Ethically Challenged Leadership and Staff

This past week, a group of members of the Redwood City Residents Say What Facebook page met in person. Although a lot of people had seen each others postings and interacted, they hadn’t met face to face. A group of about twenty, we decided to go around and give one minute introductions. When it came time for me to introduce myself, I mentioned that I had just run for council but that what most concerned me was that somehow it had become acceptable in American society to leave one’s ethics at home when doing one’s job. In retrospect, it is hard to emphasize how big a problem this has become.

Last Monday, the current City Council members gave their state of the City address. In a departure from years’ past, each council member took one of six different strategic initiative areas and explored it in detail. The new mayor, Mr. Seybert, spoke last. He also noted that going forward, the city council members were so concerned about housing, that they were adding one more strategic initiative area, the aforementioned housing which I took to mean not only housing in general but affordable housing in particular.

Then yesterday, the Assistant City Manager sent out an email to two local residents for dissemination to the local Docktown community, one of the few remaining affordable areas of Redwood City:

Dear Docktown residents,

We wanted to let you know that at the March 14, 2016 City Council meeting, staff is recommending the City Council send a letter to the State Lands Commission, asking the Commission to support legislation to allow a 15 year time frame for continued residential use of the Docktown marina.
The staff report and letter are available on the City website (see Item 6.F) here:http://agendas.redwoodcity.org/sirepub/pubmtgframe.aspx…

Thank you,

Aaron Aknin

Unfortunately once you read the actual documentation you realize that the reality of the proposal is quite different. The reality is that instead it does the very opposite. It not only violates the spirit of what one would expect to be the contents of the proposal given the initial email but also the goal of improving the housing problem that the mayor identified as a new strategic goal just a couple of days earlier in his state of the city address. The bottom line, the city would in fact only allow owner occupied units and prohibit transfer of ownership of said housing units. (Click on the link and read all the details.) The reality is that the city has already stopped allowing transfers of ownership forcing owners who for different reasons had to leave the area to rent. In effect what city staff and council members are saying is if you need to move away from the area because of a job or other life event, you can’t sell or rent your home to another needy person. No. Just leave a potential home empty!

Not only does Docktown have space for at least another twenty floating homes that could quite quickly be brought in to help with a very real and hard to solve housing stock problem; but the city council members and staff want to further reduce availability by evicting current renters and not allowing owners that for one reason or another want or need to rent or sell to rent or sell their properties. Just last year then mayor and now council member, Mr. Gee talked about implementing a policy of shaming local landlords in response to a lot of what is going on. Now it is the city staff and council that should be ashamed of themselves. Or is it that they are simply ethically challenged?

What do you think? Are city council members and staff ethically challenged? And if so should ethically challenged people be allowed to serve? In which case, is it time to recall council members and fire some of the city staff?