These Comments Have Helped Me Enormously!

I so wish that the person who wrote the following would contact me directly.

Please Email me directly at mrichards2@hotmail.com. I won't publish your name or let anyone know who you really are, if you don't want to be identified for any reason.

This post is subsequent to a previous posting of:

http://eastrpv.blogspot.com/2011/02/another-comment-elevated-to-post.html

"Anonymous", your comments provide reasoning I agree with. You have offered both support for and opposition to having R.P.V. becoming a charter city.

The reasons you question adoption of Measure C are better than anything I have written and I also feel they are better stated than many of the reasons provided by the No on C organization.

Your first latest comment begins with the knowledge that the California Supreme still needs to publish its decision regarding the city of Vista's prevailing wage guidelines. The Court has yet to publish whether it finds that a charter city can or cannot constitutionally create partial or full exemptions to prevailing wage guidelines on municipal projects funded using only municipal funding.

I have included your two comments as being connected because your second set of comments fit very well after the first I posted:

"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.

I 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."

** While I have a differing opinion about protecting the TOT, I certainly will not diagree with the good analysis I believe is important to inform everyone about.

It would not be honest of me to tell anyone that the comments have not created a swaying of my vote for passage of Measure C. These comments do confirm that I can't ask anyone else to vote Yes or No on Measure C.

I am stuck deeper in the mire of 'if not now, when? If I change my vote to No, I have no clue if this Council or any future Council makeup would look towrds Redlands for guidance.

I am still a Yes on C voter, but the totter continues to teeter more. I am troubled because I simply can't be comfortable voting either way, as much as I want to and/or should be.

I agree completely with 'Anonymous' using the word "struggling" as the person and I seemingly remain.

I guess putting my faith in the majority of voters who vote one way or the other is acceptable with me because I have mentioned my trust in the intelligence and the care folks interested enough in this matter, have.

Thank you so much, Anonymous, I would really like to know who you really are.