The singularly superlative satirical song writer, Tom Lehrer, when asked why he stopped writing the comic songs with the brilliant lyrics he became famous for is said to have said: “When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize it was the death of satire.”
Not of the same depth of depravity or height of head-scratching, jaw-dropping wonderment, but ironically bewildering nevertheless is Infineon Raceway awarded for being an outstanding green business. Think about that one, folks. Giving an award for environmental conservation, ecological awareness and climate warming consciousness to a business that dumps a sizeable shitload of pollution on the planet. I wonder what the Co2 amount comes to just over a NASCAR weekend?
Not to worry though, they do a bang-up job recycling their garbage we’re told and their local corporate management shtups the local charities with funding, all the while cultivating the town’s prominent set. To diss Infineon, formerly Sears Point Raceway, is tantamount to blasphemy, and usually brings clucking criticism from local corporate quarters in the form of letters to the newspapers telling critics how insensitive they are to Infineon’s good neighborliness and community involvement. And those claims are true. What’s also true is Infineon is the seat of a business unfriendly to the planet in its rather large use of resources and distribution of waste.
Whether one likes or dislikes auto racing is irrelevant. What is relevant is that giving Infineon Raceway an award for being green, while not Kissingerian, is like awarding a kid for good spelling in his graffiti. Maybe it’s a cost/benefit thing. Yes, they pollute the hell out of the planet, especially the Sonoma County corner of it, but look how much pleasure they bring to millions. And not to overlook the benefit to the county in tax dollars.
Simply put, it insults one’s intelligence to be told that an auto racing business is green because they do some good things. It’s good that they do good things, but they’re NOT green by any reasonable measure of the scales. That simply flies in the face of reality.
And that’s why this blog gives its flying, golden goddess of BS award to: the Sonoma Economic Development Partnership for bestowing a green award on the raceway.
On the other hand, the Benzigers won and they well deserve it. If you need an example of a bona fide green business use that as your template, Sonoma Economic Development Partnership.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
Report From June 6 Council Meeting
At the last council meeting two things happened that left me, quite frankly, amazed.
First was the poignant, passionate testimony by Deborah Stroski in regard to the strom trooper ICE raids in Boyes Springs, brutally and callously ripping parents away from their families while their children watched, shocked and devastated. These people were not guilty of some heinous, violent crime to have warranted such treatment. Some of these people have lived and worked in our community for 15-20 years – responsible, law abiding, tax paying people. These are friends, neighbors and co-workers.
As Ms. Stroski so aptly pointed out, these men and women are the working backbone of the economy of this city and this county. How does this council or anyone in this room think this community would continue to function if these people decide en masse to withhold their labor? These are the folks taking care of this community’s very young children and our older parents no longer able to care for themselves. These are the folks who make Sonoma’s service industry and wine industry function. Who the hell do we think are working the vineyards – Canadians?
Ms. Stroski brought the 6-year-old daughter of Adrian Corriera who has lived and worked here for 15 years, achieving managerial status. This child had to helplessly look on as her father was sadistically snatched away from her and her family. She pleaded, heart-broken and frantic for this council’s help.
The only one, I repeat – the only one – on this council to respond to this desperate child’s and Ms. Stroski’s impassioned pleas was Ken Brown. The rest of you blithely moved on to immediately discuss some minutia of city business that easily could have waited. My God, don’t we share the same reality? Where is your humanity? Are you unable or incapable of responding to a child’s plight when it’s happening before your eyes? Would you treat your own children with such callous indifference?
The second thing that blew my mind was the hour-long discussion about discussion of items on the agenda. Not liking the City Attorney’s instruction concerning The Brown Act – if an item is on the agenda it’s open for discussion by the public and the council. Period! What is it about that that’s so hard to fathom? Reasonable time limits can be set for comments, as has always been the case.
But not liking The Brown Act, established to insure public participation and transparency in politics, Ms. Sanders asked for guidance from a gentleman in the audience who counseled that a disgruntled majority on the council could “vote with their feet” – get up and walk out, thereby shutting discussion down, and probably effectively terminating the meeting as well. Wisely, the City Attorney cautioned the council not to act in such a manner. I’d add to Ms. Sanders that that kind of sword cuts both ways. Perhaps the honorable Mr. Brown wouldn’t employ such a disruptive and childish tactic, there may come a day when today’s majority is tomorrow’s minority, and Sanders and Sebastiani want public discussion on an item they think is important. Slip the shoe on the other foot and see if you think walking out of a meeting because you don’t like the issue is such a good idea.
First was the poignant, passionate testimony by Deborah Stroski in regard to the strom trooper ICE raids in Boyes Springs, brutally and callously ripping parents away from their families while their children watched, shocked and devastated. These people were not guilty of some heinous, violent crime to have warranted such treatment. Some of these people have lived and worked in our community for 15-20 years – responsible, law abiding, tax paying people. These are friends, neighbors and co-workers.
As Ms. Stroski so aptly pointed out, these men and women are the working backbone of the economy of this city and this county. How does this council or anyone in this room think this community would continue to function if these people decide en masse to withhold their labor? These are the folks taking care of this community’s very young children and our older parents no longer able to care for themselves. These are the folks who make Sonoma’s service industry and wine industry function. Who the hell do we think are working the vineyards – Canadians?
Ms. Stroski brought the 6-year-old daughter of Adrian Corriera who has lived and worked here for 15 years, achieving managerial status. This child had to helplessly look on as her father was sadistically snatched away from her and her family. She pleaded, heart-broken and frantic for this council’s help.
The only one, I repeat – the only one – on this council to respond to this desperate child’s and Ms. Stroski’s impassioned pleas was Ken Brown. The rest of you blithely moved on to immediately discuss some minutia of city business that easily could have waited. My God, don’t we share the same reality? Where is your humanity? Are you unable or incapable of responding to a child’s plight when it’s happening before your eyes? Would you treat your own children with such callous indifference?
The second thing that blew my mind was the hour-long discussion about discussion of items on the agenda. Not liking the City Attorney’s instruction concerning The Brown Act – if an item is on the agenda it’s open for discussion by the public and the council. Period! What is it about that that’s so hard to fathom? Reasonable time limits can be set for comments, as has always been the case.
But not liking The Brown Act, established to insure public participation and transparency in politics, Ms. Sanders asked for guidance from a gentleman in the audience who counseled that a disgruntled majority on the council could “vote with their feet” – get up and walk out, thereby shutting discussion down, and probably effectively terminating the meeting as well. Wisely, the City Attorney cautioned the council not to act in such a manner. I’d add to Ms. Sanders that that kind of sword cuts both ways. Perhaps the honorable Mr. Brown wouldn’t employ such a disruptive and childish tactic, there may come a day when today’s majority is tomorrow’s minority, and Sanders and Sebastiani want public discussion on an item they think is important. Slip the shoe on the other foot and see if you think walking out of a meeting because you don’t like the issue is such a good idea.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Democracy Restored to City Council
By Dave Henderson
After a bitterly criticized aberration from long traditional Council practice, and despite fierce opposition from two Council members during a wide-ranging debate that lasted over an hour, the Sonoma City Council, by a 3-2 vote on June 6, formally approved a norm that restored and formalized the right of any individual Council member to put on the meeting agenda for Council consideration any issue that member judges is deserving of Council attention.
Why is this such a big deal?
Because a 3-member majority, on Feb. 7, 2007, by a tricky maneuver never before seen on the Council, denied Council member Ken Brown, with the support of Steve Barbose, the opportunity to have a resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq discussed and voted upon by the Council. Brown was able to put it on the agenda, and some 46 supporters were able to address the Council on the issue, but Mayor Stanley Cohen had craftily set up a novel two-part procedure, whereby a majority vote was required, after public discussion (legally required by California’s Brown Act), to even admit the measure for Council consideration and action. In other words, the Council couldn’t even talk about the resolution, much less vote on it, if a majority voted against considering it. As Council members Joanne Sanders and August Sebastiani and Mayor Cohen duly voted, thus effectively muzzling two Council members, banning the issue that Brown and Barbose regarded as of important concern to many Sonoma voters, and hence disenfranchising those City of Sonoma voters who elected Barbose and Brown to represent them.
The reasons adduced by the three were various. August Sebastiani is vehemently against considering any so-called “national issue,” and Joanne Sanders likewise, and they have not nuanced their position to include national issues that might materially impact Sonoma, such as health care, immigration, Veterans care, No Child Left Behind Act, you name it. Council member Sanders, in addition, seems to regard anything but her own priorities for Sonoma as unimportant, no matter what another Council member might think: painted crosswalks trump everything, literally. Mayor Cohen took another tack. He had informally polled some 100 Sonoma residents over the months, and 80 said No, although he never really said publicly what he specifically asked them. Also, he alleged, “a statement from a small, rural city of Northern California, which is known as an area for its liberal views, will have no effect on those we have elected.”
Whatever one may think of these reasons, the main question, as many have reminded the Council members, is why then did you not simply admit the Iraq Resolution for consideration, call for a motion, and vote it down? That is a straightforward process which no one could take issue with.
The unprecedented procedure they resorted to not only insulated them from the necessity of personally and publicly voting on the Resolution, it had a very different, and more insidious meaning. Its clear message, admitted to in so many words by Sanders and Sebastiani in the Council discussion on June 6, was that no matter how important an issue was to one or two Council members, or to the Sonoma constituents who elected them, even if they’d run their campaign on such an issue – if three members decided to ban that issue from discussion, it was banned and censored.
But each Council member has been elected by the voters of the city at large, who have expressed faith in his or her position on current issues, in his or her character, sense of responsibility, and personal and political judgment. Every other Council member is bound to therefore accord that member the identical respect they owe themselves as representatives of the voters, even if – or especially if – each member represents different groups of those same City of Sonoma citizens. For three members to decide to reject consideration of an item proposed by another member amounts to denying official voice to that member, denying respect to that member, and, hence, denies a voice to the voters he is representing. If those who elected him are unhappy with the issues he is sponsoring, they will decide that at the next election – that is not for other Council members to decide. By not allowing a council member to directly place an item on the agenda for discussion and eventual action, three members of the Council have, in effect, frustrated the democratic system in Sonoma and literally disenfranchised the voters of this city. As Council member Brown said, “To think that I’m going to put an item on the agenda that doesn’t represent the issues and feelings and the beliefs of the people who voted for me not only discounts me, bit in a larger sense discounts the voters in our democracy.”
The issue is not the Iraq Resolution, although Council member Sanders insists that Ken Brown and Steve Barbose, and others who support their position, are pushing for procedural change because “you are still licking your wounds” over the defeat of the Resolution. The issue, rather, was the new rule pulled out of the hat on Feb. 7.
If that cooked up rule had been allowed to remain in effect – a clear violation of The Brown Act, which governs elected body’s protocol – any three or four members now or in the future, in reaction to issues seen as too liberal, or too conservative, or too outrageous – whether that issue is immigration or the Nativity scene in the Plaza or whatever – when three members can deprive another member of his or her opportunity to present a measure to the Council for consideration, that truly smacks of an anti-democratic cabal determined to keep certain members gagged and under their control.
Council members Sebastiani and Sanders desperately opposed a return to the traditional and legal norm. Sebastiani asked, “Where do you draw the line (in what could be brought up)? What if I as a Council member choose to agendize who’s going to start as second baseman for the SF Giants?” To say the least, this attitude showed a stunning disregard for the caliber and maturity of Council members elected by Sonomans. Ms Sanders stated, in various ways, that “it is not appropriate for this body to discuss any issue that 3 people don’t think should be discussed,” thus confusing, fatally, voting on an issue with simply considering an issue that a group of citizens may think of great importance, and with which she may disagree. That view is traditionally known as tyranny of the majority and suppressing of dissenting views. It was pointed out to both Council members that once an issue unpopular to them was admitted to Council discussion, it could be simply defeated by a motion and three votes. This was not acceptable to them.
After a motion by Ms Sanders to take no action was defeated, Mr. Barbose made a motion that each Council member should be able to bring to the agenda, and have considered by the Council, any item, and that such should be the written norm of the Council. Mayor Cohen, who had initiated the new procedure in the Feb. 7 meeting, and who in this June 6 meeting had initially sided with Sanders and Sebastiani, reversed his position and voted with Brown and Barbose, stating, “I’m going to switch my position, and take the challenge that Ken Brown gave me, in saying that he has all the belief in the world that each one of us is going to bring forth something that we believe needs to be considered, and if indeed it doesn’t work out I reserve the right to bring it back for discussion.”
Thus was democracy and respect restored to the Sonoma City Council, even though the last word in the proceedings was uttered by Ms. Sanders: “Crazy.”
After a bitterly criticized aberration from long traditional Council practice, and despite fierce opposition from two Council members during a wide-ranging debate that lasted over an hour, the Sonoma City Council, by a 3-2 vote on June 6, formally approved a norm that restored and formalized the right of any individual Council member to put on the meeting agenda for Council consideration any issue that member judges is deserving of Council attention.
Why is this such a big deal?
Because a 3-member majority, on Feb. 7, 2007, by a tricky maneuver never before seen on the Council, denied Council member Ken Brown, with the support of Steve Barbose, the opportunity to have a resolution calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq discussed and voted upon by the Council. Brown was able to put it on the agenda, and some 46 supporters were able to address the Council on the issue, but Mayor Stanley Cohen had craftily set up a novel two-part procedure, whereby a majority vote was required, after public discussion (legally required by California’s Brown Act), to even admit the measure for Council consideration and action. In other words, the Council couldn’t even talk about the resolution, much less vote on it, if a majority voted against considering it. As Council members Joanne Sanders and August Sebastiani and Mayor Cohen duly voted, thus effectively muzzling two Council members, banning the issue that Brown and Barbose regarded as of important concern to many Sonoma voters, and hence disenfranchising those City of Sonoma voters who elected Barbose and Brown to represent them.
The reasons adduced by the three were various. August Sebastiani is vehemently against considering any so-called “national issue,” and Joanne Sanders likewise, and they have not nuanced their position to include national issues that might materially impact Sonoma, such as health care, immigration, Veterans care, No Child Left Behind Act, you name it. Council member Sanders, in addition, seems to regard anything but her own priorities for Sonoma as unimportant, no matter what another Council member might think: painted crosswalks trump everything, literally. Mayor Cohen took another tack. He had informally polled some 100 Sonoma residents over the months, and 80 said No, although he never really said publicly what he specifically asked them. Also, he alleged, “a statement from a small, rural city of Northern California, which is known as an area for its liberal views, will have no effect on those we have elected.”
Whatever one may think of these reasons, the main question, as many have reminded the Council members, is why then did you not simply admit the Iraq Resolution for consideration, call for a motion, and vote it down? That is a straightforward process which no one could take issue with.
The unprecedented procedure they resorted to not only insulated them from the necessity of personally and publicly voting on the Resolution, it had a very different, and more insidious meaning. Its clear message, admitted to in so many words by Sanders and Sebastiani in the Council discussion on June 6, was that no matter how important an issue was to one or two Council members, or to the Sonoma constituents who elected them, even if they’d run their campaign on such an issue – if three members decided to ban that issue from discussion, it was banned and censored.
But each Council member has been elected by the voters of the city at large, who have expressed faith in his or her position on current issues, in his or her character, sense of responsibility, and personal and political judgment. Every other Council member is bound to therefore accord that member the identical respect they owe themselves as representatives of the voters, even if – or especially if – each member represents different groups of those same City of Sonoma citizens. For three members to decide to reject consideration of an item proposed by another member amounts to denying official voice to that member, denying respect to that member, and, hence, denies a voice to the voters he is representing. If those who elected him are unhappy with the issues he is sponsoring, they will decide that at the next election – that is not for other Council members to decide. By not allowing a council member to directly place an item on the agenda for discussion and eventual action, three members of the Council have, in effect, frustrated the democratic system in Sonoma and literally disenfranchised the voters of this city. As Council member Brown said, “To think that I’m going to put an item on the agenda that doesn’t represent the issues and feelings and the beliefs of the people who voted for me not only discounts me, bit in a larger sense discounts the voters in our democracy.”
The issue is not the Iraq Resolution, although Council member Sanders insists that Ken Brown and Steve Barbose, and others who support their position, are pushing for procedural change because “you are still licking your wounds” over the defeat of the Resolution. The issue, rather, was the new rule pulled out of the hat on Feb. 7.
If that cooked up rule had been allowed to remain in effect – a clear violation of The Brown Act, which governs elected body’s protocol – any three or four members now or in the future, in reaction to issues seen as too liberal, or too conservative, or too outrageous – whether that issue is immigration or the Nativity scene in the Plaza or whatever – when three members can deprive another member of his or her opportunity to present a measure to the Council for consideration, that truly smacks of an anti-democratic cabal determined to keep certain members gagged and under their control.
Council members Sebastiani and Sanders desperately opposed a return to the traditional and legal norm. Sebastiani asked, “Where do you draw the line (in what could be brought up)? What if I as a Council member choose to agendize who’s going to start as second baseman for the SF Giants?” To say the least, this attitude showed a stunning disregard for the caliber and maturity of Council members elected by Sonomans. Ms Sanders stated, in various ways, that “it is not appropriate for this body to discuss any issue that 3 people don’t think should be discussed,” thus confusing, fatally, voting on an issue with simply considering an issue that a group of citizens may think of great importance, and with which she may disagree. That view is traditionally known as tyranny of the majority and suppressing of dissenting views. It was pointed out to both Council members that once an issue unpopular to them was admitted to Council discussion, it could be simply defeated by a motion and three votes. This was not acceptable to them.
After a motion by Ms Sanders to take no action was defeated, Mr. Barbose made a motion that each Council member should be able to bring to the agenda, and have considered by the Council, any item, and that such should be the written norm of the Council. Mayor Cohen, who had initiated the new procedure in the Feb. 7 meeting, and who in this June 6 meeting had initially sided with Sanders and Sebastiani, reversed his position and voted with Brown and Barbose, stating, “I’m going to switch my position, and take the challenge that Ken Brown gave me, in saying that he has all the belief in the world that each one of us is going to bring forth something that we believe needs to be considered, and if indeed it doesn’t work out I reserve the right to bring it back for discussion.”
Thus was democracy and respect restored to the Sonoma City Council, even though the last word in the proceedings was uttered by Ms. Sanders: “Crazy.”
A Letter About Community and Free Speech the I-T Didn’t Print
By Bob Edwards
Editor:
Your recent editorial (Community vs. Conspiracy) chides local activists for publicly objecting to police photography of peaceful student demonstrators. You attribute your “passionate exception” to a belief that Sonoma has a “high level of community, a high level of we.” In short, the activists shouldn’t have made a public mountain out of what you consider a molehill.
Disturbing is the implication that in Sonoma “we” don’t make a fuss when “we” see civil rights being coerced. We are told, “What’s missing in all this an understanding of the nature of Sonoma.” In short, these activists are not really one of us but are some menacing band of outside agitators and troublemakers.
The misunderstanding—and it is an insulting, divisive and constitutionally dangerous one—is yours, not that of the students or the adults, both teachers and activists, involved in the incident. Sonoma has minimal tolerance for civil rights abuses. In that regard and contrary to your opinion, we are no different from Berkeley or San Francisco or that place called America. OK... maybe we are different from Texas.
Your own archives hold the evidence that the IT has not covered itself in glory in defending civil rights in Sonoma. Some will recall we are approaching the two-year anniversary of the shameful Fourth of July Parade Incident, when a passionate resident of our community charged into the parade to destroy the sign of antiwar protesters, also members of our community, who were peacefully protesting a government debacle that 75% of the country now recognizes as The Mother of All Blunders. No doubt the attacker felt that sign disturbed the community’s sense of “we,” or at least her vision of who “we” are.
The war wasn’t then widely accepted for the insanity it is, and today some do not see immigration as a happy subject for Happy Valley. Still, the parade incident occurred on the very day our community was celebrating a holiday with some significance for civil rights, and so it is a worthy example of how and why civil rights are considered important in Sonoma. The attacker’s behavior quickly became the butt of public ridicule, letters to the editor and front-page news in your paper. Charitably, the victims did not sue the daylights out of her or the City or the parade sponsors.
As in this latest incident, the IT waffled and equivocated. Recognizing the marchers’ right of free speech, it nonetheless lamented the fact that free speech had to spoil a nice hometown parade. One was left with the impression that the protesters were equally at fault with the sign-ripper for bad judgment. How un-American of them to think that the 4th of July meant something.
Back to the present: I don’t think for a minute that police policy or Chief Sackett OK’d the photographic surveillance of peaceful student protesters, or has a secret plan to do so. Our new Chief is not that kind of guy and no doubt he finds all this fuss a very unwanted distraction for his department. In a time of government-sponsored paranoia, the officer may have mistakenly thought he was doing his job. After all, if police are required to patrol public schools, those students must be a dangerous lot, right? But does that make the officer a Bush-variety thug?
No, but it doesn’t excuse what even your editorial acknowledges should not have been done: “Police surveillance of lawful citizen assembly is contrary to the spirit of democracy and violates the surveillance guidelines for law enforcement” developed by the state attorney general.
The point is that such government surveillance of peaceful citizens is precisely the kind of conduct that chills (in the phrasing of the Supreme Court) free speech and it deserves a very public and very vocal response whether it takes place in Berkeley or Sonoma or Crawford, Texas.
To privately and quietly address suspected public abuses by public officials, as you suggest, is precisely the sweep-it-under-the-rug cover-up that totalitarians everywhere love, because it perpetuates the myth that such abuses can’t and don’t happen or, if they do, they are nothing about which we should get passionately upset.
If you thought about it for more than a reflex, you would see that what you suggest is that the people surrender their constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government—i.e.. in public or in private. Which is exactly what they did when they confronted the officer on the day in question and later protested to city council. And while you have concluded that the officer’s action was not improper, others might disagree. In any event, it may come as a surprise to learn that the exercise of the right to petition the government is NOT pre-conditioned in the least on whether the petitioners are right or wrong in their claims of government wrongdoing. The Constitution contemplates that public discussion will air the facts so the people can decide the truth for themselves; truth which can never reliably come from behind closed government doors. If it turns out the accusations are false, the best place for that humiliation to occur is in public discussion.
Rather than upbraid their public conduct, you should have praised the activists for providing the students a living civics lesson that they do not get in school every day and, regrettably, do not get from the Index Tribune, whose understanding of the First Amendment is fundamentally corrupted by mindless boosterism. Would that someday the IT is as unequivocally passionate about civil rights as it is about its nostalgic, cotton-candy view of a community that exists only in its wildest dreams, and in our worst nightmares.
But the good news is that you may have another chance to get it right. I await your editorial response to the inevitable protests should the city decide to pursue a councilman’s vision of erecting on the Plaza a diorama celebrating his religious beliefs. Yes, another one of those community-dividing First Amendment Constitutional civil rights issues and, potentially, a very expensive legal experiment for the City, too. Adding to the newsworthy excitement will be council’s new agenda-setting policy: Discussing and deciding federal issues like the First Amendment, and that whole separation of church and state thing, may not qualify as “legitimate city business.” I note the Iraq War apparently was not a local concern, even though it spoiled our 4th of July parade and threatens to do it again this year. Bethlehem is in that same troubled neighborhood and, well, I’m told that if it exists at all heaven is supposedly even farther away and that if there is a God/god there or anywhere, He/She/It is probably way outside council’s jurisdiction.
Anyway, before pouring editorial concrete around those topics, I respectfully recommend a little more research, a bit more thought and a lot less “passionate exceptions. “ The Constitution would be a good place to start, as it may contain many shocking surprises.
FYI—If you would like a reference to the source of the I-T’s prior equivocation regarding free speech, it can be found in Mr. Lynch’s editorial of July 15, 2005 in your archives of that date, entitled “Don’t Ruin a Good Thing.”
Friday, June 8, 2007
Council Process Almost Short-circuited
By Dave Henderson
Comments to City Council, June 6, 2007:
I am continuing to respond to this Council’s refusal, on February 7, to even consider and discuss, much less vote upon, a resolution about withdrawing US armed forces from Iraq.
On 5 previous occasions, I discussed reasons given on that occasion by councilmembers Cohen, Sebastiani, and Sanders. Tonight, related to Item 6B on the agenda, I want to address the reprehensible ploy engineered by Mayor Cohen, and agreed to by Mr. Sebastiani and Ms Sanders, which overturned the traditional practice for councilmembers placing items on the City Council agenda. I want to urge you to return to that former practice.
By not allowing a councilmember to directly place an item on the agenda for discussion and eventual action, you are, in effect, frustrating the democratic system in Sonoma and literally disenfranchising the voters of this city.
Each member here has been elected by the voters of the city at large, who have expressed faith in his or her position on current issues, and in his or her personal and political judgment. For three of you to decide to reject agendizing an item proposed by another member amounts to denying official voice to that member and, hence, denying a voice to the voters he is representing. If those who elected him are unhappy with the issues he is sponsoring, they will decide that at the next election. That is not for you to decide.
When any three or four members now or in the future, in reaction to issues that are either seen as too liberal, or too conservative, or too outrageous, whether that issue is immigration or the Nativity scene in the Plaza or whatever, when three members can deprive another member of his or her opportunity to present a measure to this Council for consideration, that truly smacks of an anti-democratic cabal determined to keep certain members gagged and under their control. I find that outrageous and I find it hard to believe that three members of this Council, in the City of Sonoma, in 2007, could perpetrate such a blatant injustice on the city.
Finally, I have to wonder at the reason behind such a maneuver.
I realize that at least two members will oppose any so-called national issues. But why would they not simply allow the issue to be presented, and then vote it down?
The only thing I can come up with is that by not admitting the issue to the agenda, in this case the Iraq Resolution, you insulated yourselves from having to stand up and actually cast a Yes or a No vote, and from thus experiencing, either presently or in the future, the consequences of that vote. I’m sorry if that seems harsh, but you have not given us any reason for that maneuver--that I am aware of, at least--, and I can conceive of no other valid reason. If you do have other reasons, then you have done yourselves a disservice by resorting to a measure that creates doubts about your justification.
I urge to you to formally take steps to ensure that such a procedure is never resorted to again on this Council.
Editor’s note: At the end of this meeting the council voted 3-2 to restore the long standing process by which a council member can bring any item to a council agenda thereby opening it up for discussion by the council and the public. Legally this process is required by the Brown Act, which governs publicly elected body’s proceedings. This legally binding process was vehemently opposed by council members Sanders and Sebastiani who labeled it a “tyranny of the minority.”
Their objective was to have a vote regarding an agendized item before any discussion took place by which a majority against the item would effectively kill it then and there. By so doing the public and the other council members would not be able to hear and discuss the item. In any event the law (Brown Act), fairness, respect for the public’s right to comment, and common sense prevailed.
Comments to City Council, June 6, 2007:
I am continuing to respond to this Council’s refusal, on February 7, to even consider and discuss, much less vote upon, a resolution about withdrawing US armed forces from Iraq.
On 5 previous occasions, I discussed reasons given on that occasion by councilmembers Cohen, Sebastiani, and Sanders. Tonight, related to Item 6B on the agenda, I want to address the reprehensible ploy engineered by Mayor Cohen, and agreed to by Mr. Sebastiani and Ms Sanders, which overturned the traditional practice for councilmembers placing items on the City Council agenda. I want to urge you to return to that former practice.
By not allowing a councilmember to directly place an item on the agenda for discussion and eventual action, you are, in effect, frustrating the democratic system in Sonoma and literally disenfranchising the voters of this city.
Each member here has been elected by the voters of the city at large, who have expressed faith in his or her position on current issues, and in his or her personal and political judgment. For three of you to decide to reject agendizing an item proposed by another member amounts to denying official voice to that member and, hence, denying a voice to the voters he is representing. If those who elected him are unhappy with the issues he is sponsoring, they will decide that at the next election. That is not for you to decide.
When any three or four members now or in the future, in reaction to issues that are either seen as too liberal, or too conservative, or too outrageous, whether that issue is immigration or the Nativity scene in the Plaza or whatever, when three members can deprive another member of his or her opportunity to present a measure to this Council for consideration, that truly smacks of an anti-democratic cabal determined to keep certain members gagged and under their control. I find that outrageous and I find it hard to believe that three members of this Council, in the City of Sonoma, in 2007, could perpetrate such a blatant injustice on the city.
Finally, I have to wonder at the reason behind such a maneuver.
I realize that at least two members will oppose any so-called national issues. But why would they not simply allow the issue to be presented, and then vote it down?
The only thing I can come up with is that by not admitting the issue to the agenda, in this case the Iraq Resolution, you insulated yourselves from having to stand up and actually cast a Yes or a No vote, and from thus experiencing, either presently or in the future, the consequences of that vote. I’m sorry if that seems harsh, but you have not given us any reason for that maneuver--that I am aware of, at least--, and I can conceive of no other valid reason. If you do have other reasons, then you have done yourselves a disservice by resorting to a measure that creates doubts about your justification.
I urge to you to formally take steps to ensure that such a procedure is never resorted to again on this Council.
Editor’s note: At the end of this meeting the council voted 3-2 to restore the long standing process by which a council member can bring any item to a council agenda thereby opening it up for discussion by the council and the public. Legally this process is required by the Brown Act, which governs publicly elected body’s proceedings. This legally binding process was vehemently opposed by council members Sanders and Sebastiani who labeled it a “tyranny of the minority.”
Their objective was to have a vote regarding an agendized item before any discussion took place by which a majority against the item would effectively kill it then and there. By so doing the public and the other council members would not be able to hear and discuss the item. In any event the law (Brown Act), fairness, respect for the public’s right to comment, and common sense prevailed.
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