lobbyists” for the SR Chamber of Commerce. Johnson later called attention to the activities of Richard Carlile, who eventually paid $24,000 in fines to settle FPPC charges, including that he improperly lobbied for clients while he was on the SR Planning Commission.

Fast forward to the present and look at these simple facts from the public record:

– item: The Santa Rosa city trash collection/recycling contract won by North Bay Corporation in 2002/3 is reportedly worth “between $150 and 200 million” over its ten year life.

– item: According to Press Democrat reporter Mike McCoy’s 2005 feature article on Williams, “His client North Bay Corp., a Santa Rosa-based garbage hauler, has won contracts from Santa Rosa, Windsor and Rohnert Park. “

– item: The City Council that awarded the trash collection contract included as a majority Jane Bender, Janet Condron, Mike Martini and Sharon Wright. According to the McCoy piece they have all been associated with Williams, who is of course guru to the current The Team slate of City Council candidates.

– item: Bobbi Hoff, member of this year’s The Team running for City Council, states on her website she was “chosen by the Santa Rosa City Council as one of the three people to evaluate and select a new recycling and trash hauler. Bobbi is proud of the committee's accomplishments, including evaluating and awarding the largest trash hauling contract ever in the history of Santa Rosa, and being instrumental in converting City vehicles to use alternative fuels and implementing single stream recycling. She continues serving on the Refuse Committee monitoring the implementation of the contract.”

You be the judge. Is there a possible appearance issue when the same political campaign team comprises:
1) someone who has been retained by a company,
2) a city-appointed monitor for that company’s multi-million dollar municipal contract, and
3) one or more City Council members?
I don’t know whether North Bay Corporation, which includes SR trash collector Redwood Empire Disposal, is still Mr. Williams’ client, but that’s the kind of question a lobbyist registration ordinance might help clarify.

A number of California cities have ordinances promoting transparency of lobbying activities. In addition to California’s big metropolises, a quick web search turned up San Jose, Fresno, Malibu, West Hollywood, Oceanside, and Milpitas. They all appear to have fairly simple ordinances requiring persons employed as lobbyists to register with the City Clerk. There’s no significant budget obstacle – the cost of publishing regulations, printing forms and asking lobbyists to fill them out is minimal.

Santa Rosa does not have such an ordinance – I’d say it’s time to get one.

Advocacy, discussion or politics? – Oakmont and Elnoka

2008-09-29T22:41:00.000-07:00

Advocacy, discussion or politics? – Oakmont and Elnoka

Many of us who advocate for neighborhood participation in the city planning process have been dismayed by the confrontational nature of recent exchanges over a proposal to develop part of the “Elnoka” property adjacent to Oakmont. The developer’s plans are still forming, but would likely include 200+ residential units along with a commercial component on a 9.2 acre parcel south of Highway 12 between Melita Rd. and Oakmont.

Three elements have raised temperatures: Oakmont residents’ worries about the impact of the project; confusion over the affordable housing dimension; and plain old political finger-pointing.
Underneath it all is a now familiar question: why doesn’t our fair city have a process that better informs stakeholders and does more to resolve their differences before they enter City Council Chambers as gladiators bent on mortal combat?

The Elnoka case doesn’t provide a full answer, but it is instructive.

First, Oakmont residents have expressed many of the practical concerns neighbors all over the city raise when a major project is proposed next door. Kenwood Press (cheers for local news organs!) highlighted some examples from an early August meeting with city officials: traffic along Highway 12; fire protection; the effects of higher residential density and a commercial element; and impacts from inclusion of low or moderate income housing units.

These issues are what the city planning approval process is supposed to deal with under the aegis of the Design Review Board (DRB) and the Planning Commission (PC). The pointed grilling of some Oakmonters, however, implied a lack of confidence in the system. They have reason for caution – in recent months, neighbors in Southwest went to court to overturn a PC decision on a Walmart project, those in the JC neighborhood successfully appealed a PC rezoning action to the City Council and appeal of a questionable 4-3 PC decision on design and environmental issues is now pending for Spring Lake Village expansion proposals.

Next, “affordable housing” is a phrase that generates more heat than light in many Santa Rosa conversations. In the Elnoka case, the City Council made the basic zoning decision back in 2002, when it designated the parcel as one of several in different areas of the city to make sure enough land would be available for higher density housing. On that narrow point, there was nothing for the PC or the City Council to say in 2008 except to affirm the 2002 action.

That history tells us the Council has not stayed on top of affordable housing issues, even though the city has in fact met regionally mandated targets for moderate and low income housing of the kind that could be a small part of Elnoka development. Meeting those targets is good, but not the whole story – the other side of the coin is that the city’s approach over the last two decades has created serious social problems by ghetto-izing our urban setting. The Housing Element of the General Plan is currently under study for a critical review by the City Council next year – that’s the obvious opportunity to try again to forge a consensus on the how, how much and where of affordable housing.

In the short run, electioneering has muddied the waters. The August meeting mentioned above was characterized by the Kenwood Press as “city representatives” meeting with Oakmonters to “clarify” the Elnoka issue. That sounds good in principle, but the city reps were three Council members running on the developer-supported slate: Bender, Sawyer and Dean, plus Bender appointee Scott Bartley, who is Chair of the Planning Commission. That politically one-sided line-up was hardly a balanced way to start a constructive dialog on city-wide policy issues and the happening should have been billed for what it was, namely a campaign event.

So where is the Elnoka discussion headed? Exchanges in the early rounds were disjointed because, as the Kenwood Press reported “(city officials) have not been privy to the developers’ plans that were shared with our community.” Those plans were evidently not final, and as best I can tell there is no firm proposal now on the table.

If and when a more solid concept is put forth, discussion can focus on concrete issues and options. City Council members of all stripes have tried to assure Oakmonters that their input will strongly influence, if not determine, DRB/PC decisions on the final shape of the Elnoka project.

One hopes for productive exchanges, but as Council Member Lee Pierce pointed out in connection with the Spring Lake case, the planning approval mechanism needs to do better at resolving problems before escalation to the City Council. The record suggests – to me at least – that new faces are needed to make the process more responsive and effective.

The "progressive agenda"

2008-09-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

Is there a “progressive agenda” – and if so, what would it change?

There’s talk of a possible “progressive majority” on the Santa Rosa City Council for the first time in the modern era. 2+2 is indeed 4, so the hopes of progressives will come to pass if two (or more) of the their favored candidates win to join current Council Members Gorin and Jacobi.

First, let's fix who might form this potential new majority. I count six candidates who enjoy robust support from progressive advocacy groups like the Sierra Club, labor unions, affordable housing types, Democrats, and the three core progressive political organizations, namely Concerned Citizens for SR, Sonoma County Conservation Action and the Coalition for a Better Sonoma County. On this basis, the following names emerge: Allen, Dupre, Wysocky and Pierce for the open four-year term seats, plus Kennedy and Rosas for the one two-year vacancy. No single candidate has the endorsement of every such organization, but all have substantial association with more than just one or two.

Second, what specific new policies and priorities would a progressive majority bring? Strictly speaking, there is no “progressive agenda,” since these disparate candidates have no unified command or coordination center. But from what they have said, I find ideas that overlap to form a broadly consistent set of goals. Before proceeding to lay them out, however, I’m obliged to make a strong disclaimer – I have not consulted with the candidates, and I apologize in advance for any misinterpretations in the following paragraphs. That said, here’s my crystal ball reading of the major themes that would come to the fore if progressives win control of the City Council:

Cluster I – more open, inclusive government

1 - less “developer” influence. There is a very strong perception among progressives that developers continue to enjoy undue influence on city policies. Judging from campaign talk so far, a progressive Council majority would give much greater attention to environmental costs, neighborhood concerns and socio-economic impacts of development projects. Anticipating the howls of developers, progressives would say this is not anti-growth, but protection of our future.

2 - more open government. Many progressives now see a government run by a small group that pulls strings behind the scenes to preselect SR Mayors, set Council agendas, and stack city boards and commissions with pro-developer figures. Lee Pierce, who prides himself on accessibility to the public, split in 2007 with former colleagues on the Council and what he called “the Herb Williams camp,” because of their closed-hand approach. Progressives would try for a more transparent process.

3 - inclusiveness and diversity. I expect a progressive majority would reopen the case for district elections early on. There is an overriding sense that “ordinary folk” can’t compete in our current system, which puts a premium on the big bucks needed to campaign city-wide. Proposals would likely be put on the table for some “hybrid”combination of district seats, at-large slots and maybe a separate ballot for Mayor.

4 - listen to citizens. Progressives reflect a growing concern that city government should be more responsive to neighborhood views and follow through on visions that have citizen support. They say the established city way of doing business gives too much priority to short term development goals. A progressive shift on the Council would encourage more citizen participation, and put not only new faces, but also new attitudes, on city boards and commissions.

Cluster II – get serious about the environment

5 - go green faster. Santa Rosa by many measurements has a good “green” record, but it falls well short of what progressives want. They would intensify the search for environmental “best practices,” water security, ways to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a quick end to the kind of foot-dragging that has hobbled efforts to put real teeth into green building ordinances. This forward lean to green has earned Dupre, Allen and Wysocky coveted endorsements from the Sierra Club.

6 - feet, bicycles and alternative transportation. This year’s crop of progressive candidates are all big on reducing conventional auto-dependency by making it easier for people to walk and bike. This is quite a change from recent Council attitudes, epitomized when then-Mayor Blanchard side-tracked a Bike and Pedestrian Board recommendation for forceful action on bike paths in Northwest SR, and Carol Dean in effect fired the Board chairman for pushing the issue. Wysocky and Rosas are avid bicyclists, Kennedy has a ZAP vehicle, and Allen wants to consider SMART Bike production (check the web if you’re not up on “SMART Bikes”).

7 - new approaches to environment and housing. Progressives know there isn’t a lot of money in the till, so they are generally looking for creative low cost measures, ways to use our area’s unique advantages to exploit the demand for green technologies, and imaginative ideas for financing, such as a solar financing district as proposed by Allen almost a year ago. Resource shortfalls will also complicate moves for more affordable housing, but progressives will be pressing to redress the city’s poor performance on the very low income category.

Cluster III – tackle the budget deficit and revenue weakness

8 - balancing the budget. I don’t find any magic bullets in progressive budget proposals, but there are a couple of common threads. Allen and Wysocky have both attracted a measure of positive attention, the former with calls for greater collaboration among all stakeholders (an approach he applied to help solve Mendocino County’s $10 million deficit a few years back), and the latter with his focus as a CPA on more solid balance-the-budget policies to keep down administrative overhead, eliminate overlap and maintain a conservative reserve.

9 - reevaluate city revenues. Progressives are very leery of the once predominant idea that more large-scale residential development, downtown high rises and big box stores are all essential to generate needed revenues for any municipality. They would rather explore alternatives that promote green technology entrepreneurship, make use of existing buildings, develop innovation clusters, and broaden the sales tax revenue base. Some may want step way back to take a new big-picture look at whether city growth as now projected will create demands for infrastructure and services that will in turn inevitably outstrip the income from fees and taxes.

10 - use what we have. I may be stretching a bit here, but I sense progressives will be more focused on exploiting our existing strong points, rather than pinning hopes on grand development plans. After all, while high rise buildings have languished on drawing boards, closer-to-home projects have added considerable life to the downtown scene: refurbishment of 4th St., RR Square’s do-it-yourself promotion of heritage tourism, the Prince Greenway project, and the Arts District.

All in all, November 4 could bring a potentially sweeping change of direction for our fair city – if progressives can bring it off. The strongest argument in their favor is that the policies of the last two decades have run the city into a financial hole and left it without a coherent vision for the future.

The incumbents and their fellow candidates would beg to differ of course. In a blog coming soon, I’ll try to take an objective guess at what will happen if “Coach” Williams and The Team prevail.

"The Team" -- new campaign poster and why Steve Rabinowitsh was never Mayor

2008-09-21T14:11:00.000-07:00

"The Team" -- new campaign poster and why Steve Rabinowitsh was never Mayor

A new campaign poster has been spotted in Santa Rosa: "The Team for City Council." It lists John Sawyer, Jane Bender and three new recruits to the Santa Rosa Team franchise.

So what does it mean to have “teams" like this on the SR City Council? For one thing, in Santa Rosa it has meant that game plans can be hatched off the field, including decisions on who should carry the ball as Mayor.

That is why Steve Rabinowitsh, one of the city's most popular Council members during his eight years at City Hall, never had a chance to be Mayor. Steve was an exemplary team player on the Council, but he wasn't a member of The Team. So leaders of The Team-2002 awarded Sharon Wright bragging rights to “an unprecedented third term” as Mayor, rather than give Steve a turn at the helm. Others suffered similar fates over The Team years.

The Team-style politics also explains the consternation in front of Council chamber cameras in 2006 when newly elected non-Team member Veronica Jacobi nominated Lee Pierce to be Mayor. The problem was that before the new Council members even took their seats, the
fix was in. Bob Blanchard was to be Mayor for two years, and that was that! Veronica's move, however, was a political advance of sorts, since during The Team heyday before the changed mood that followed the 2006 elections, outsider names, like Rabinowitsh, never even got nominated, much less selected.

All this is important for the rest of us, because the Mayor in Santa Rosa is not just the team captain for the opening coin toss. The CityCharter accords the Mayor power to “establish the agendas for Council meetings” and to appoint Council Committees and Chairpersons thereof. The Mayor also appoints Chairpersons for the city’s boards and commissions, as well as representatives to county, regional and state bodies, subject to approval by a majority of the Council. The latter condition has not been any complication until just recently, since before 2007,
The Team held the necessary four or more seats.

The analogy of sports terminology is useful, but one should be careful not to take it too far. Some of The Team's huddles like the ones to pick a Mayor not only seem to take place off the playing field as mentioned above, but also without all The Team members present (having a Council majority in on such discussions would violate California's Brown Act, which requires that most official business be open to the public). On the other hand, The Team does have a well-known adviser/coach – local political consultant and pollster Herb Williams – and like NFL teams, it has wealthy backers.

For more serious discussion, The Team is the “they” in the sentence I quoted from a Chris Coursey Press Democrat column in my opening background blog: “The city moves in the direction they want it to, which usually coincides with the desires of the business and development interests that dominate their base of support and supply the campaign money that keeps them in office.”

Coursey's terminology doesn't have much to do with sports teams. For more detailed political analysis, descriptions like “The Electoral Machine” surely fit better than “The Team.”

Santa Rosa Election 2008 – growth is still an issue

2008-09-18T23:50:00.000-07:00

Santa Rosa Election 2008 – growth is still an issue

The Press Democrat has ruled that growth is not an issue this year - “there is but one main issue: the economy ... and budget deficits.” Bit of hyperbole there since budget options are in practice rather limited, but let’s set that aside for the moment and look at why growth is and should be a critical concern for voters in November.

First, “growth” as a Santa Rosa issue is mostly about how to grow. There are only a few diehards who argue for a moratorium on growth, but there are many citizens who have been dismayed at the nature of the city’s expansion over the last twenty years and want to see more sensible policies put in place for the next twenty. That underlies the support for “smart growth” and corollary skepticism about the continuing inflow of developer money to fund Electoral Machine slate candidates – it is not unreasonable to conclude that developers are reaching deep in these tough times in order to be ready when the recession blows over and construction picks up.

A range of environmental, social justice and neighborhood activists have been pushing back in recent years against what they see as undue influence of developers. This opposition trend has very little to do with “growth” defined as population increase since Santa Rosa and the surrounding area has been growing at a low single digit pace in the last several years (probably so even with allowance for undercounting).

“Growth,” however, is also a word that describes the drive to build out in northwest Santa Rosa, promote high-rise development in downtown, add more big box stores, maximize in-fill wherever a pocket can be found, and keep Farmer’s Lane extension on the agenda for potential lucrative development of southeast Santa Rosa and its beckoning hillsides.

Although at some level this kind of growth can and will be accommodated, environmentalists are finding it a real struggle to put teeth into policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Ditto for promotion of alternative transportation and implementing the best planning and zoning features which seem often to go by the board to facilitate developers. And many ask if we are truly preparing for the day when the cumulative demand for water will require hundreds of millions of dollars for a pipeline to connect our long-term supply in Lake Sonoma with the Santa Rosa water system.

As I write, a big box Lowes application is in the works with support from pro-growth advocates who see it as a vital source of sales tax income. Existing malls and stores are certainly cash cows, but is there really room for more? Home Depot came in but Yardbirds went out, for a questionable net gain. In the same vein, is the next new giant more likely to take money from other Santa Rosa businesses than attract customers from Windsor, Rohnert Park and other points around that now have their own big box stores?

Against this background, there is every reason to consider requiring Community Impact Reports to get a better handle on true costs and benefits before bending over backwards to woo another big box. Nor is it right to try to slide by with incomplete environmental impact information, as a judge recently told the city and Walmart. Those are growth issues.

And then there is growth downtown. The old SR Council’s plan for city center high-rises has flopped. And just recently, respected outside experts have told the city that our downtown is “overparked” and should move away from auto-dependent development. But momentum from past Councils carries the city forward with plans that now include a six story office building with a parking subsidy linked to a big new garage which will be funded by the parking fees you and I will pay when we visit downtown. I happen to favor exploring the idea of a new hotel on the White House site... but another office building, parking space subsidies and more promotion of auto-dependency??

As I ponder the current campaigning, it strikes me that Santa Rosa elections mirror the national scene. The Machine candidates who have been running the city are working to reset the agenda, avoid accountability for performance shortcomings of recent Councils (including the budget deficit situation), and position themselves as agents of change. It all presents a formidable challenge to the looser, more grassroots coalitions that make up the opposition.

But I digress -- my point is that growth indeed remains a matter of great consequence – the make-up of the next Council will make a big difference, not to whether, but to how the city grows.

“Trees don’t read newspapers” – re PD Endorsements

2008-09-14T19:28:00.000-07:00

You can learn a lot about local politics from reading between the lines of today’s Press Democrat endorsements for County Supervisors. In the Third District, the PD claimed to be “troubled” by Shirlee Zane’s labor ties, and endorsed Sharon Wright for a record, it said. of making “difficult decisions, particularly on budgetary matters.”

Ahem! That’s the same Wright who serves on the Sonoma County Alliance Political Action Committee with representatives of the three city unions – police, fire and civilian employees – whose benefits threaten to bust the Santa Rosa city budget. In fact, while Wright was Council Member and Mayor of Santa Rosa , the “experience” she had and “difficult decisions” she made helped lay the foundation bricks for the budget crisis the city now faces.

No single mailer thus far in local campaigning has been more duplicitous than the “Wright for Supervisor” piece that sought to link Zane, SEIU and the bankruptcy of Vallejo. But Vallejo went to the brink under fiscal pressure from city unions, primarily police officers and firefighters just like the ones Wright works hand in glove with on the SCA PAC. They are not part of SEIU. And Zane, by the way, as CEO has kept the Council on Aging financially sound by making reasonable bargains with employee organizations like SEIU.

The fact is that unions, whether local city units or SEIU, work for the interests of their members. So why would the PD whitewash Wright’s long-standing cooperation with city unions on a PAC, and smear Zane for taking contributions from SEIU? The explanation seems to be that the PD is still spinning its editorials to support candidates of the local pro-growth Electoral Machine.

Consider the PD’s first editorial of the 2008 campaign – a “gotcha” piece on October 17, 2007, slamming “progressive groups” for allegedly giving diversity a “back seat “ by endorsing three non-Latinos for SR City Council. Except the PD didn’t mention that one of the endorsees, Michael Allen, has a Latino mother. (Disclosure - I am on the Board of CCSR, one of the progressive groups that endorsed Allen et al.)

Whoops! Can it be that the city’s prime daily newspaper didn’t know that Allen, a prominent citizen (Senator Pat Wiggins’ local office director and a labor activist), has Latino roots? The paper clearly got carried away in its haste to promote two carefully calculated tactics adopted by the Electoral Machine for this year’s campaign: a) attacking labor and b) adding two Latino candidates to its slate.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that the Machine slate includes Latinos. And that many progressive groups are supporting not only Allen, but also David Rosas (now on the Roseland School Board as Sonoma County’s only elected Latino official), and African-American Lee Pierce. Whatever side one is on, there is cause for rejoicing that the all-white model for City Council campaigns may indeed have become a thing of the past.

In the West County Fifth District, the PD used its labor stick to smack down Rue Furch for her support of county employees, while extolling the young and inexperienced Efren Carrillo for his “great insight” and “clear understanding” of the need to solve the county’s budget problem. Furch got mention of her 16 years service on the Planning Commission, but not of her credentials as a long-time advocate for social justice causes and strong defender of the environment .

Which brings me back to the title of this piece, a quote from a former publisher of the San Jose daily newspaper who, when asked why his paper so fervently supported pro-growth coalitions over environmental interests, answered, “Trees don’t read newspapers.”

So too, with our reader-hungry Press Democrat. The paper, to its credit, prints articles by fine objective reporters like Mike McCoy and Bleys Rose, but remains editorially in league with the developer-backed pro-growth Electoral Machine that has run Santa Rosa for twenty years and surely should be held accountable to a large degree for the city’s parlous fiscal state.

2008-09-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

Deciphering Council Code for Election Insights

You had to be a political junkie to grasp the nuances of the Council’s recent “debate” on new fees to fund half the cost of the city’s Advance Planning unit. In the end, the Council approved the fees unanimously, but not before exchanges revealed the continuing gulf between developer-backed and progressive sides of the dais.

The mini-drama started on Aug. 5, when Sawyer, Bender, and Dean stripped out the Advance Planning part of a cost-recovery fee proposal for the city’s overall Community Development and planning work. The three other Council members – Gorin, Jacobi and Pierce – were ready to approve the package as a whole, but Mayor Sawyer insisted he needed more detail.

When the issue came back to the Council on September 9, a phalanx of community representatives showed up to urge approval of the Advance Planning fees. (Disclosure – I was among them.) Bender wondered aloud why people seemed to think she was against advance planning when all she had done was ask for more information – Sawyer took a similar tack less directly, while musing about possibilities of reducing advance planning positions. At one point, from the opposite perspective, Gorin said she was “shocked” to hear a home builder representative propose (again) that Advance Planning be folded back into Community Development.

The March 2005 coup

The big community turn-out, Bender’s defensiveness and Gorin’s sensitivity all hark back to March 2005, when the developer-backed majority on the Council (6 of 7 members at the time) insisted that Wayne Goldberg be removed from his job as head of the Community Development Department, ostensibly because it was too slow to process permits and approvals. The otherwise popular Goldberg was “kicked upstairs” to lead an Advance Planning and Public Policy unit, newly established for the purpose in the City Manager’s office.

The creation of Advanced Planning soon proved a blessing in disguise for the community since from his new chair, Goldberg was able to infuse long term visioning with greater credibility and invigorate citizen participation in the planning process. Projects like the Station Area Plan, 6th and 7th Street Linkage, and Mendocino and Santa Rosa Ave. corridors were warmly received by a range of stakeholders.

But some developers and property owners continued to chafe at the restrictions and slow-fuse implementation implied by city planning parameters.

Sawyer and Bender were part of the mean-spirited Council majority move in 2005 to reassign Goldberg, and they have both drawn electoral support from developer interests. No wonder then that progressive antennas went up when the two began to question the fees needed to sustain the Advance Planning office.

No surprise either that Gorin was quick to challenge the recommendation that the unit be submerged in the Community Development Department, an obvious recipe for downgrading its influence. Progressives see Advanced Planning as beneficial not only for urban design, but to promote environmental protection, sound business investment and healthy neighborhoods. (Lee Pierce was elected on the Machine slate with Sawyer and Bender in 2004, but he was never invited into its inner circle and soon parted company with the group.)

Goldberg himself is a soft-spoken likable professional, who has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most knowledgeable and thorough city planners in the state. He would clearly prefer that people like me let sleeping dogs lie and not rake up the 2005 episode

But people like me think our fair city has been ill-served by the opaque politicking of the past and hope that shining a little light here and there will help bring about more transparent government.

The Moral

The bigger moral of the story is that the upcoming November elections are very much about perceptions of undue developer influence and too much back-room politics. The PD’s Paul Gullixson had a point recently when he highlighted the role of the economy and city budget deficits – but there are no obvious answers, so the underlying question is still what perspective the next Council majority will bring to bear on the search for solutions.

2008-09-10T00:44:00.000-07:00

What’s the Matter with the Press Democrat?

Have staff cuts chopped away the Press Democrat’s analytical capabilities? Its August 31 editorial on “Pay, politics” revealed a distinct lack of knowledge about City budget issues and how the Council has tackled them.

The PD editorial praised Council members Sawyer, Bender and Dean for “putting the city’s long term financial interests ahead of their own” when the three voted August 26 to turn down a pay package covering police dispatchers. The city, said the paper, “doesn’t have the money,” nor is there “justification,” since “at the moment” the city faces an $8 million deficit. The PD went on to assert that the Council members’ election chances would somehow have been better had they gone along with the pay agreement, rather than “courageously” turning it down.

But wait! The City was facing an $8 million dollar deficit back in February when these same Council members approved an even greater pay increase for the even larger City Employees’ Association (SRCEA). And again, a scant two months before the August vote, on June 10 the trio voted for pay increases covering four otheremployee units.

So why did Sawyer, Bender and Dean wait until August to make their move against the dispatchers’ bargaining unit? Cold-eyed analysis suggests pure politicking – aided and abetted by the PD.

Let’s take a closer look at the pay package issue and Council politics.

The real long term city interest

The city’s budget woes flow in large part from the burdens of overly generous retirement benefits granted in the past. Santa Rosa’s civilian employees (including police dispatchers, but not most other police or fire workers) can now retire based on a formula that gives them 3% times the number of years service times their last year’s salary at age 60. In short, they can quit at age 60 and keep drawing 90% of their final year paycheck – less if they leave before age 60 or with fewer than 30 years. (SR Public Safety officials get the same benefit starting at age 50.)

For the first several years of the last decade while city coffers were flush, Councils controlled by leaders such as Jane Bender and the late Bob Blanchard never stopped to question the costly retirement systems. Ditto for their like-minded associate, John Sawyer, who took his seat in 2004.

But lately, the need to get out from under the ‘3% at 60' burden has become urgent, and the city has wisely started to negotiate down to a ‘2.5% at 55' formula for new employees. Some might say that is still too generous, but the savings will add up to the millions in the out years. However,the new system can’t go into effect until all six bargaining units (excluding Public Safety) agree – three have already signed on the line, and the police dispatcher agreement would have been the fourth. It has been on the table for months.

The two-tier system is critical for the city’s long-term fiscal health. The city administration months ago made the judgment that getting the change was more than worth the short term cost of the raises. Budget options presented to Council for over a year now have taken the trade-off into account, including implications of the ongoing $8 million deficit.

That was true last February for the SRCEA package, and the dispatcher agreement came to the Council under virtually the same conditions. The city’s budget deficit may well rise in 2009, but that was a known factor back in February, the magnitude of the ciris is not materially greater and and in any case thegap only underscores the need to reduce pension benefits as soon as possible. There was no serious discussion of these financial considerations by Sawyer/Bender/Dean when they voted the dispatcher package down.

Political risk – say what?

So why did the veterans, Sawyer and Bender, approve the other agreements and wait until this fourth contract came up to change course? Sawyer, who warmly praised the dispatchers, could surely have intervened weeks ago for a relook at the timing and strategy needed to get the remaining three units on board with the two-tier system. Instead, as Mayor, he led the dispatchers in effect down the garden path for the last several weeks, then at the last minute sandbagged their pay package.

It’s surely no coincidence that the leader of the City Employees’ Association (SRCEA)– whose more expensive agreement sailed through last February – has long worked hand in glove with the developer-backed Machine that this year supports Sawyer, Bender and Dean. SRCEA President Tony Alvernaz is currently chair of the Political Action Committee of the Sonoma County Alliance that funnels assistance to Electoral Machine candidates.

In contrast to the cosy relationship promoted for SRCEA employees, the dispatchers are among only a handful of city employees represented by the progressive Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has tangled with the city on social justice issues like the living wage and affordable housing. There is already an election year effort underway from the Machine side to cast unions like SEIU in bad light for high city salaries, conveniently ignoring the fact that it is SRCEA and Public Safety unions, not SEIU, which have received the big benefits and supported Sawyer, Bender and their Machine colleagues.

Although the Press Democrat suggested Sawyer and Bender were taking a political risk, it is obvious that the public – stoked by PD highlighting of executive salaries and employee overtime – is upset with the high level of city pay and benefits. The no vote on the dispatchers, thus, was not only related to the union issues noted above, but also has to be recognized as a calculated political move to exploit public opinion to gain votes in November.

It was patently obvious to any experienced Council watcher that the vote on Aug. 26 was essentially scripted in advance. None of the usual hesitations or searching for words. The scenario reminded me of a championship baseball infield – Bender fielded the agenda item cleanly, flipped to Dean, who fired the ball on to Sawyer at first for a PR double play.

Where the PD stands

Put simply, the Press Democrat editorial had it all backwards. The fact is the three Machine slate members sacrificed the city’s long term financial interest to serve their own short term political goals.

Are the PD’s editorial writers as ill-informed as their inadequate analysis suggests in this case? Perhaps, but the PD has for years lined up with the Electoral Machine led by Herb Williams, and this year the paper seems again to be working hard to support the chosen slate, even if that means helping to undermine the city’s long term financial interest.

Santa Rosa Progressive Coalitions

2008-09-10T00:41:00.000-07:00

Santa Rosa Progressive Coalitions
(a background blog)

Progressive influence on city council elections has always been lively, but it has not always been unified. Electoral support from environmentalists, labor unions, social justice advocates and neighborhood interests has flowed through a shifting kaleidoscope of coalitions, which in the past have shied away from backing a single slate.

There is thus no "progressive machine." In general, progressive candidates have had to contend for endorsements, scramble for contributions from hundreds of small donors, and devote extra energy to grassroots campaigning. In recent years progressive leaders have engaged in more extensive networking to better compete with the tightly organized approach of the developer-backed Electoral Machine (see my separate blog fro background on the Electoral Machine).

For those who are not local political junkies, the following paragraphs take a look at the major sources of electoral support for progressive candidates and the intensified effort to improve coordination.

Progressive players

Environmentalists have been a bedrock of the local progressive community. This is true in part because they started early, in part because they have a wide range of supporters including many business people, and mostly because their cause has become increasingly recognized as not only worthwhile but also urgent. Sonoma County Conservation Action (SCCA) was formed in the 1980s to be a focal point for environmentalist political action. SCCA "walks the talk" by reaching down to help with canvassing and neighborhood organizing. It also issues a well-regarded "scorecard" to rank City Council members based on their records of performance with respect to environmental protection and receptivity to citizen views. The Sierra Club is also a key player since its endorsements carry considerable weight, but it has a less intense political focus.

The second "natural" source of support for progressive candidates is the panoply of social justice advocates active in Santa Rosa. Their causes have included affordable housing, services to the homeless and poor, aid for seniors, living wage and diversity. "Diversity" has most often been used as something of a code word for better integration of the Latino community and sometimes fairer treatment of immigrants.

The drive for diversity in political terms has been expressed most pointedly by promotion of district elections, which could virtually assure a Latino representative from southwest Santa Rosa. Electoral Machine adherents have opposed such a move since it would diminish the advantage they gain from having the money to campaign on a city-wide basis, in particular with expensive mailers

The third source of major progressive electoral support has been labor unions. As a general rule the local branches of regional or national unions such as SEIU have a proud progressive tradition and are the single largest potential source of regular campaign funding for progressive candidates. But not all unions wear these colors B city unions covering police, fire and the bulk of civilian employees have thrown their lot in with the Electoral Machine, which after all has produced the Council majorities that determine the wages and benefits of these union members. And all unions are conflicted from time to time on issues or projects which may have a progressive downside, but hold a promise of good paying jobs for their membership ( the proposed casino in Rohnert Park, for example, or a large construction project).

The late Dick Day was a unifying force for progressives and took a lead role in forming not only SCCA with Bill Kortum, but also Concerned Citizens for Santa Rosa. CCSR has an overtly political mission to identify, promote and support progressive candidates for City Council. It also works diligently to monitor council actions to advance progressive causes, while seeking greater openness and citizen participation in the governmental process. The Coalition for a Better Sonoma County (CBSC) is a more recent addition to the political action arm of the progressive community. It has a strong focus on electoral campaigns and in 2006 sent out a mailer which highlighted contributions from developer and construction interest to two Electoral Machine candidates. The CBSC mailing incurred the wrath of the Machine-supported Council majority which promptly scrapped campaign spending limits until 2010.

In 2008, Democrats, with a capital D as in The Democrat Party, began a more structured engagement in local elections. Almost by definition progressives in Santa Rosa are Democrats (here and there some Greens), and as individuals they have always been active either running themselves or supporting candidates. Politicians like Pat Wiggins and Noreen Evans have played very important roles with endorsements and fundraisers, but that has been more a function of their long-standing individual connections in the community. In 2008, however, due in some measure to the excitement at the national level, local organizations associated with the Democrat Party are much more in evidence at the local campaign level.

Progressives have no team quarterback to match the Election Machine’s Herb Williams, who marshals contributions for Machine slate candidates and supports them with experienced advice, polling information, contacts for endorsements and signs, lists for campaigning and so on. That is not to say, however, that progressive candidates have to assemble their own resources from scratch. There are like-minded political consultants – Terry Price being the best known among professionals – and experienced former candidates, including both winners and losers, who work hard to help progressives campaign.

2008

The race for a majority on the next City Council is wide open. Although the only two carry-over Council members – Gorin and Jacobi – can both be counted as progressives, the Machine slate has three incumbents and an overall advantage in name recognition. On the other hand, progressives scored wins for two of three open seats in 2006, and concerns about undue developer influence seem to have been mounting. Still, it’s a complicated election year with a plethora of candidates and the uncertain impact of the city’s ongoing budget deficit.

Progressives have coalesced – more or less, that is – behind four candidates for the four open four-year sets: Michael Allen, Marsha Vas Dupre, Gary Wysocky and Lee Pierce. The first three have long been associated with various progressive causes, and Pierce, who won election in 2004 on the Machine slate, always had a progressive bent and was never comfortable with the back-room politicking of the Machine group, from which he parted not long after taking his seat on the Council. Two progressives are in the race for the two-year seat to serve out the late Bob Blanchard’s term – Judy Kennedy and David Rosas – both having support from different, sometimes overlapping, progressive coalitions.

The Santa Rosa Electoral Machine

2008-09-10T00:35:00.000-07:00

The Santa Rosa Electoral Machine
(a background blog)

It’s no secret that an electoral machine has filled the majority of seats on the Santa Rosa City Council for as far back as most of us can remember. Former Press Democrat columnist Chris Coursey in 2006 summed up the city’s “political reality” thus: “Bender and Bob Blanchard and Mike Martini and John Sawyer and the folks who have made up the majority of the council for at least the past decade control the power in city politics. The city moves in the direction they want it to, which usually coincides with the desires of the business and development interests that dominate their base of support and supply the campaign money that keeps them in office.”

The wealth of the influential core of backers has been used to build a formidable electoral machine. In back rooms obscured from the general public, key individuals provide the organization not only to fund campaigns, but also to recruit and train candidates, coordinate strategy and marshal the range of political tools. This focused approach has enabled the Electoral Machine to come out ahead in election after election, even though the pro-developer policies of its candidates once in office have been poorly tuned to the liberal views of most citizens.

The Santa Rosa Electoral Machine is a textbook example of what academics call “growth coalitions.” In cities and town all across America local government has largely been dominated by monied interests that seek to maximize profits from development of land. Since city councils control land use, developers and associated interests spare no effort or coin to help the “right” people win local elections. For years “growth” was the mantra of Americans looking to own their own house in the suburbs with two cars in the garage. Only in the last two decades or so has increased public disenchantment with urban sprawl, auto-dependency and inequality generated effective opposition to growth coalitions. (A separate blog provides a brief overview of the progressive side of the political equation in Santa Rosa)

Inner works of the Machine

So, how does the growth coalition – and its electoral machine – work in Santa Rosa? Here’s a quick look at three key elements: money, coordination and continuity.

The source of the big campaign money can be readily tracked though required official reports – Forms 460, posted on the city website. As summarized in numerous news articles have, the city’s developer elite, its financiers, realtors and construction interests fund a slate for city council elections. Some names keep showing up as the big money contributors: families that own Meade Clark Lumber, Cobblestone Homes, Oakmont developers and Aegis Senior Living, real estate and investment interests. “Bundling” helps – in 2004 for example, 5 or 6 members of developer William Gallaher’s family, including two student children, gave $500 each to the campaigns of Jane Bender and John Sawyer.

The Santa Rosa Electoral Machine has its own central coordinator in the person of Herb Williams, thought of by some as the Karl Rove of local politics. He doesn’t talk much publically about his orchestration of campaigns, but he is clearly in the middle of matching candidates to funding sources and strategies. Being both professional pollster and political consultant, he is able to provide crucial information and advice to the Machine’s chosen slate for little or no cost. In between elections, according to a Press Democrat feature by Mike McCoy, Williams gets his “primary paychecks from consulting work he does for developers and other business interests, some of which rely on votes from officials which Williams helped get elected.”

City policy has long been favorable to growth and development. That is not bad in itself, but critics say the city has gone too far in facilitating residential construction that marched over the ridge tops for Fountaingrove and Skyhawk, as well as giving a controversial $3 million subsidy to the first of the mall complexes that turned Santa Rosa Avenue into what one citizen called “a parking lot for big box stores.”

The Sonoma County Alliance (SCA) makes a critical contribution to the Santa Rosa electoral machine’s effectiveness by providing continuity and networking. SCA was formed in the 1980s to be the developer/construction club’s counter to the then-rising influence of environmentalists. Its wide-ranging support for intense urban growth attracted a range of business and community interests. The SCA website puts “protection of private property rights” first among its goals, followed by a healthy economy, environmental protection and political action. It also puts major emphasis on law and order, having formed a reward fund for this purpose in 2005.

The push for expansion of city-wide development and attraction of big businesses drew in a variety of organizations promoting growth, not so much in population terms per se, but to advance economic activity, the arts, and civic pride. Many parts of this outer circle have little to do with politics, but key core members like the Chamber of Commerce and the Press Democrat (growth means more newspaper sales) take a keen interest in city council elections. Both the latter two provide important support to the Machine slate at election time.

2008

For the five City Council seats open in 2008, the SR Electoral Machine is backing the two incumbents, John Sawyer and Jane Bender (both are Machine insiders), plus three newcomers for its slate, Carol Dean, Ernesto Olivares and Bobbi Hoff. Dean, who promised not to run when she was appointed to the Council to replace a resigned member, has regularly lined up with Sawyer and Bender on important Council votes. Both the other newcomers on the Machine slate also have backgrounds favorable to growth coalition interests: Hoff, is a CPA and business person with real estate ties; Olivares, a career policeman.