State and Local Politics

Accommodations set for City budget meeting

2011-06-03T06:48:51Z

The City of Sacramento Department of Parks and Recreation presented an oral report regarding their progress on community centers to the Parks and Recreation Commission.

During the report, Parks and Recreation Director Jim Combs provided an overview of the proceedings for next Tuesday’s Council Meeting. The highlight of the meeting will be the report back on the budgets of the city’s parks, police, and fire departments.

“We hear maybe 1000 to 1500 folks there attending this meeting just from the police department,” said Combs. “Then the fire department’s going to have a big crew. We know that the centers and all those communities; we’re going to have more people down there than we had last time. There were maybe 70 speakers.”

The city is taking steps to accommodate what is expected to be an enormous crowd. They are urging people to arrive between 5pm and 6pm; the meeting begins promptly at 6pm.

Each of the groups - parks, police, fire, golf (they are not part of parks), and general topics - will be given a number of passes allowing fair access to seating in the Council Chamber in accordance with required capacity limits.

According to Combs, the Council Chamber will be divided into three sections with police, fire, and parks receiving different color tickets. Each group will receive at total of 100 tickets; the first 100 people for each group gets a ticket.

Speaker slips will be available at all locations and will be submitted to the Mayor for Council’s consideration in managing public comment. Speakers called that are not present in Chambers will be notified and ushered to the podium.

Each group - parks, police, and fire - receives a block of 30 minutes for public comment.

Overflow areas will be provided with meeting audio/video in Historic City Hall, New City Hall Mezzanine, and Outside Plaza Area (Audio Only).

According to Combs, City Council may take stock in the time the public speaking session has concluded and determine whether they wish to go into deliberations on Tuesday night, or adjourn and reconvene on Thursday night for discussion by Council only without discussion from the public.

Combs also outlined actions taken over the past three weeks regarding the Oak Park, George Sim, and Hagginwood Community Centers. All three were slated for closure under the budget proposed to City Council in mid-May, which received backlash from the public.

“We’ve had meetings with organizers,” said Combs. “We’re looking to work with groups that have some capacity to offer staffing or dollars or can bring something to the table to help us organize and run community centers.”

Parks and Recreation held meetings at each of the three community centers.

“We’ve had really great turnouts,” said Combs. “We had twenty-some organizations that showed up for Oak Park. We had a second meeting and had even more organizations show up. So for the Oak Park community, there’s really a lot of outpouring.”

Combs indicated three to four have stepped forward to be the lead group for the Oak Park Community Center.

“We also had successful meetings at Sim Center,” said Combs. “There we have two partners we had obtained through the RFP process that had already committed to being over there. We’re finalizing our agreements with them, and then we have the two neighborhood associations and a couple of other groups that have come in and want to add to the mix.”

The largest meeting was at the Hagginwood Community Center, though Combs expressed disappointment.

“It was disappointing in the sense that most of the folks were seniors and folks that come there for the feeding program and the grandparents program,” said Combs. “They were residents there that didn’t want to see the center closed for their own personal use.”

“It wasn’t really attended by the organizations with capacity that we were hoping to see that were saying ‘we can step in and help you run this’. We did have several organizations there, but most of them were just passionate about ‘keep my center open.’”

Second meetings will be done with both the Sim Center and Hagginwood Community Center prior to the next City Council meeting.

Members of Local 39 call for action

2010-07-28T06:57:06Z

“Chop at the top!”

That was the chant echoed by approximately 150 employees of the City of Sacramento, all members of Local 39, as they picketed outside City Hall Plaza.

“Our members are very, very upset,” said Joan Bryant, Director of Public Employees for Local 39. “This is the fifth round of layoffs we’ve had in our bargaining units. We had about 121 of our members who recently received layoff notices, and our members are upset about it."

“I’m here to show my support,” said David Worlds, an employee with the Department of Transportation, recently transferred from the Department of Parks and Recreation. “I think it’s important that we show up and if nothing else let people know that it is important to us.”

In terms of concessions, the City is proposing:

A three year contract covering June 19, 2010 to June 2013
A 4% reduction in salaries effective June 19, 2010
A 5% increase in salaries effective June 30, 2012
One furlough day per month for the term of the contract
Salary step increases suspended until June 29, 2013, upon which salary steps will be advanced to the step that they would have been had the salary step increases not been suspended.

A statement passed out by Local 39 at today’s event addressed the concessions saying the City of Sacramento is top heavy with management. According to the statement, there is one management position for every six workers who provide front line services to the public.

The statement also alleged the City Manager is proposing to lay off workers in special funded departments, such water treatment plant operators and sanitation works in the Department of Utilities, even though they have an approved balanced budget.

Local 39 also took concern with the percentage of general funds spent on public safety, saying the City of Sacramento has for the first time surpassed the 80% figure for public safety expenditures.

Bryant indicated talks have been moving along between the City and Local 39. “I kind of characterize it as the very early stages of bargaining,” said Bryant. “We’ve had nine sessions with our large bargaining unit, and we were at the table today with our plant operations, and tomorrow we will have another session.”

Yet not everyone feels Local 39’s Leadership has put their best foot forward regarding concessions.

“I haven’t heard anything from anybody,” said Worlds. “There’s more questions right now than answers, and I think that’s probably a big part of it.”

“I think if there was more communication, it would help.”

An online petition has been started urging Local 39 Leadership to agree to the City’s proposal.

“I know we have some members who believe we should just come and vote on whatever they want to vote on, and we have a process to follow,” said Bryant. “I know there are some disgruntled members because they thought last year they should have had a vote on something. Last year we met with the City hoping we could arrive at some kind of amicable solution to help with the budget deficit, but the City walked away from the $7 million dollars we offered in concessions.”

“I don’t think they (the members) understand the bargaining process that you should just come and vote. That is not the feeling of the majority of them”.

When asked what he would like to see as a result of the demonstration, Worlds hoped for one thing:

“An agreement”

Tretheway, Ashby support public input in charter change

2010-05-21T05:28:09Z

Much has been made over the recent quid pro quo allegations made by Sacramento City Councilmember Ray Tretheway.

At a recent press conference, Tretheway said he was told he could garner the endorsement of Mayor Kevin Johnson if he voted in favor of placing a “strong mayor” proposal on the November ballot. On Tuesday, Johnson announced his endorsement of Tretheway’s opponent, Angelique Ashby, leading Tretheway to hold a news conference on Wednesday alleging six influential businesspeople unsuccessfully pressured him to participate in the quid pro situation.

Tretheway later said only one of those people, Steve Ayers, is to blame.

The underlying aspect of this controversy is the Strong Mayor Initiative. Neither Tretheway nor Ashby discuss it on their campaign’s websites; however, both expressed their opinions at a candidate’s forum on March 31, 2010 at the South Natomas Community Center.

At that forum, both Ashby and Tretheway (and Efren Guttierrez) were asked whether they support a city-council initiative plan to increase the authority of the mayor, and if so what are the components of that plan.

Here are the responses given by Ashby and Tretheway.

Ashby

Okay, well the strong mayor proposal was a lightning bolt of controversy from the first day it came out of the lips of the first person who uttered it, so it’s a tough topic to talk about.

I'll tell you what I like about it. It started a conversation. And the difficult conversations are always the best conversations because it’s where we get the most work done.

There’s one thing for sure: our charter is antiquated. And I mean really bad. So we must redo that charter. We must have a discussion about what the structure of governance of the city of Sacramento is going to be.

I was not in support of Kevin Johnson’s Strong Mayor proposal because there were some things in it that I think were really bad for District 1, including how the ninth seat would be appropriated, which would directly affect this district because of the size of the population here.

However, I do like the direction he is headed. I do like the direction that the charter review committee took us, and I think it’s a conversation that needs to happen.

Here’s the difference, though. It can’t be one person somewhere that comes up with an idea, and then goes out and tries to sell it to the council, and then the council comes and tries to sell it to you. It has to start the other way around. It has to start in the community with suggestions from you, and then go back to a discussion of putting those ideas into a proposal, and then being voted on by the city council and moved forward.

Whatever this community decides they want is what that charter should be.

There are positives and negatives to a stronger mayor versus the council-manager position, and it really needs to be a conversation that happens because so much of what was discussed is not quite right, and so of much of what was discussed was specific proposal but doesn’t need to be part of the second proposal.

The good news is the conversation has started. I want to encourage you to stay engaged, and know this is something, again, that I would love to be a part of on my first day in office.

Tretheway

The Strong Mayor Initiative, after reading it, I was the first public official to come out against it, clearly. It was just an overreach, and it was written in a back room, and it probably would’ve caused more problems than our current one does. And that’s where I would start.

I would also start with a participatory program. I can share with you that just last week I just sat down with some of the Mayor’s staffers, and they want to put another initiative on this November. And I said you don’t have my vote, and I’m sure I was the fifth vote; you need five out of the nine. I said I will not participate in that.

We have to have a participatory program to do two things. One, I think we have to have community consensus on what the problems are, and then have a community dialogue on what are the different solutions, what are the options, to resolve those. We do have charter commission’s three strong reports, and I think those are the starting points of this community dialogue.

I hope this community dialogue begins as early as this summer, and I think it’s going to take about a year and a half. So, by either the Primary or the General Election in 2012, the city will have had an extensive dialogue, tremendous amount of participation and on the ballot we will have a choice to amend our charter or not.

A Divided Natomas

2010-05-07T07:35:24Z

Years ago, driving home from ARCO Arena used to be like driving through a vast rural land of fields, sometimes through thick fog and orange overhead lights. Now this land is the thriving community commonly known as North Natomas filled with homes, businesses, restaurants, a high school, and a brand new library.

That’s all located north of Interstate-80. South of Interstate-80 is the established communities of South Natomas, Gardenland, and Northgate.

Calls to serve both areas equally were made at the District 1 City Council Candidates Forum, moderated by Brandy Boyd, publisher of the Natomas Buzz.

“Come on down Northgate Boulevard” said Candidate Efren Guttierrez in response to how to secure business in Natomas. “Get out of your car. Walk the boulevard. You tell me who said people are secure.”

“That’s District 1, too.”

Candidate Angelique Ashby said she was tired of seeing other projects not come to Natomas.

“We need to have an eye on the future for building up this region,” said Ashby. “We also have to be a safe place for our business. No entrepreneur would want to open up a business where there’s a lack of police.”

Candidate and current Councilmember Ray Tretheway, who had to leave early for another event, discussed youth mentoring and truancy programs.

In discussing North Natomas’ levee problems, Guttierrez pointed out a theme he consistently hears when discussing various topics.

“It’s the fact that everything is generated north of I-80, and it isn’t,” said Guttierrez. “Before I-80 was a glimmer in Heather Fargo or Ray’s eye’s, there was a community called South Natomas.”

“South Natomas was promised many things; fire station, a medical facility, a police station. We got none of these. The medical facility that was supposedly built on West El Camino and Truxel closed in six months. I didn’t see Ray or anybody else jump to keep them there.”

“At the end, there is a world south of I-80,” said Guttierrez.

Ashby also took a shot at Tretheway, who had his Campaign Manager Bryan DeBlonk sit in as his surrogate.

“No offense to Mr. DeBlonk, but Ray is not a strong advocate for our region,” said Ashby. “He is a nice guy, but he is not a person who is going to fight for this community on a day to day basis.”

Both Guttierrez and Ashby pointed out problems with crosswalks and signals in both North and South Natomas.

But Ashby continued to take shots at Tretheway when responding to nearly every question.

“I do not believe our elective representative has done his job,” said Ashby when discussing safety in the community and at schools.

When discussing public transportation, Ashby said Tretheway ignored the petition of 500 people to not run Light Rail down Truxel Boulevard.

In responding to how to preserve current Natomas business, Ashby said “Ray Tretheway has been on the council for nine years. You need to think about whether you want him the next four.”

If elected, Ashby vowed she would not treat her position as a part time position; however, DeBlonk reminded everyone of the difference between an advocate and a Councilmember.

“It’s very easy to be an advocate and to say ‘this one thing we need to be doing and I’m going to push for it, and you know what, if all of us advocate more, then more the things we want get done,’” said DeBlonk.

“It’s a very different thing to be a Councilmember.”

Transit takes center stage at District 1 debate

2010-04-01T06:00:23Z

Regional Transit wrapped up their talks about service cuts earlier this week, though there was still plenty of room for finger pointing and analysis at the District 1 Candidates Debate.

"Natomas is losing all routes on the weekends as my understanding," said candidate Angelique Ashby. "That means people have jobs elsewhere on the weekends and they are going to ride the bus, they can't do that anymore."

Ashby said she didn't understand why current District 1 Councilmember Ray Tretheway, who is on Regional Transit's Board of Directors, did not fight to keep a route in Natomas.

"I don't understand how he can let them all go," said Ashby. "We certainily pay into that tax system that provides that transportation. It seems to me it should be equal, and areas that have access to Light Rail should have been cut first. We don't have any Light Rail, but buses are the only public transportation that we have."

Tretheway responded saying no lines in North or South Natomas were cut except for one operating on the weekends.

"One goes through North Sacramento and ends up to Natomas Marketplace", said Tretheway. "That one was cut on weekends. All the rest I fought to restore."

Tretheway also elaborated on the Natomas Light Rail extension, saying it's been settled on going down Truxel Blvd for the last three to five years. Ashby opposes the Truxel Blvd plan.

"I believe that we will take care of the community, community center, and neighbors, and that Light Rail will be a public asset coming down Truxel", said Tretheway.

Efren Guttierrez, the third candidate in the debate, expressed his disappointment with Regional Transit.

"The line that you're talking about Ray is Line 13," said Guttierrez. "Line 13 runs down Northgate Blvd, and that is a working class neighborhood."

Guttierrez also discussed the problems working with other transit authorities over the years.

"We've been fighting with SACOG and Sacramento Transit Authority for years to deal with our problem of buses in this city," said Guttierrez. "We've seen this coming down the pipe."

District 7 Candidates discuss SMI, council cooperation, and the arena

2010-03-19T18:39:20Z

They walked out onto the stage at the gym at Genevieve Didion Elementary, each wearing suits and ties. They weren’t clammed up, having talked to various people in the crowd prior to taking the stage. Each of them was familiar with the neighborhood, and had a desire to represent it.

Current City Councilmember Robbie Watters, retired Sacramento Police Captain Darrell Fong, and Sacramento State professor Ryan Chin all participated in Thursday night’s Sacramento City Council 7th District Candidate Forum, organized by the Didion-Lewis Park Recreation Center Committee. And once they took their seats, none of them could escape responding to questions about the Strong Mayor Initiative, acrimony amongst city leaders, and the arena project.

“I did not endorse or support a strong mayor in the city” said Waters, who voted in favor of placing the Strong Mayor Initiative on the June 2010 ballot. “I did vote to put it on 2010, but I did not endorse it.”

Chin opposed the initiative, saying a strong mayor doesn’t need a “strong mayor’s initiative”, but an ability to bring people together to get issues done. Fong also opposed the initiative, calling it Chicago style politics.

Responding to how he could foster cooperation as potentially one of eight members on the city council, Chin emphasized his experience in business and community service.

“You don’t focus on the person, you focus on the problem,” said Chin. “It’s about the issue and solving it.

Fong answered by saying he understands the dynamics of City Hall, and has developed relationships at the city, county, and state levels.

Waters elaborated on the loss of Ray Kerridge, but then discussed his feelings regarding relationships on the City Council.

“This is the worst City Council I’ve ever worked with,” said Waters, pointing out that he and former Mayor Heather Fargo, who was in attendance, may not have always agreed but would usually talk and settle their issues.

“Now when the Mayor says something, two or three people disagree with him no matter what it is,” said Waters, “I’ve learned over 15 years how to get along with other councilmembers.”

When asked if he felt it was the right time to build an arena given the current economic times of the City, Waters felt this plan is the closest we’ve been and that it would create needed jobs.

Chin felt this is not the time to spend public funds, but did feel it was likely that city land would be used.

Fong said the arena should be an entertainment center and more than just an arena, but was concerned about the involvement of public subsidies.

“Public subsidy is the land,” said Fong, “We have land that’s swapped between Natomas or Downtown that’s worth money. So I think the people should have a choice whether they want to use that land for the arena or entertainment center.”

At the end of the arena discussion, Waters took a moment to emphasize that the City’s loan to the Sacramento Kings is set in stone and must be paid back. He estimated the loan currently stands at $69 million.