POOR DEMOCRATIC PROCESS, FAR BEYOND ONE CLOSED LUNCHEON

POOR DEMOCRATIC PROCESS, FAR BEYOND ONE CLOSED LUNCHEON

There are laws. Either Newark is complying with them or they are not. Inadvertent non-compliance does not bother me. Intentional non-compliance does.

 —Newark resident Jennifer Snyder

 Readers have asked for more evidence of problems with Newark’s city government. Failure to follow procedures intended to insure good democratic process looms large, though it often goes unnoticed. So let’s look at recent evidence illustrating long-time patterns.

 Returning to the Mayor Nagy’s State of the City speech last month, recall that a public event was conducted at a private venue where the public was not invited. The luncheon cost to $45, $35 if you were a Chamber member. As one can imagine, there was no free lunch for the public to hear the mayor it had elected.

 The City put out no publicity at all, and the mayor’s speech wasn’t posted until a week after the event. The Chamber did the publicity, yet the meeting was not even posted on its own Facebook page or its own calendar! The Chamber’s website clearly indicated there would be no “gallery” seating at this year’s event—and this was even stated right on the reservation form! 

 How much more difficult could the City and Chamber have made it for the public to attend a event where not just the mayor but all Council and Planning Commission members would be present? 

 As everyone knows, the Chamber of Commerce is hardly a neutral party; understandably, it typically funds pro-business candidates. It also typically opposes new parks, environmental protection, low-income housing, school bond issues, and efforts to raise wages for working people.

 Once in office, “representatives” supported by the Chamber are likely to support “sweetheart deals” such as the one granting 80% of the new (incremental) sales tax rebates to Rouse Properties, which the City has contracted to refurbish the Mall.

 As everyone also knows, sound democratic process involves minimizing conflicts of interest. The Chamber of Commerce is not a neutral party; it has everything to gain by staying cozy with decision makers, but the general pubic can lose when it does.

 In Newark, however, the conflict of interest problem is more acute than in most cities. Here the Chamber actually has its office at City Hall and is partly funded by the City. In Newark, then, conflict of interest has been institutionalized for many years, so it all seems “normal,” just our way of doing business. However, these conflicts of interest suggest a long-time lack of compliance with the Brown Act, which sets standards for conducting public business (CA GOV. CODE 54950 – 54963).

 If the mayor’s address were the only instance, we might be tempted to ignore Newark’s violations of the law. 

In 2013, Miriam Keller, then president of the League of Women Voters, warned City Council about its tendency to duck into "executive session" for virtually any issue, not just those dealing with personnel matters. Completely ignoring the warning, about twenty minutes later the Council announced it was going into closed session! 

 When we consider how very rare it is for members of Newark’s City Council to vote differently from one another, we have to conclude that deliberations have already gone on behind closed doors.  This allows members to provide a united front at public meetings—but the public will never know what they advocated for in private.

 So in Newark violating the Brown act has become, if readers will pardon the pun, “a way of doing business.”

 —Paul W. Rea, PhD, public citizen