As Mayor Kevin Johnson prepared for a Thursday night meeting to discuss new arena options, his chief of staff talked with Sacramento State students about the issues currently facing Sacramento -- namely, the arena, public safety and who’s in charge.

Kunal Merchant joined the Mayor’s office in Dec. 2008 and has had a lot to manage in his year of service. Despite the furloughs and layoffs surrounding him, however, he is hopeful about Sacramento’s future. “We feel really optimistic about sacramento's prospects,” he said. “This is a moment in time where we have a chance to get things really right that can have positive consequences for decades.”

Getting things right, he said, includes improving Sacramento’s status among large cities in the U.S. “Sacramento is considered a second-tier city,” Merchant said. “We disagree. We think Sacramento’s got a whole lot going for it. There are a lot of positive things going on in Sacramento, but we have a hard time selling ourselves.”

One way to increase our standing, he said, is to build a new arena. “It’s about building that world class facility; it’s also about leveraging the mayor’s unique brand,” he said. “This is the time we’re going to make it happen… We’re very excited about the potential of this.”

Merchant also recognized that public safety is a major concern for Sacramento. “We’re the second-most dangerous city in the state,” he said, and added that the only way to lower crime in the area is to put more funding toward police services.

“Compared to other cities, we spend a lower percentage of that money on public safety,” he said. “It’s a dangerous place, and we need to put more officers on the street.”

Also on Merchant’s list of issues was the strong-mayor proposal. Merchant said the current weak-mayor form of government is only effective for small cities, and Sacramento has long outgrown its usefulness. “The city’s gotten to a big enough size that things just don’t get done,” he said.

Merchant pointed to K Street as a prime example of the current system’s ineffectiveness, stating that the city has pumped over $400 million since 1980 into revitalizing the street with nothing to show for it. “We’re trying to build a new sports and entertainment complex – we could build two with that money,” he said. “That’s why in bigger cities they try to move away from this form of government. It’s just more difficult.”

A strong-mayor form of government, he said, would actually increase the city’s accountability to its taxpayers. “The city of Sacramento is run by special interests right now, hands-down,” Merchant said. “The reality is, if no one’s accountable, no one can be held accountable. That’s the reality, unfortunately, in the current system.”

Stan Oden, a government professor at Sacramento State, raised the question of whether strengthening the Mayor’s role in city government is necessary to be an effective leader. “Some people say there can be a strong mayor in this form of government, basically by leading,” he said, and he pointed to former San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. “He was, in fact, able to forge a majority vote on the council, and with that, was able to influence the city manager… Why couldn’t that happen here?”

Merchant said in response that San Diego declared bankruptcy a few years after Wilson’s run and converted to a strong mayor form of government. “The Mayor will be effective regardless of what the structure of the government is,” he said. “If you want to get to a new level, you’ve got to take new risks. It’s hard to lead, basically. It’s hard to lead in a visionary way under the current system.”