Tuesday Night’s City Council Meeting

I found Tuesday night’s City Council meeting difficult to watch and participate in, on so many levels. My main purpose in going was to support city staff’s well thought out recommendation to expend funding for a senior housing survey. In looking back at what happened, it is difficult not to be perplexed. I am still scratching my head. Let me explain.

The City Council majority ultimately chose to approve Don Saylor’s motion. He flatly opposed a $20,000 senior housing survey that would have been statistically significant. Instead the Council majority punted, by choosing to wait and see if a grant for $7,500 is approved. If so, it will be the anemic amount spent on a mini-survey of dubious statistical significance – facilitated through Facebook, Twitter, or other alternative methods than a simple telephone survey. The fact that many seniors don’t even own computers apparently didn’t occur to the City Council majority.

Councilmember Steve Souza stated he was in favor of a survey, just not at this time. He thought it wasn’t worthwhile to do one until an actual project was proposed. Yet it is well known to all City Councilmembers that a large senior housing development is anticipated for the site on the corner of Pole Line and Covell Blvd. In fact, the application for it is expected to come in January of 2010. That is only three short months from now.

What I cannot figure out is how the seniors in Davis are expected to express their desires about senior housing to the City Council, if never asked before projects are planned? It seems as if things are back end to. Invariably the city asks after the fact, if at all, to conform citizen wishes to what the developers have already decided to put forward. Shouldn’t it be the other way around, where builders construct what the populace wants or needs?

Don Saylor just didn’t care to expend city funds on a survey, even though the account it would be drawn from was admittedly for planning purposes only. Nevertheless City Council has had no problem expending a whopping $75,000 for a survey of our city parks, to find out if people really liked them. Not surprisingly the city got the answer it wanted – yes our parks are lovely. But citizens didn’t get much in the way of new information despite the massive dollars expended.

Ruth Asmundson was in favor of a survey, just not via telephone. Her reasoning was that she herself doesn’t care to spend twenty minutes answering telephone surveys. It was never satisfactorily explained why a twenty minute Facebook or Twitter survey would be any less onerous than a twenty minute telephone survey. Or how this survey was to be facilitated on nonexistent computers that many seniors do not possess.

To their credit, Lamar Heystek and Sue Greenwald attempted to doggedly support city staff’s modest recommendation for a $20,000 senior housing survey. But the two were summarily shot down for their efforts. However in the same night, apparently Councilmember Souza had no problem expending city funds to rent out Oddfellows Hall, of which he is a member by the way. Why? So it can be used as a new location for adolescents as a drop in site, because the local Teen Center has been usurped for the city’s new Bicycle Museum.

So it would appear teens in this town don’t much matter, nor senior citizens either. On the other hand, inanimate objects like bikes take precedence over everything. How ironic! It wasn’t so long ago the Davis Senior Citizens Commission was slated for elimination, in favor of keeping the Bicycle Commission. A very disappointing turn of events and déjà vu all over again. But matters took a much uglier turn Tuesday evening, that was embarrassing to observe.

In an extremely ugly exchange, an attempt was made to remove minority Councilmember Sue Greenwald as liaison to the Budget and Finance Commission, ostensibly because she had previously overstepped her authority. The City Council majority conveniently passed a novel rule that night, giving authority for a City Council majority to remove a fellow member deemed to have violated standards laid out for improper liaison behavior. What followed was a concerted effort to humiliatingly subject Councilmember Greenwald to this new rule ex post facto, as the city attorney sat silent.

It is Black letter law (Black’s Legal Dictionary) “By Article I, Section 10 of the United States Constitution, the states are forbidden to pass any ex post facto law. Most all state constitutions contain similar prohibitions against ex post facto laws. ” There is good reason for such a prohibition. Any law passed after an occurrence serves no notice or warning of the punishment to ensue (pardon the pun) for conduct deemed inappropriate but enumerated after the fact. In short, ex post facto laws are an attempt to circumvent fair play and punish without warning.

Mr. Souza was particularly pointed in his attack on Councilmember Greenwald’s conduct, which I found hypocritical at best. I remember very distinctly his visit to our Davis Senior Citizens Commission a few years back, that was hardly “objective” or within the scope of his authority as a member of the Subcommittee on Commissions. His express purpose was to viciously strong-arm commissioners into agreeing it was somehow advantageous for the Senior Citizens Commission to become a three member subcommittee of the Social Services Commission. Mr. Souza’s reprehensible conduct was reported on this very blog as a “browbeating” of senior citizen commissioners.

I left the City Council meeting Tuesday night shaking my head, wondering how voters who were watching will perceive the conduct I just witnessed. I am baffled at the thought processes, or lack thereof, going into the decisions being made that so effect our lives.