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Wednesday, May 22, 2013
DWB: The View from Downtown
by David Watts Barton, published on August 17, 2011 at 9:21 PM
Storyline: DWB: The View from Downtown
It took a couple hundred ordinary people from Oak Park only a couple of hours Tuesday night to reintroduce the Sacramento City Council to the idea of democracy.
After weeks in which the nine electeds have spent their time playing games, engaging in backroom deals and petty feuds, and blithely ignoring the greater good for the good of their own careers and egos – the council got an earful from the people who will suffer the results of the council's rough gerrymandering of council districts.
Payback is a bitch. Especially when you're just living your life in your district, and someone else’s political payback comes to roost on your porch.
So Tuesday night's City Council meeting, with a remarkable 57 citizens speaking out, was an encouraging sign that participatory democracy is alive. In fact, it's pretty pissed off.
Whether that anger has much impact on council members is an open question. But perhaps Tuesday night's display of anger was some kind of wake-up call to those members, some elected with as little as a few thousand votes, that their membership in their backscratching (and backstabbing) club is not guaranteed.
Do I sound angry? I've actually calmed down since last week's council meeting, when it first became undeniable that members were going to hijack the redistricting process in order to protect each other – unless, of course, they were hijacking it to punish each other.
Is it high school yet?
Not all of the members of the council are self-serving careerists, but enough are to make a mess of the government process for everyone in our down-on-its-luck city. And that's where all of this ceases to be entertaining political theatre – did he really just use the phrase "separate but equal"? – and starts having serious impacts on individuals, businesses and whole communities.
For instance, Oak Park.
How Kevin McCarty and Steve Cohn can so cavalierly divide up a longstanding community simply to serve their own interests – and to stick it to council newbie Jay Schenirer by removing a key part of the district he was just elected to serve – is beyond me. What happened to public service? What happened to the greater good?
What happened to shame?
The map Cohn cleverly dubbed "Neighborhoods Together 2.0" – clever in its Orwellian dishonesty, with a fashionable high-tech sheen – severs the most affluent parts of Oak Park and hands it to Cohn's ally McCarty.
The people in one of Sacramento's oldest and most troubled neighborhoods are just going to have to live with it. That's politics.
But while that map is what drew nearly 200 Oak Parkers to City Hall Tuesday evening, even that bald political power move overshadows the deep systemic corruption of the whole redistricting process since it moved from the citizen's advisory group that gathered 37 citizen-drawn maps into the gaping maw of raw politics.
If it wasn't raw politics, how did Cohn end up with the railyards, far from his East Sac base? This is gerrymandering, impure and simple, and it is against the spirit of the whole citizen's advisory process. Then there's the introduction of progressively less-workable maps by Cohn, Sandy Sheedy and McCarty, outside of the public process and partly behind closed doors, raising questions about compliance with the Brown Act, which sets open meeting standards for government.
Meanwhile, Sheedy's District 2, one of the city's poorest, where she lives on its affluent southern edge, will remain almost exactly the same, even though leaving it that way splits and thus fundamentally under-represents Sacramento's sizable but politically unorganized Latino community.
This is all about the status quo, where each district contains a crucial constituency of precisely…one.
The drama will continue next week: At the very end of Tuesday’s meeting, after most people had left, Schenirer asked city staff to redraw the disputed Oak Park boundaries to move the UC Davis Medical Center area back into District 5, forcing the council’s hand.
The change he has requested has negligible impact on population deviation and Voting Rights Act requirements regarding "communities of interest," and it is in direct response to Tuesday’s public outcry.
If the council refuses to accept that change, it will be clear for all to see that this whole process is purely about politics.
That still doesn’t address all the other issues regarding District 2 and Latino representation, as well as Cohn’s seizure of the railyards. But at this point, if this council can come up with something that’s not a total disaster, we’ll have to call it a victory.
But next year, the City Council will stand for election again, and Sacramentans will have a chance to show the City Council members up for reelection – Sheedy, Rob Fong, Bonnie Pannell and McCarty, as well as Mayor Kevin Johnson – what democracy is about.
The candidates will, of course, tap their big contributors and tout their accomplishments and most likely win on the votes that tiny fraction of potential voters who actually go to the polls.
The council members will also use the map they are devising, well beyond the agreed-to process, to ensure that they keep their jobs no matter what the citizens of Oak Park, North Sacramento, or any other part of town want.
You could call it democratic. Then again, there are a lot of other things you could call it. But none of them are flattering.
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All four maps presented by the Redistricting Committee split District 2's neighborhoods in some way, shape or form. The four looked to keep Del Paso Heights intact, but split it from it's North Sac roots as a result. Other neighborhoods such as Hagginwood, Robla, and Old North Sacramento were also split by the maps. Some of these neighborhoods have historically been together since North Sacramento was its own city. Furthermore, thie city's boundaries (or those on record) did not extend to Northgate, one of the areas referred to with a high percentage of Latino residents. This is also the current western boundary for District 2.
I'm not condoning what may or may not be going on behind closed doors and, as it stands now, North Sacramento is kept whole by the current proposed map.
My question is where was this anger when the first four proposed maps - one of which was submitted by a committee member also featured in an article on this website - divided neighborhoods in North Sacramento and other areas while keeping the central city fairly whole.
Just to make my earlier comments clear, I wasn't referring to the new map as keeping the Central City whole; I already realize it does not do this. However, that was what the other four maps looked to do.
Also, constituents from District 2 did voice their opinions at council meetings asking to keep their neighborhoods whole. This ranged from people from Del Paso Heights, East Del Paso Heights, and Robla, none of which were "affluent".
They may not have had the flair brought by some residents of Oak Park - and those residents should be applauded for the pride they take in their community - but their voice was still there.
Not so sure about that instance in particular--gerrymandering is usually done to make a political district more secure for one party or another, and the capture of the Railyards doesn't do much to that effect. I assume that Cohn, who is as enthusiastic about railroads and transit as I am, wants the Railyards in his district so he can continue to be directly involved in their development (as well as the arena, if it goes there.) But there is no voter advantage--no voters live in the Railyards, and I'm not sure if the 1000 or so residents of the Richards Blvd/River District would make much difference. Of course, assuming that those new growth areas do fill up over the next decade, the makeup of that district could be very different.
That said, does it make any more sense to separate the Railyards and Richards area from the central city than to separate UCDMC and Sacramento High from Oak Park? A major focus of the Railyards development is to reinforce the connections between downtown/midtown and the new development area (historically the biggest employment center in city)--how does keeping the central city split from its own new development area promote that reconnection?
That said, I don't think that Cohn's passion for railroads should be a determining factor in where his district is drawn. And if I had to choose between someone's interest in choo-choo's vs. their interest in power - and whoever "gets" the railyards is going to have significantly increased power - I'd have to go with the latter.
Finally, no, it makes very little sense to separate the railyards from downtown, which is why it is so suspicious to me.
Re the Brown Act: Cohn claims said act was not violated because only 3 Council members conferred privately on his map. ( It takes a quorum to violate the Brown Act.) The next question is: How did 6 members evaluate & vote on a map of which they had no previous knowledge within a VERY few minutes of its introduction? (Anyone want to check phone/email records?)
I wonder if those can be uncovered?
http://cityofsacramento.org/redistricting/documents/PlanA.pdf
I think a lot of neighborhoods stayed quiet until very late in the game, unlike previous redistricting periods, because people assumed the redistricting committee was a public process--and, oddly enough, people trusted the process.