As sure as the sun rises in the morning and sets at dusk, the Modesto City Council gets it wrong, one decision after another, one regulation after another, one unrealistic request after another that drives potential employers away, one costly mistake after another, i.e., tearing out all the tracks on 9th St. and along Virginia Ave, tracks that could have been used for light rail and saved the City millions in fuel costs for its extremely antiquated bus system.
What is causing the City to make all these mistakes?
The question arises: What is causing all of these horrendous mistakes that the City still is making, such as approving diagonal parking spaces downtown
that are too long and too slanted for most drivers to back out of safely because of visibility issues, or approving parking meters downtown without soliciting prior feedback from the public, or making unrealistic sidewalk and infrastructure demands that scare off major manufacturers that potentially could employ thousands of our citizens?
To this observer, the answer is obvious: The City Council's mistakes, for the most part, are caused by its repeated delegation of its decision-making authority to non-elected City staffers who have not sworn an oath to the City, the State of California and to the Constitution of the United States, like the Mayor and City Council have.
Consent Items on the Meeting Agenda
If you regularly or even occasionally watch the City Council meetings on Zoom or in person, you will see that the Mayor has the City Clerk read off a number of items to be approved by a simple majority vote of the Council. Most of these items are mundane, such as approving a garbage company contract, or approving mosquito abatement along a riverbed, or something similar. However, some of the items are more controversial and should, but usually don't, involve the solicitation of opinions from the public before a decision is made.
One thing that all of these Consent items have in common, whether they are mundane or highly controversial, is that they all are written by City Staff and put on the Agenda by City Staff. City Council members may have some input with respect to what does and does not end up on the Agenda, but the actual Agenda items are written by City Staff.
Make the Mayor and Council write the Agenda items
It is this observer's opinion that from here on out, the Mayor and City Council should roll up their sleeves at a pre-meeting of the Council and hammer out the Agenda on their own. There are a number of reasons for this: 1) The Council members will be much more familiar with what is on the Agenda because they wrote it. 2) The Council members will take much more of a personal interest in the Agenda if they write it. 3) The Council members will take more responsibility for the outcome of something that they wrote than of something that somebody else wrote. If it is a bad piece of legislation, the Council members are much more likely to rewrite it and improve it before allowing it to go to a vote at a public meeting.
Full time Mayor and Council
When I was a small boy, Mayor Don Hammond, the owner of Dow-Hammond International Harvester, and later Mayor Peter Johansen, the owner of The House of Carpets, were full time businessmen who attended to their part time Mayoral duties once a week. The Council members all had full time jobs too.
This was back in the early 1960's. Modesto was a very small town then that more closely resembled Mayberry than anything we have today with a population of over 200,000. We did not need a full time Mayor and Council then, but we do today.
It is my suggestion that we implement the following changes immediately:
1) Cut the City Staff in the City Manager's office by two-thirds.
2) Use the money saved from the aforementioned to increase the salaries of the Mayor and City Council to a "reasonable" level so they can comfortably support themselves and their families.
3) Require that the Mayor and Council members divest themselves of any active interests in any businesses of which they have an ownership and/or partnership while they are in office.
4) Have a "No Moonlighting" clause in effect for the Mayor and Council members while they are in office so that their entire professional and occupational time will be devoted to their jobs with the Council.
In conclusion...
For much too long this city has been run by non-elected City Staffers in the City Manager's office who write the Agendas and get them passed in one fell swoop as Consent Items in very quick, Up/Down votes. It is time for that era to end. The days of part time Mayors and Council members are over too. We need to fire two-thirds of the City Manager's staff, elect a full time Mayor and Council and pay them enough to support themselves and their families without having to run a business or work on a job somewhere. And we need to have "No Moonlighting" and divesting mandates in effect for the Mayor and Council while they are in office as well. If we implement these changes, there no longer will be any need for the City staffers to write the Agenda items for the Mayor and Council.
Perhaps if we enact these measures, we will start seeing legislation coming out of our City Council meetings that more closely reflects the will of the People and is more responsive to the the needs of everyday citizens in Modesto.
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