Interim City Manager Gus Vina responded to questions from six neighborhood activists in an April 9 interview with The Sacramento Press. The following are Vina’s responses to questions from three neighborhood activists. Read Vina’s responses to questions from three other involved citizens in an April 12 story at The Sacramento Press. 

Question from Sacramento resident Dale Kooyman:
(Ray Kerridge) felt residents did not know what was best for their quality of life when it came to communicating with city staff, historic preservation, streets, sidewalks, traffic, transportation, planning projects and related early notification, neighborhood-serving businesses, fiscal matters, entertainment and alcohol venues ... A prior city manager (Bill Edgar) stated as his management philosophy that a city is a collection of many residential and business neighborhoods, and a city is as healthy and strong as its unhealthiest and weakest residential or business neighborhood. Therefore he promoted engaging both when making decisions that affect these neighborhoods ...

Which of those two philosophies most closely reflect your management philosophy? If the former, what good has come of such a divisive philosophy?

If the latter, what role(s) do you see neighborhoods (business and residential) playing in your management approach, and how would you engage them, including staff working cooperatively with both?

Interim City Manager Gus Vina:
I would like to talk about Gus’ philosophy, rather than Ray's or Bill’s. And I think it’s probably a combination of both.

Who’s our community? (That is) the question. Our community is our residents, our visitors and our businesses. And, I do absolutely believe that we all have to work together.

And, the city (staff’s) role is to facilitate the vision that council sets out for us. And a lot of that vision is in the general plan ... And part of that facilitation is to make sure we understand who the stakeholders are and engage them.

Rarely will you get everybody to agree to everything. You’ve already failed if that’s the goal. So, the goal is good communication, great outreach, get people to participate and then decisions need to be made ... But I think we can do really well for our businesses and our neighborhoods when you have that kind of engagement, good communication and early communication — so they’re not finding out about it when the shovel goes in the ground and we’re already building something.

Question from Sacramento resident Michael Boyd:
The city could be working with neighborhood groups to facilitate discussions of the types of businesses needed in each neighborhood. Block by block. We should have a clear vision of what our areas should look like.

Another very easy tool to implement is a system of early notification. I know we have some semblance of one, but it is not nearly as effective as it should be. Residents should know what is being proposed as soon as it is proposed. Neighborhood associations should be the first stop for developers for true consultations, not presentations.

Do you agree, and if so, what, specifically, will you (do to) engage residents, businesses and developers to a truly consultative process?

GV:
I do believe that working with our neighborhoods is important. I believe we do a pretty good job of that. We have a Neighborhood Services Department (that) is very active in our neighborhoods. And we try our best to bring issues, concerns (and) the things that are being proposed in the city out to the neighborhoods as quickly as we can.

So, I’ll do my best to look for opportunities where we work with neighborhoods to understand better ... the business development that they think would be beneficial to that area.

I have several goals that I have committed to as interim city manager ... and the first one is to get a balanced budget in place. And so right now, that’s my most immediate focus, and it has a lot of priority. When I’m done with that, which should be in July, I plan to dive into our economic development strategies and make sure that I understand and can help lead the economic development process. Because that’s going to be the key to fixing our budget -- more so than just, "Where are we going to cut programs?" So, I’ll keep these thoughts in mind. And we should keep our neighborhoods in mind as we look at land-use opportunities and try to develop the city.

Neighborhoods and residents/citizens need to know that their involvement — their participation in any of these development projects — can occur in a number of ways. We have the Development Oversight Commission that looks at these plans as they’re being submitted. And those (plans) are public. We (also) have (opportunities for public comment) when the projects start coming to council ... So, certainly, what citizens can do is stay involved and come to council meetings and engage the council when those projects are being discussed.

Additionally, of course, we can make sure we’re getting out to neighborhoods — and I know the (city staff) do (that) now. The idea that we engage affected neighborhoods when we’re talking about a major project in an area: That happens today. So, it’s really nothing new for us.

Question from Sacramento resident Bill Burgua:
During the current budget crisis, Kerridge had experienced code enforcement officers laid off. Do you see the wisdom in the citizens' desire to bring in revenue while improving neighborhoods and bringing properties up to code? Will you boost code enforcement by reinstating experienced code enforcement officers that have been laid off?

GV:
Well, obviously, the challenge for us right now is our revenue. It’s at historic low levels. And we’ve been losing revenue for three years in a row now ... I don’t know that anytime soon we’re going to be able to increase code enforcement officers.

A little bit of clarity in that: The layoffs started with (the Community Development Department), not Code Enforcement ... So, (CDD employees) were laid off from CDD (and then) replaced people at Code. And then Code had to lay people off. There wasn’t a net reduction of code officers because of those layoffs. If not for CDD issues, we wouldn’t have been laying anybody off (at) Code Enforcement. That’s ... the technical piece of it.

I think the real question there is: How much do we care about blight in our neighborhoods and quality of life? I would say that it is a huge objective for us — to work with our neighborhoods to eliminate blight. Those kinds of things introduce crime, and the whole quality of life in the neighborhood goes downhill. I think code enforcement is a very important part of what we do in the city. So, besides developing the city where we have opportunities, we can’t ignore the fact that we have 500,000 people (who) already live here in some neighborhood and need to be taken care of, as well.

Kathleen Haley is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.