Why Novato Needs to Have the Charter Conversation Now

I'm about to spend several columns walking through specific ideas: a different way to fund city services than a sales tax, tighter rules on construction contracts, a stronger campaign finance limit that can't be undone by a single council vote. Before any of that, I want to explain why I think Novato needs to have this conversation at all, right now, instead of treating it as a theoretical exercise for some future year when things are calmer.

An Independent County Body Already Told Us This

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This isn't just my read of one bad summer. In June 2023, the Marin County Civil Grand Jury, an independent body of county residents with no political stake in Novato's council races, released a report titled "Novato's Chronic Fiscal Deficits: A Call to Action." After months of reviewing budgets back to 2011 and interviewing current and former council members and staff, it found that Novato had known about its structural deficit for more than a decade without taking sufficient action, that a routine annual financial audit had once taken the city thirty-one months to complete, with the outside auditor's own letter warning of "a significant breakdown of internal controls," and that the city's workforce had shrunk from 231 employees in 2008 to under 192 even as the population grew. In one especially telling episode, Novato discovered in December 2022 that it didn't actually own the corporation yard it had occupied for thirty years, and had to make an emergency $5.9 million purchase, funded in part by borrowing from its own vehicle fleet fund, just to keep operating out of land it thought was already its own.

Here's the part that should worry every Novato voter regardless of politics. When the council formally responded to that report, it agreed with nearly all the findings. But when the Grand Jury recommended the one fix with real teeth, creating an independent internal auditor with authority to investigate city operations on its own, the council rejected it outright, calling it "not warranted." It also rejected requiring the city's Finance Advisory Commission to issue quarterly reports discussed publicly, on the grounds that the commission's role is merely advisory. Novato had an independent county body hand it a clear roadmap for real oversight, and the city said no to the two recommendations that would have actually bound future councils to anything.

We Just Learned How Fragile Our Rules Actually Are

Two years later, the same underlying problem showed up again. Novato adopted its first balanced budget in more than five years this past June. That happened because voters approved Measure M, a sales tax that's now bringing in roughly $10 million a year. It's a real success, and I've said so plainly. But two months after the money started flowing, the very workers who deliver the services that tax was sold to fund walked off the job for three days, arguing the city hadn't been transparent about where the money was actually going. The city disputed that. The two sides ended up in state-mediated negotiations after a second strike in September.

I keep coming back to that timeline because it proves something the Grand Jury had already told us two years earlier: Novato's entire fiscal recovery, and the trust that made it possible, is currently held together by nothing more durable than good intentions and whichever council happens to be sitting in office. There is no rule that says the city has to report how Measure M money gets spent against what voters were promised. There is no rule that says a reserve, once built, has to stay built through a hard year. Every one of those protections exists only because the current council chooses to honor them, and a different council, facing a different budget year, doesn't have to. Novato already had the chance to write some of those protections into a durable rule when the Grand Jury handed it the option in 2023. It chose not to.

That is exactly the problem a city charter is built to solve, and it's why this conversation can't wait for a quieter year. The quiet years are when nobody feels the need to write the rules down. It's the hard years, like the one Novato just had, that prove why the rules need to be harder to erase than a Tuesday night vote, and harder to reject than a one-paragraph response to a Grand Jury.

We're Already Making Big, Consequential Decisions Without Charter-Level Rules

This isn't hypothetical. Novato is in the middle of a nearly $24 million contract to rebuild Novato Boulevard, with financing tied to reimbursement agreements from two other public agencies, Novato Sanitary District and North Marin Water District, that the staff report never confirmed were actually signed before the council voted. We're a general law city sitting on aging office parks along the Highway 101 corridor that badly need a redevelopment strategy, without charter-level rules requiring the kind of fiscal disclosure that would keep those deals honest. We have our own campaign contribution limit, stricter than most California cities, that exists purely as an ordinance a future council could quietly weaken.

Every one of those situations is happening today, under general law, with no charter-level backstop. Novato isn't deciding whether to start making consequential decisions. It's already making them. The only question is whether we keep making them under rules any future council can rewrite on its own, or reject with a one-paragraph response the way the council rejected the Grand Jury's audit recommendation, or whether we build a set of rules that require the public's consent to change.

Waiting Doesn't Make This Easier

I understand the instinct to put this off. Charter conversations sound abstract, legalistic, and slow, especially compared to a ballot measure with a clear yes-or-no ask. But waiting doesn't make the underlying problem go away. It just means the next fiscal crisis, the next contracting dispute, the next labor fight over a voter-approved tax, happens under the same loose rules that let this year's version happen, and the same rules that let the city say no to independent oversight in 2023. Novato doesn't have a shortage of hard decisions coming. We have a shortage of durable rules for making them.

What I'm Actually Asking For

I'm not asking Novato voters to approve a charter today. Nobody has written one, and I wouldn't ask anyone to vote on a document that doesn't exist yet. What I'm asking for is a serious, public process to find out what a good one could look like, led by an elected charter commission rather than the sitting council writing rules that would govern its own future taxing, contracting, and election authority. A council that already turned down an independent auditor once is not the body I'd trust to write stronger oversight into its own founding document voluntarily. That process takes real public input, real legal review, and real time, which is exactly why starting now matters more than starting after the next crisis makes it obvious.

Over the next several pieces, I'm going to walk through specific tools a charter could give Novato: a fairer alternative to taxing every purchase at the register, tighter discipline on how the city contracts and finances major projects, a more current business tax structure, and election and campaign finance rules that can't be quietly unwound. None of those ideas matter if Novato voters don't first understand why the conversation needs to start now rather than later. An independent Grand Jury gave us the argument in 2023. This summer gave it to us again. I don't think we should wait for a third one.

Mike Little is a distribution design engineer, foster parent, and candidate for Novato City Council, District 2.