Council / staff plot in all day session

The Manteca City Council met with city government "staff" in a marathon meeting on Thursday. Here we learned of the plight of the economy, how the city refuses to cut spending and hopes to convince people to raise their taxes.

Mystery 1: Why was this meeting held at the "Godfather Room" at Chez Shari and not at the council chambers? The room wasn't any bigger or had better AV equipment.

Who made the seating arrangement I wonder. If you notice, the council was staggered around the table with city bureaucrats between them. I wonder if this was the create the psychological impression that the council members were "part of the team" (instead of their proper role as the representatives of public oversight of "the team.")

The meeting started at 0830 and as you can see there was a small spread of coffee and bagels and little donuts but nothing too extravagant. (They could have done the same thing at city hall.) I didn't get to see the exact lunch arrangement as the public wasn't invited (hmm!) but it looked like some kind of sandwich / buffet thing.

The chairs they "provided" to the press and public felt like they had spikes in them. The staff and council sat in plush cushioned chairs. As you can see the room was arranged somewhat like the war room in Dr. Strangelove, including a Big Board.

Nevertheless, enduring the torturous chairs paid off with a deeper knowledge of how city government works. Here's what I learned:

The government seems to exist for its own sake and for its own survival. There was no talk of any program that would improve the lives of ordinary people; each department head discussed how they were going to struggle to keep their own fiefdom fully funded.

The police and fire have agreed to taking two weeks off "to save money." However are still giving themselves a 4 or 6 percent "COLA" raise in pay, which is more than the amount saved by the furloughs! In other words, they will take an extra two week vacation, tell us that's "saving money" even though it costs more this year! (The furlough "saves" about 3.8 percent and their raises are 6 percent.)

No one asked how the "cost of living" for one group was four percent but for the other group it was six percent.

The "cutbacks" talked about by the police and fire chief, considering the extraordinarily generous funding of "measure M/ public safety sales tax" was appalling. They talked about not responding to home burglaries because their were "many false alarms" -- even though by his own figures about 52 times last year the home burglary alarm was not a false alarm. But evidently the police can't be bothered with trivialities such as protecting the homes of the citizenry. The fire chief talked about cutting back on some medical services and cancelling the public CPR training.

To be honest I couldn't even listen to what the police or fire chief was saying once they started yammering about "cutbacks." This talk was so disgraceful after all they had promised if we passed "measure M" that it was an outrage.

Finance Director Suzanne Mallory read a long "doom and gloom" forecast in the morning. In the afternoon she told us this time last year about 250 homes had gotten "48 hour notices" (notices to shut off utilities for lack of payment). She said that in general about half of those would be cleared before actual shut off, so that would be about 125 or so that would actually be shut off. She said that this year, there are 1,000 or so 48 hour notices, and assuming that same fix rate over 48 hours they are expecting about 500 shut offs.

She further explained how you can't pay on line "because we don't know the exact amount" and the office is plagued by an antiquated telephone system that only has five lines. And if you're caller six you just get a ringing with no answer. So it's "very difficult" for someone who gets a 48 hour shut off notice to fix the problem. (As for why they can't figure out the exact amount they need to pay when they send out the 48 hour notice I have no idea.)

The next bombshell was dropped by City Manager Pinkerton. He whined how other cities "the same size as Manteca" collect so much more in taxes. For example, he said Pleasonton is about the same size as Manteca but it collects about twice as much in taxes per person. And even more so with San Francisco. Therefore, he suggested, Manteca should add a new "utility tax." He figured that the rate could be anywhere from 1 to 11% and we should set the rate so that they extract about another $100 to $200 per family.

A quick summary of the reaction of the Council:

Mayor Weatherford: Fantastic idea!
Debrum: Champion!
Harris: Not so fast, need more cuts first.
Hernandez: Maybe. "Neutral"
Moorhead: "I'm just taking it all in!" (later expressed reservations?)

By the way bringing this subject up and polling the council without any of this being on the agenda is illegal as hell but it's futile to complain. It's probably better that we know where they stand.

Rounding out the day was the "planning guy" -- the single department most responsible for poverty in the City of Manteca. He explained how in his unquestionable judgment the "business park" he pointed to on the map wasn't a good idea and he told the planners to "stop working on it" and then explained how this wondrous "Centerpoint" project was the greatest thing since the invention of the cow.

At about this point I was expecting a guy in a wheelchair and one black glove to roll in and address them as mein fuhrer. Overall, a horrifying day.