Government: Good Ideas Gone Bad

Those of you who read my blog posts know that my last post was regarding what is becoming increasingly more common: “cost recovery” policies instituted at a number of different levels of government and in particular planning departments. While I am sure that the person who originally came up with the ideas was praised as a visionary; the reality of this process is that while government is supposed to work for the benefit of citizens in reality it is a bureaucracy that first takes care of itself. This has meant that once costs recovery policies are instituted they begin to snowball and feed upon themselves for additional growth and success of the particular bureaucracies.

I bring this up again because we have another such good idea likely to go bad starting to make the rounds in Redwood City. Like other citizens I was horrified at the abuse of power inherent in a policy that allows local officials to vote themselves additional time in office whether or not it is legal and regardless of additional time frame be it one day, one year or a lifetime. While as a recent candidate, I didn’t feel it appropriate to become active in this discussion, it doesn’t mean I didn’t have an opinion. In fact as a resident of Docktown in line to be served an eviction notice (the first batch of notices were served last week) for next February by the very city council members that voted themselves a year extension, I had a huge interest in an election happening this year. For there is no way that these evictions would be in process, if this would have been as originally scheduled an election year.

Regardless however of how disconcerted I am to realize that I really live once again in a banana republic not only at the national level but also at the local level; we need to be careful and not make the problem worse downstream. What do I mean by that? A new argument seems to be making the rounds as supported by Steve Penna’s article in this month’s Spectrum Magazine. The argument is that state and then by logical progression federal law does not supersede local municipality and charter laws: “they (the city council) are telling us that state law supersedes local laws or, in this case, charter law.”

While the Redwood City city charter probably does need a major rewrite and update, arguing and making the case in court that state and federal laws don't supersede the charter might at some point in time win this battle; however the war that we may lose in terms of downstream foreseeable arguments against all kinds of federal and state actions seems to me to be far worse a result then the short-term benefit we hope to obtain including in my case my home.

A democracy for better or for worse struggles with the need to balance sometimes competing interests, unfortunately as more and more individuals and organizations are starting to realize (see a post I wrote just over a year ago), we are turning the knobs of government in ways that we think fix or achieve short-term problems to end up with much more serious problems overall.