Today I received an 'Anonymous' comment from someone who is an opponent of passage of our Measure C, the Charter City creating ballot measure that will be voted on, on or before March 8, depending on whether voters use absentee ballots or walk into polling places.
The comment was regarding my posting on January 13, 2011 titled:
Measure C, Rancho Palos Verdes As A Charter City, My Thoughts, linked here via,
http://eastrpv.blogspot.com/2011/01/measure-c-rancho-palos-verdes-as.html
Here is the comment which I will follow up with my own perspective on the comment.
"To answer your question Jeff, the following are just a couple of the reasons why we should delay:
(1) There is a case currently pending before the California Supreme Court (involving the City of Vernon's (Vista's) charter) that will address whether charter cities can truly exempt themselves from CA's prevailing wage statute. If Vernon (Vista) loses this case then the financial benefit you are touting will evaporate. In such case, the typical costs of administrating, amending, and defending our own unique charter (vs piggy-backing off of the state rules, as most cities do) most surely would become a financial drain on the city. Although Vernon (Vista) received a favorable ruling from the appeals court, it did so only by a split vote. The strongly worded dissent was very compelling (it's worth a read, if you haven't seen it). So I think it is far from certain that the appellate decision will be affirmed and that the claimed financial benefits for a charter form of city government will be realizable.
(2) The fact that the city council and a few citizens have sporadically addressed this issue over the last year is irrelevant. What matters is the effort the city has put into studying this change and informing the electorate about the true impact of this charter. This is perhaps he most important measure in the history of our city. Adopting the charter will have the effect of repealing hundreds of well-developed and time-tested statutory provisions that currently govern us. For the sake of expediency and to reduce costs the city council has drafted a charter that replaces all these laws with a bare bones outline. (This approach is particularly striking when you compare the far more robust charters that have been effectively used by Redondo Beach and Torrance.) With a few very limited exceptions, we have no idea what the city council members(or their potential successors) intend to do to replace all of these existing laws. We are expected to just trust them to do the right thing. But it is difficult to trust them when it was the council itself that drafted this charter instead of a broadbased community panel. Fundamental reform of this magnitude should not be based on the comments of a couple of people at a few meetings. The council should have affirmatively engaged residents to take an active rule in studying whether and to what extent our city government should be reformed.
Having the city council grant themselves carte blanche to proceed as they see fit is a poor process for reforming our city government, and so I agree with Mark that this process was definitely too rushed and should not have been placed on the March ballot."
The writer of the comment was answering a comment made by Mr. Jeffrey Lewis, a supporter of Measure C.
The author of the comment incorrectly identified the city which is the center of a lawsuit still under consideration by the California State Supreme Court regarding prevailing wage guidelines.
Vernon, California is not the city, it is Vista, California. Vernon, California had a residential population of 91 in the 2000 Federal Census and is considered the 'smallest' city, in terms of residents, in Los Angeles County.
Vista, California is a charter city which had a lawsuit placed against it for its exemptions as far as prevailing wage guidelines, go.
In the original trial, Vista was found to have not violated any laws regarding exemptions from prevailing wage guidelines.
The Plaintiff appealed and the appellate court ruled in Vista's favor.
The Plaintiffs then appealed the ruling to the California Supreme Court which has not offered an opinion the case.
Prevailing wage guidelines must be followed for projects that receive State and/or Federal monies. A charter city can have no exemption, partial exemption, or full exemption of having to pay prevailing wages on projects funded for their own municipal projects which do not receive other governmental funds.
Should the Court release an opinion that states all cities, including charter cities must adhere to prevailing wage guidelines for all projects whether funded internally or not, it would make moot all of the current partial or full exemptions some charter cities have on their books and it would not be legal for Rancho Palos Verdes, as a charter city, to have either partial or full exemptions to prevailing wage guidelines.
Exemption from prevailing wage guidelines is a big deal to some of the strongest and most vocal supporters of Measure C.
I have heard that should our city become a charter city, the City Council would get right to work creating a full exemption from prevailing wage guidelines on municipal projects paid for using municipal funds.
I agree with 'Anonymous' and I feel supporters are tauting the ability to be exempt from prevailing wage guidelines, without also openly stating that there is no guarantee R.P.V. as a charter city would be able to have exemptions to the guidelines while the case is still pending.
Supporters will also tell you a few things like:
Labor is the most expensive cost of any project. I don't argue with that, one bit.
The use of prevailing wage guidelines requires an up to 40% increase in the cost of labor. Here again, I don't necessarily dispute that.
Exemption of having to pay prevailing wages will save millions of dollars on major projects listed along with goals in our city. I don't know that for sure and when you see, hear, or read anything close to "40%" and believe that that could be the reduction in total costs for projects with no prevailing wage guidelines, that is simply not true.
What may be true that should the court agree with the city of Vista and R.P.V. uses full exemption of the guidelines on projects funded with municipal funds, the savings could be somewhere in the neighborhood of '8%-16%' (don't quote me on this), according to my ears from what our City Attorney stated Monday evening.
Please don't get me wrong, up to 16% savings is savings and good, but I feel that 'Anonymous' and I need you to know that an up to 40% savings on labor costs is only a portion of the total costs of any project.
*The San Ramon/Terrapaca Landslide repair project will require multiple sources of funding and all supporters and opponents recognize that this project would have to use prevailing wage guidelines because our city cannot pay for the repairs on its own.*
It is my opinion that the largest project that could fall under the exemption would be the building of a new City Hall and offices.
The second part of the comments from 'Anonymous' are somewhat similar to my feelings, but I have a different take since I first heard about the move towards charter city status.
One might imagine that if becoming a charter city was such a good idea, why is it that only 120 our of our State's 481 incorporated cities are charter cities?
I know a little more about 'the rush' to have our city become a charter city than most of our residents know, but since the first Tuesday of last November, some of that 'rush' now seems not so 'rushy'.
I do agree however, that protecting our assets, including the T.O.T. from grabbing hands by the State or Washington is a VERY important issue to me and that is the only reason I now have to consider a sooner rather than later vote on the measure, but having the vote held further down the road than March 8, does have some advantages, I feel.
In early 2010, while speaking about R.P.V. becoming a charter city at a City Council meeting, I opined that I was not pleased that taxpayer funds would be used towards the support of the measure and I think that if supporters were truly wanting R.P.V. becoming a charter city, they should pay for the cost of the election and other costs not related to objective education.
The Council hand picked a committee which I felt and feel is a 'rubber-stamping' means to lobby support for Measure C and do the bidding of the Council. There are no members of the committee that were selected because they didn't already fully support the proposal to have us become a charter city.
Our residents' tax dollars are funding an election of a measure many oppose or have no idea about.
The City Council also are the basic authors of a charter they themselves would govern over, for more than a few months.
I don't doubt the honesty and sincerity of all five members of our Council and I know for a fact they are work very hard for our city and its residents. I trust they have the ability to make good decisions for the bulk of the time.
I do recognize the various form of charters, cities might want to use. I do think that the particular path 'our' charter is traveling along, may not be as good as its authors and supporters could have made it.
Folks, we are not residents of Bell, California. Those hard working, lower-middle class income, residents were not given the education their city's representatives should have given them.
Take a look at the history of who has served our our City Council. Take a look at the credentials of the strong supporters and the outspoken opponents of Measure C and you would be very impressed by their education, background, and interest in our city's matters.
While we are not better than residents of any other city, we do have a vast and vital wealth of residents who can make good judgements and become informed, should they choose to.
Our residents are being asked to (somewhat) blindly go where no other city on The Hill has ventured. We are told by supporters that it is a good thing to become a charter city.
Members of organizations opposed to Measure C ALSO will tell you they don't necessarily object to R.P.V. becoming a charter city. Most believe it could be a good thing, too.
I continue to support passage of Measure C, but it would be dishonest of me to ask you to vote for it, at this point.
My support for Measure C relies heavily on my thoughts about the Design and Build elements a charter city could adopt and my (almost) insistence that municipal affairs funds remain for use in our city and not being taken away by any larger governmental entity.
Thanks for your thoughtful response to my post. Sorry about the typo. Vernon has been in the news lately on the annexation issue and guess I inadvertently switched the names in my comment. You are correct that the defendant in the prevailing wage case is the City of Vista.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, my point was tht we should have an answer very soon on prevailing wages, so we should not have rushed into this. It would be great to save all that money, but I put the odds of that happening at below 50% and chasing after a highly contingent financial benefit seems a poor reason to adopt a charter.
Also, I completely disagree that we need to pass a charter to protect TOT revenue. It would not be politically viable for the state to raid the treasuries of general law cities and exempt those who are fortuitously organized under charters. That was never going to happen. Indeed, if there were a serious risk of that happening there would be a heck of lot more charter initiatives pending right now.
Nevertheless, even without the purported financial benefits, a charter may be a good way to go. Gaining "home rule" on municipal affairs, in and of itself, should not be very controversial. For the most part, the rules at issue govern how a city goes about forming policies, not what the actual policies will be.
But let’s step back for a second and think about how that home rule would be exercised under the proposed charter.
For more than a hundred years California cities have had two options - (i) to organize their municipal affairs under uniform statutes crafted by the state or (ii) to go it alone and organize them as they see fit. It’s like software. You can buy the off the shelf package offered by the state or develop your own proprietary software line by painstaking line.
If you choose to go it lone, one option is to draft a very detailed charter that, in and of itself, replaces the state's comprehensive set of laws governing the organization of municipalities. However, amending such charters is cumbersome and expensive because any minor change or tweaking has to be voted on the full electorate.
The second approach is a short form charter in which the municipality simply reserves the right to organize its municipal affairs as it sees fit. As I understand it, the existing state laws are then ultimately replaced with comparatively easy-to-pass and easy-to-amend city ordinances. Measure C proposes a type of short form charter.
What I think some people are struggling with (including me) is that, except in a few specific instances spelled out in the charter itself, we have no way of knowing how RPV’s municipal affairs will be organized going forward. And if we don’t like where things end up, the only way to reverse things would be through an expensive and cumbersome initiative process.
So I think the concern is not a charter per se, but the fact that the Council is asking us to approve a short form charter without having either directly engaged an independent committee of residents to study and draft the charter or having worked with residents to develop a comprehensive plan for organizing our municipality going forward. It’s like deleting Microsoft Word from your computer without having programmed your new word processor (or even determined all the features you want your new software to have).
The charter has been described as a constitution. That may be so in some cases, but ours is much more akin to a declaration of independence. The actual constitution, in large part, has yet to be drafted.
I know there are 100+ charter cities in California, but I’d be curious to know how many of those cities have adopted short form charters and what their experiences have been. My impression is that the use of a short form charter is much more of a recent phenomenon that has produced, at best, mixed results. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to properly study this aspect of the issue and I’m not sure anyone else has either.
To explain my position a bit more, in my review of this issue it seems that some other cities have treated the charter issue with a lot more precision and respect. For example, Redding is currently considering changing to a charter city. In Redding’s case, their city council appointed an independent committee of ten diverse members of the community to conduct a comprehensive study of all aspects of a potential charter. Their process is a striking contrast to RPV’s where a short form charter was drafted by a city council member and simply discussed at a few city council meetings.
ReplyDeleteI think Redding’s city council understands that because the charter impacts the manner in which the city council itself will function going forward it was key to study and develop those procedures independent of the council. In fact, Redding’s Vice Mayor was so concerned about maintaining the “maximum independence” of the charter committee that he vowed to stay away from the charter committee’s meetings and urged the other councilmembers to do the same. http://m.redding.com/news/2011/feb/01/council-subgroup-to-be-created/
Moreover, instead of a comprehensive and considered analysis by an independent committee, which you would expect to look something like this…
http://friendsofhomerule.org/images/Luzerne%20County%20Proposed%20Home%20Rule%20Charter_081810.pdf
…we’ve got a powerpoint from the City Attorney that looks like this:
http://www.palosverdes.com/rpv/cityclerk/City-Attorneys-Community-Leaders-Breakfast-Chartering-Presentation-01-29-2011.pdf
So you can start to see what people mean when they feel this has been rushed. We haven't done our homework yet. I’d feel a lot more comfortable with this if the proposed charter were the result of a studied community-based process like Redding's.
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