Editorials

Editorial: Muttering in the Ranks

Becky O'Malley
Tuesday October 28, 2003

Anybody with an ounce of anarchism in their blood felt a secret frisson of delight at San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly’s one-day coup last week. While Real Mayor Willie Brown was junketing in Asia, Mayor-for-A-Day Daly appointed two of the five members of The City’s extremely important Public Utilities Commission, and it looks like the appointments are going to stick. Some who believe in maintaining proper decorum (yes, we do have them, even in Berkeley) profess that they are Shocked, Shocked at Daly’s breach of political courtesy, of course. But that reaction misses the very real reason Daly felt justified in seizing the reins: the winner-take-all system for appointing commissioners in the city and county of San Francisco. Technically, the mayor (whoever that might be at the moment) gets to appoint all of the commissioners. Lately there’s been a nod to the power of the Supes, who can now veto some or all of the appointments, in some circumstances. (Here the Daily Planet must confess to haziness on the exact details. The San Francisco charter is a baroque, much-amended document that makes Berkeley’s somewhat fuzzy charter look crystal-clear.)  

Here, we pride ourselves on our Fair Representation Ordinance, under which our mayor and councilmembers each get one appointment, ensuring at least, most of the time, some variety of views on our commissions. That’s not to say that interest groups don’t have the ability to capture particular commissions, often for benign purposes. For example, we seldom see anyone appointed to the Parks Commission who favors converting all our parks into parking lots, though some in Berkeley might like that.  

The very diversity of our commissions can potentially lead to paralysis, but most of the time they work pretty well, better than the San Francisco equivalents. (The chair of San Francisco’s equivalent of our Landmarks Commission is now leading a campaign to modify his commission’s powers to be more like Berkeley’s.) At the same time, however, Berkeleyans need to watch out for the pervasive governmental tendency to creeping centralism, which has existed throughout history and around the world regardless of the form of government. 

Under the current mayor, we seem to be slowly drifting toward a kind of government by task force, coupled with sotto voce grumbling about the power of citizen commissions. Mayoral task forces, unlike commissions, have no fair representation requirement—the mayor just appoints everyone. When former mayor Dean tried this, progressives screamed, but now that their guy is doing the appointing their screams have been muted.  

So far, only two task forces have really gotten going. The Development Task Force has been forced by citizen activists to adopt a fairly public profile, but the City Revenue Task Force has come and gone without even posting a list of its members on the web. Since it was chaired by the estimable former Assemblymember Dion Aroner (who was Bates’ Sacramento aide for twenty years), its recommendations were expected to be reasonably solid. However the lack of real public participation in discussing alternative ways to deal with Berkeley’s inevitable cash crisis risks provoking voter hostility toward the recommended solution, which calls for balancing the budget with a $10 million parcel tax to be placed before voters in March. 

There’s muttering in the ranks, from a surprising number of points on the political spectrum, about the Revenue Task Force’s reluctance to examine whether the city’s union contracts are excessively generous in light of current revenue problems. Some, those historically closer to Berkeley’s “moderate” party, have not been shy about expressing these criticisms at council meetings and in print, including in these pages. What is more surprising is that a good number of well-respected long-term activists in the “progressive” party are saying the same kinds of things in private. The City Council, especially the “progressive majority,” ignores these voices at their peril. They’ve already voted to place the parcel tax on the ballot, at one of the usual poorly attended council sessions where active discussion is minimized. It will be billed as funding for fire services, an easy sell, but everyone won’t be fooled. A poll which was supposed to measure voter willingness to increase taxes did not show unequivocal enthusiasm from two-thirds of the electorate under all circumstances. 

Before the March vote there will be plenty of time for the sub-rosa criticisms to surface in the public discourse. Berkeley voters have always been generous with government, but with the current economic downturn this might not continue to be true. The council doesn’t take final action on all ballot measures until Nov. 25. They still have time to take a better look at paring staff costs as one way of helping to balance the budget. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.