Sunnyvale: Vote No on A
Today, I voted.
I have permanent mail-in voter status, so I am able not only to vote before the elections, but I am also able to avoid having to go into voting stations on election day. Crowd avoidance whoo!
On the ballot were a small number of district seats up for election, and two ballots. The first one (A) was a measure to change Sunnyvale's parliamentary system of Mayor selection to nominally a democratic one. Currently, Sunnyvale has a city council elected by city residents. From that body of city council members, they choose who will be the Mayor of the city.
Section 605 of the City Charter provides that the City Council shall select one of its members to be presiding officer and have the title of Mayor. The Mayor can be removed by super majority (five) votes of the Council.
The measure "Measure A" would change the city government so that we would have the mayor elected directly, instead of nominated by her peers.
Wow, this is SUCH a stupid idea.
My first thought was, WTF, if you have Measure B which limits city council member compensation, why would you want to create ANOTHER seat to elect and pay?
My second thought was in the current setup, the Mayor stays the mayor at the agreement of the rest of the city council. That means the Mayor needs to be able to work with all of the council to accomplish things, and that as a general rule she will be able to, they selected her to be their leader.
The people in favor of Measure A argue that the Mayor isn't directly elected. SO WHAT? The Mayor is an ELECTED council member. That she isn't directly elected is a red herring
The second one (B) was about city council compensation. The compensation one was kinda annoying, but not particularly controversial. I disagree with it, as it limits pay raises in ways that could be problematic later on (say, in a year with horrible inflation).
What I understand least about Measure B is why people focus on the pay of city council members, which is about $650,000 a year, when the city budget is $274,000,000 a year. I DON'T CARE IF THE CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS EACH MAKE FIVE THOUSAND MORE DOLLARS THIS YEAR. Seriously people, how about narrowing all of our streets and planting trees in the reclaimed 20 feet by hundreds of miles of ground space - we could save $45k a year not repairing the wider streets since they're narrower, and we could plant more trees, reducing the asphalt footprint and related heat effects. Then we could afford to pay the city council members more!
Focusing on the wrong things, people.
Or as Charles tells me David Schultz says, "Vote no, vote often."
Comments
Hey, Kitt, just some brief
Hey, Kitt, just some brief comments. I'm on the "No on A" campaign (which is why I found this), so I agree with that. But just a brief note about B, since I pushed for it. Council cannot set its raises. It's dictated by the City Charter, and it currently *requires* a 5% raise per year. Our salaries are about $22k/year, so you're right that it's a minor deal. But here's the thing. 5% is way beyond what anyone else gets, even in a good year. And over time, it's *huge*. At 5%, council salaries double every 14 years. So since this was put in place back in the eighties, council salaries have doubled twice over. They're not out of whack now (at least that seems to be the prevailing sentiment), but the time to fix the raise issue is before it does become unreasonable.
In a year with horrible inflation, we'll get the max 5%, which is the same as what we get now. But in a serious down-turn, when prices of things don't rise, we *still* get 5%. And we can't do anything about that, by law. Tying raises to CPI means that our raises rise and fall according to the economy, generally, and that's probably more fair.
It just looks really bad when we on Council are asking employees to take a third year of 0% raises, when we keep raking in 5% raises every year. It's a leadership thing. It's unfortunate that the only way we can do this is to get the voters to approve a Charter change, but that's the law.
Anyway, that's the scoop. Not that it matters, since you already voted...
Jim Griffith
Vice Mayor
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