• Decentralize city government into Neighborhood Councils
Dear friends and neighbors; sadly, today we live in a city run by a dysfunctional government. One mayor resigned in disgrace, another supports wealthy benefactors, like the Sunroad Corporation, appoints crooks and cronies to city agencies and protects mafia figures in Little Italy. Members of the San Diego oligarchy fight among themselves over the ability to plunder the city treasury, with hundreds of millions of our dollars going to outside consultants, attorneys and lobbyists.
Sewers leak and spill into neighborhoods, 79 percent of city streets are in “unacceptable” condition, police response time continues to fall, firefighters, incredibly, after two devastating fires, with loss of life, are still short-changed in the budget, libraries suffer, parks and recreation facilities crumble – all for a reason. The foxes are in the hen house; they pretend to cackle like the rest of us, wear artificial feathers and want to be there for four more years to pluck the place clean for wealthy corporate interests.
Outrageous, un-mitigated corporate welfare is the reason our city is near bankruptcy. While City Council members and the Mayor pad their wallets with corporate donations and allow paid lobbyists to write our city ordinances, the social capital of our city continues to depreciate, its services threadbare, neighborhoods unkempt and community spirit tattered.
We must, as average citizens, regain control of our civic affairs and begin to accept our responsibility as stewards, not only for future generations, but for Mother Earth itself, through global warming mitigation efforts.
I propose we begin decentralizing city government and bring democracy back to the neighborhoods, where it belongs, by creating a series of neighborhood councils in each community of San Diego – such as Linda Vista Neighborhood Council or North Park Neighborhood Council – based on the local planning committee models.
These elected boards would have the power and authority to make all major decisions about their neighborhoods. We need participatory democracy rather just another strong politician calling the shots. These fully empowered councils would change the structural characteristics of city government by building into the very fabric of the administrative process citizen participation requirements and effective, neighborhood policy-making authority.
Community members should not be regulated to simply protesting the demands of corporations and developers in their neighborhoods, but, rather, as empowered citizens who can plan, create and act. Those of us who have participated in the political process at the grass-roots level [I was elected to the City heights Area Planning Committee in 2003 and served as it Treasurer] found that, even when we disagreed, personal interaction and trust – and trust begins cooperation and a sharing of visions and resources. We began to understand that community is not merely just living in some space – but having some measure of control over that space and the qualities of our lives.
• Participatory Budget Process
I further propose that every fiscal budget begin in the neighborhoods with a participatory budgetary process, where community members come together to offer suggestions and proposals and then, vote to approve a proposed budgetary allocation of funds for the needs of their neighborhoods, which would then go to a city-wide assembly of representatives from each neighborhood council to decide the final budget. This would eliminate the politicians, their lobbyist bosses and the bloated bureaucracy, which makes a fortune telling us what to do with out money.
• Citizen Participation Rather Than Politics as Usual
There are few today who would not agree that our representative democracy is broken. Civic affairs has been made into a commodity, another product on the open market, bought and sold like pretzels and beer. Instead of building strength in each person as a participant in community, neighbors who have a voice and can help make public decisions; the process is skewered toward wealth. Store bought professionals move from profit-driven corporations to government bureaucracies and back again; tweaking the system to institutionalize our lives, usurp ever greater amounts of our hard-earned dollars for corporate welfare and turn us into automated, faceless, powerless citizens.
Representative government has been hijacked by special interests and wealthy power brokers at all levels of government. Rather than box cutters, the high-jackers use vast amounts of money. In San Diego, the switch to a strong mayor type system, did nothing to revitalize city affairs or make participation easier; rather, like a shell game, merely moved power (and the fight for it) around, politicizing the bureaucracy, giving more clout to campaign dollars than citizen voices, and building pyramids of top down administrative despotism.
Hierarchical government creates symbolic rituals of participation. Public hearings on issues that are already a fait accompli, two minutes of open forum time at City Hall, letters and e-mails never answered unless you grease the machine.
Neighborhood government, on the other hand, in its face to face democracy breaks down the pyramids of power which institutionalize unfairness, inequality and privilege. Those who live in the neighborhood are the best persons to act on issues that effect their home turfs; like land use issues, long-range planning or Master Plans, drug abuse and crime, social service and health care needs, budget allotments and infrastructure needs as well as the usual concerns about parking, stop signs, garbage collection and rowdy neighbors.
Abstract actions – signing a petition, giving money to a campaign, joining yet another organization correct neither the cause nor the effect leading to political helplessness, apathy or cynicism. To correct this we must become intimate with our government; hell, we must become the government. In our front yards, on our blocks, in our apartment buildings, we must bring the knowledge of self, the needs of our families and partners, the hopes and dreams of our neighbors, together – to rebuild our shrinking sense of community, what Paul Goodman once called our “empty belonging.” In corporate owned government as the right-wing proposes; we, as citizens are rendered tame, dependent and obedient to the needs of wealth.
In participatory government, rather than an illusion of democracy, separated, unengaged, looking on from a distance, a caricature of action; we can experience authentic personal power and weld it to the threatened needs of our neighborhoods and our threatened planet.
Our quality of life and community milieu are being sacrificed for political ambition and huge corporate development projects, particularly downtown. Neighborhood organizations and planning groups are losing influence. City bureaucrats, drawn from corporate sycophants and offers from land speculators, from the Developments Services Department through the Housing Commission, routinely ignore local opposition.
In the last few years, planning groups and neighborhood councils have lost what little clout they had in the planning process as developer-based government solidifies under Mayor Sanders.
Elsewhere, as columnist Don Bauder pointed out in The San Diego Reader, the Mayor’s office was allowing their buddies at Sunroad and the city’s premier rip-off artist, the McMillin Company, to actually have their paid staffs rewrite the city’s Otay Mesa Community Plan, rezoning their industrial property near Brown Field airport into lucrative residential lots quickly to take advantage of market conditions without public oversight or discussion. One of those staffers was none other than Tom Story, former city staffer and then, Sunroad’s veep for development, who was charged with 14 criminal, ethics code violations. The misuse of public processes to gain millions for personal cronies of the Mayor reflects the priorities of out of touch city government.
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