Come as you are
Happy first day of school!
Nevermind the calendar, Summer is over! (take that solstice!) and the Alameda City Council is jumping into the big issues right away.
Tonight (Tuesday 9/4), the council will consider forming an ad-hoc subcommittee to look at the Alameda City Charter and identify areas of conflicting, obsolete, and antiquated languages. This subcommittee will recommend changes to the city council who, if they deemed it necessary, would then place the charter revisions on the ballot for people to vote on.
As you can imagine, there are those who are trying to make hay out of this issue. One actually believes that the word “change” becomes a big red waving cape in front of the more paranoid around town. To them, nothing is ever presented accurately (and yet it almost always ends up as advertised).
The packet spells out some pretty specific places that the council is interested in looking at:
“At the August 7, 2007 City Council Meeting Vice Mayor Tam requested information on the process for a Charter amendment and the formation of a Charter Review Committee to clean up language dating back to 1937 on the Secret Police Fund, Council compensation, meeting schedules and the role of the Public Utilities Board. At the August 21, 2007, Mayor Johnson requested Council consider forming a City Council sub-committee to address Charter Review.”
(Snarky blogging comment, please excuse typos, the inability of the City of Alameda to create PDFs that actually act like anything more than a photograph is becoming legendary and I had to retype the entire paragraph from the city’s document. For some reason, nearly every other city in Alameda County created searchable PDFs: Berkeley, Union City, Piedmont, Newark, Emeryville, Dublin, Livermore, Pleasanton, San Leandro, Hayward, Albany, and….wait for it…..Oakland!
Pleasanton, Livermore and Dublin manage to make the process more complicated by having their documents housed by an off-site company using a proprietary system, but even then, the system prints usable PDFs (they just aren’t pretty). Fremont is the only other city in Alameda County, that appears to be incapable of creating easy to use, searchable, cut and paste-able PDFs. So Alameda is one of two. out of 14 cities, that doesn’t provide this service. And the kicker, the thing that makes it absolutely ridiculous? It’s no extra work! It’s a check box that only needs to be selected once, and ALL documents created are useful to their full extent….end rant….for now).
The key Charter Change issue, or at least the on with the potential to generate the most public interest is going to the be the council compensation issue. Currently, the city council receives stipends, benefits, etc. in the amount of about $50,000 annually (that’s $8400 in part-time pay divided between the 5 members, and $37,346 in benefits). That includes car allowances so that the council members aren’t paying to get to meetings and the $50 a meeting stipend that they get for spending two Tuesday’s a month in the council chambers. It’s certainly something worthy of looking into. And what about the “secret police fund?” My guess it’s living up to it’s name, because nobody I’ve spoken with knew it exists.
Now’s not the time for the pros/cons, I mention it solely to point out that large issues are afoot, but of course, they are not hidden, they are written in the 4 page staff report. Is it possible that other issues might come up? Sure. Is it possible that the council might look at Charter Article 26, aka Measure A? Not on your life.
If you are interested in sitting on the ad-hoc committee, or know someone who you think is just right. Email the council at the handy alamedacitycouncil@gmail.com address or you can use the Access Alameda link on the city’s website. There, staff will print a copy of your email and put it in the council persons box. It’s almost as easy as carrier pigeon, I’m actually wondering if we can install a system whereby an Alameda resident sends an email to a council member, a city staffer then comes to that persons house, writes the message down, calls it into a voicemail that is checked by the assistant to the councilperson, who transcribes it and leaves it in their council box. I understand all the good intentions involved in creating Alameda Access, but creating a system where people have to register in order to communicate with their elected officials is missing the forest for the trees. But I digress….again….sigh.
Quick note about the PDF issue, why do YOU care? Because if you are looking for information on an issue in Alameda, and the info is a PDF that is not searchable, Google (and others) can’t find it. Even if you know which document to look at, if it’s more than a few pages, you’ll have to read the entire document, because Adobe Acrobat won’t be able to find any text when it searches. Some of the city’s development documents are hundreds of pages long, the inability to search them for specifics without having to skim read them, is unnecessary and contrary to the idea of open and public information.
[Editor's note: this post has been changed to include the specifics about current council pay/benefits hihglighted in purple (or is it blue)?]
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