Candidate for
Member, City Council; City of Ukiah

Council members represent all the residents of the City and not just those who voted for them. At the same time, the Councilmembers who ran and were successful on a specific platform should not abandon those commitments lightly.

Open government combined with frequent dialogue with the general public is essential to good decision-making. Dialogue with the public means far more than adherence to the Brown Act. And use of citizen committees on specific issues can only increase the responsiveness of the Council.

Informing and educating the public is arguably the most important job of elected officials.

The obligation of a Council member, in the great tradition of representative democracy in our country, is not only to listen to constituents' viewpoints but to become as fully informed as is possible and then to vote according to his or her best judgment. Following the directives of the loudest voices in the community, or conducting opinion polls and voting accordingly, is not responsible representation.

Each new Council needs to articulate its vision for itself, to develop a shared vocabulary, to reach agreement on how to settle disagreements, and in particular to define the scope and limitations of its responsibilities.

Finding the right balance between responsible oversight of City operations and micro-managing those operations is a huge and ongoing challenge. The buck does stop with the Council and this requires ongoing vigilance over City business.

It is the job of the Council to keep a broad perspective. Both the Council and the general public can get so caught up in immediate issues that we don't step back and make it clear that what we do with issue X will not address the underlying problem (medical marijuana and water are examples). In other words, our discussions need to look beyond the specific topic to the underlying concern.

Furthermore, while immediate crises obviously require our attention, we cannot focus on them to the exclusion of long-range planning. Again, this is an area where keeping the public informed is essential. We need to work for long-term solutions, rather than ones that provide an easy and politically viable fix, but with long-term consequences.

The balancing of rights in conflict is one of the most difficult tasks before the Council. On many occasions in disputes brought to the Council, both sides have legitimate arguments. The following topics come to mind: rights of the homeless vs. the quality of life for the community; and rights of home builders and developers vs. preservation of agricultural land and open space. For some issues there can be a degree of balancing and compromise; others need to be recognized as being impossible to balance. The Council must inevitably make decisions that by their nature will reasonably seem unfair to some of the parties.

Prop 13 has done much to obstruct good government in California, though some of the waste and inefficiency that led to its passage is still present, particularly at the State level. The political reality, however, is that even truly necessary tax measures can be defeated. The Council's job around this issue is to create a climate in the City in which tax questions are looked at objectively and the value received for tax dollars spent is clearly assessed.

We have to promote free exchange between groups that see themselves in opposition to each other. In our polarized society, individuals and groups tend to talk among themselves, constantly preaching to their own choir and telling themselves how bad the other group's choir is. But many of these disagreements run only as deep as the vocabularies used by different groups. Beneath the arguments over words may be significant and productive points of agreement that, if uncovered, can lead to better government.