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.”