Last October Councilmember Lamar Heystek announced that he would not seek a second term as Councilmember. The move stunned many in the community who had grown to respect him for both his principles and demeanor on the dais.
As time has gone on since that point, a small number of candidates has emerged Sydney Vergis, Joe Krovoza, and the most recent Rochelle Swanson. Meanwhile as we reported yesterday afternoon, Mayor Ruth Asmundson will not seek a third term.
The letter reads as follows:
Last fall, Councilmember Lamar Heystek announced that he would not be seeking re-election after serving only one term on the Davis City Council. We all respected Lamar’s decision and commitment to his future wife and family. At the same time, however, it is evident that the city of Davis now faces critical and unique challenges of historic magnitude. The gravity of these challenges and the obvious disfunction of city government as it struggles to cope, have become clearer in the weeks since Lamar “bowed out.” We believe with the community’s urging Lamar will reconsider.
Lamar Heystek has demonstrated leadership, honesty and integrity on the key issues that face the city of Davis. He has been a voice of civility, maturity, reason, and passion in the face of great obstacles. The city cannot afford to now lose Lamar’s experience.
We sincerely believe that Lamar is the best person for the job. We ask you to sign this petition requesting him to reconsider his decision to not seek re-election. We hope that an outpouring of community support will demonstrate to Lamar that the city of Davis needs him on the City Council.
Please fill out the form below to indicate that you are willing to endorse his candidacy, contribute money up to $100, walk a precinct, or host a neighborhood party should he decide to seek re-election.
Please join us in urging Lamar to reconsider.
Please go to www.draftlamar.com to sign the petition.
The petition also allows people to commit to donating money and volunteering. As of press time this morning, there appears to be quite a few names already listed in support of this petition on the draftlamar.com site.
The names include: Steve Tracy, John & Lyn Lofland, Tansey Thomas, Lisa Thomas, Pam Nieberg, Will Lotter, Ken & Diane Wagstaff, Richard & Rachel Livingston, Calvin Handy, Rick & Linda Gonzales, Carlos Matos, Don Gibson, Eric & Wendy Nelson, Bernita Toney, Elaine Roberts Musser, Gene Borack, Jack Zwald, Previn Witana, Brandon Craig, Kelsey McQuaid, Lucas Frerichs, Stan Dundon & Christine Cipperly, Jim & Katherine West, Ida Bryan, Sandy Holman, Natalie & Ben Wormeli, Henry Bennett, Julia Hunter-Blair, Pat & Mike Lenzi, Marcelo Campos, Helen Wagner, Fraser Shilling, Shery Lynn Gerety & Bruce Winterhalder, Joel Friedman, Marne McGuinness, Bryan Clarkson, Deb Westergaard, Matt Williams, Sherrill Futrell, Ann Privateer, Cecilia Escamilla-Greenwald, Carrie Ziser, Rob Roy, Alan Pryor, Mary Wind, Crilly Butler, Hamza & Nariman El-Nakhal, Maryam Haghbin, Dean Newberry, Bill Kopper, Greg Webb, Steven Lee, Kari Peterson, Don Shor, Barbara King, Karen Mo, Eric Gelber, Sandy Weaver, Michael Pach, Erin Gardner, Rebecca Schwartz, Domenico & Marietta Bernoco, Baki Tezcan, James Schwab, Mark Spencer, Donna Miller, Andrew Peake, Nora Oldwin, Bill Ritter, Dana Small, Ernest Moeller, Lyle Smith, Steve Jerome-Wyatt, Stephanie Brown Fehm, Doris Ruud, Bill Lackemacher, Rick Entrikin, Frank Mertens, Patricia Byard, Lorrie Thornton, Rebecca Wu, Jim Watson, William Lewis, Martha Teeter, Suzanne Mikesell, Stephen de Ropp, David Suder, Stephen Sosnick, Billie Dunbar, Chris Dietrich, Judith Plank.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
It’s weird. On the one hand, I admire and respect Lamar. Though he is often soft on issues that I highly value, he is effective and assertive on others. I dearly hope that he changes his mind and runs for reelection. On the other hand, anyone can easily see that the amount of time, effort, sweat, stress, grief, disappointment and frustration that our city council members must inevitably endure suggests that you’d have to be either half-crazy or a flaming idealist or both to take this job on. Why he’d want to subject himself, his family and his health to that would be puzzling.
The support has to be financial too. I believe Lamar took out a loan to run for CC (30k?). 104 people (above) have expressed support. WIth a maximum donate of $100/person, that’s only $10k. It will take many more donations to have him as a City Councilmember (if he’ll even run again).
Suggest the author(s) of the website make this clear, set a goal and keep a current total.
“I believe Lamar took out a loan to run for CC (30k?)..”
Lamar succumbed to advice in his last election that resulted in him spending far more on his campaign than was necessary to win, even then, when he was a relatively unknown political quantity to the Davis voters. Now he is a well-known and respected Councilperson and could easily win with a campaign budget that was much, much less than his last campaign.
If he chose to run again, there would be an army of supporters going door to door on his behalf… this is what wins Davis Council elections.
Lamar doesn’t need to spend any money this time around. He can just rely on The Vanguard to “educate” the voters with mailers.
I’ll sign up for this! Agree that Lamar’s performance and visibility should make his reelection fairly routine. We don’t need to agree with every stand or his level of assertiveness on every issue. He’s proven his effectiveness. On the other hand, I wouldn’t wish the frustrations of being a Council member on anyone these days. It’s difficult enough to watch them in session; what must a be like to be a part of it?
P.S.–Tried to watch last night’s meeting on my computer. The streaming stopped after several minute, and I never could get back on the site. Did everyone behave during the behavior item? How much time was consumed on the issue? Again, Lamar already is trained (and doesn’t need new rules in order to work well with others).
Lamar’s finest hour was his attempt to revise the budget – his more negative and realistic projections were spot on. We need this kind of common sense expertise on our City Council.
Lamar’s weakest hour was his backing of ther WHR Project, but I’m willing to forgive because all-in-all Lamar is a ton better than the
“gang of three”.
Lamar Heystek quoted in the Enterprise today:
[quote]
Davis Councilman Lamar Heystek is ‘flattered’ and ‘humbled’ by the online petition currently under way to convince the incumbent to run for re-election when his term ends in June, he said Tuesday.
‘My mind is open and I want to respect the efforts of the community,’ Heystek said. ‘Those efforts, I think, are rather extraordinary.’ [/quote]
Yeah! Sue might get to keep her puppy after all!
For all the talk of how “effective” Lamar is, I don’t see that he achieved any of the major objectives of his backers. Wildhorse Ranch failed, you folks hate the labor contracts, Target came, West Village isn’t going to be annexed, and I’m not sure what the other contentious issues are.
Polite though Lamar may be, his record works much better as a platform to blame the city council and city staff, rather than to get things done. Frankly I think it would be the same even if he were part of a council majority. Much of the agenda is of the square peg, round hole variety. Inevitably someone with such an agenda will either be a source of blame, if others fail to push the peg through the hole, or a target of blame if he drops the peg by the wayside.
Granted, Lamar did succeed with the Living Wage Ordinance. But this was an unusually realistic end result that also affects fairly few people.
…and the bow ties are cool.
It’s true, his bow ties are way cool.
Hey Greg, did you notice the erased comments from the Fightfighter mailer article?
[i]”For all the talk of how “effective” Lamar is, I don’t see that he achieved any of the major objectives of his backers.”[/i]
There is a much more sensible way of looking at this.
First, if you agree with Lamar on the Davis issues you care most about, then you will probably want him to stay on the council, whether his side came up in the majority or not most of the time. Being [i]effective[/i] is not just winning 3-2 votes on issues where the majority appears to have been corrupted by campaign contributions. Beig effective is cogently expressing your views and representing the views of the people in Davis who put you on the council and want to have their views spoken, even if they come in a losing effort. But not all of Lamar’s votes were on the losing side. He was effective and winning in a few important instances on issues of historic preservation, for example.
Second, the new council majority might be different than the old council. Whereas on many contentious issues, Lamar and Sue lost on 3-2 votes, a new council (of Stephen, Joe, Sue, Lamar and the person who replaces Don) might be just the opposite. In 2012, the city’s labor contracts are again going to come up. They will be far more contentious then than they were this year, as the built in costs are likely to outstrip the probable revenues, resulting in cutbacks in personnel (through retirements or firings) and or cutbacks in wages and benefits*.
Third, Lamar is effective in a more intangible, subjective sense–I believe he is trustworthy. I don’t always agree with Lamar. (Living wage, for example.) But I always believe he is trying to do what is best for the people of Davis. I don’t believe he has any hidden agendas. I don’t think he is doing someone else’s bidding or voting to further his own personal interests. That may sound like a lot of blarney, but think about it–how many people in public office can you really say that about? Can you say that about anyone in Congress? Do you really think Mike Thompson’s votes are not highly influenced by the special interests which fund his campaigns? Do you really think Mariko Yamada wrote the bill to make municipal bankruptcy 5 times as expensive for cities and counties because she believed that was the right thing to do? Or do you think maybe all that money the CPF and other public employee associations give her influenced her decision? When you have a very corrupt democracy as we have, one in which elections are privately financed and the financiers are getting paid off at all levels of government, it seems to me very refreshing to find an officeholder who is not corrupt. I don’t mean to imply that all of Lamar’s council colleagues are not acting in the public’s interest. However, a majority of them appear to care a lot more about the long term interests of their financiers than they do the voters.
——————————
*Many agencies in California which have new labor contracts have done something Davis will do next time or the time after to reduce the burden of retiree medical costs. (The longer we wait the greater our pain will be.) They are now making retirees with huge pensions pay an increasing share of their premium costs. (In Davis, retirees pay nothing.) The result has been a number of lawsuits ([url]http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20090922/articles/909229948?p=1&tc=pg[/url]) by rich retirees, who claim this change in plans breaks a promise made to them. AFAIK, no suits have yet been decided, so only time will tell if this holds. But that, I suspect, is the direction we will go.
No, I didn’t notice the erased comments from the firefighter mailer article.
As far as I know, David didn’t erase any of mine.
There was a back and forth between David and Sue. Sue was very upset about David making her look bad. David explained that he had sent her a draft of the mailer and that she had given her approval. She denied seeing a draft and stated she recommended David not do the mailer. It was like the CC meeting only in a blog. I wrote “Greenwald overreacts to a percieved slight once again.” The next day, gone. I commented on the removal, gone. I commented on the censorship, gone. Transparency my butt.
Rich, you accurately summed up why anyone would vote Lamar, and you at least implied the main reason that anyone should vote against him.
It is absolutely true that Lamar has been zealously faithful to a certain agenda. If you want someone on the city council who always cogently expresses certain views, then Lamar is your man.
It’s not what I want. I wouldn’t want someone who only knows how to agree with me. I want someone who knows how to make hard decisions. And I would never, ever want someone who mistakes professional wisdom for disloyalty.
[i]Sue was very upset about David making her look bad.[/i]
In all honesty, there is an element of truth to what Sue is saying. It is absolutely true that the incident had the not-so-coincidental effect of steering a lot of traffic to this site. Probably the incident would have looked bad anyway, quite possibly every bit as bad as it did look. But it indeed looks like it was exploited for publicity.
[i]”I would never, ever want someone who mistakes professional wisdom for disloyalty.”[/i]
What does that mean?
[i]What does that mean?[/i]
Rich, it means exactly what it says. There are unfortunately a lot of people who reject good expert advice by figuring that the source of the advice isn’t “trustworthy”. The classic example was how Bush convinced himself that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Whenever anyone warned him that it didn’t or might not, the reaction was, that guy’s not really on our side. Hans Blix said that he didn’t know if Iraq had WMD, but hey, he’s a Swede and a pacifist and he’s in the way. Joseph Wilson made warnings, but he’s a Democrat. And so on.
That is exactly the way that it looks with the city’s labor contracts. Navazio, Emlen, Saylor, and Souza all clearly said that the contracts that they obtained were the best we could do without getting much less in return, one way or another. If you want the city to spend less, you could accept service reductions. If instead you demand a war with the bargaining units, then these guys all think that the hit to city services will be far worse than with negotiated reductions.
But the reaction from Lamar’s backers is that Saylor and Souza are “bought and paid for”, while Emlen and Navazio are shilling for office coworkers. Everything that they say has just been waved off as biased. I have not seen any good record in public planning on the other side to justify such a reaction. Instead it looks like sheer ideology.
Lamar himself hasn’t openly accused people of disloyalty, but his stunt with his so-called alternative budget is part of the same song. I don’t know that he did any more than bent Navazio’s own numbers for his own convenience. However he got them, Lamar used his worse numbers to argue that we should cut services less than Navazio said we have to. How do you go from, “you need to lose more weight than your doctor said,” to “and therefore you can eat more than your doctor said”. It’s not very far away from, “your doctor isn’t loyal to you”.
[quote]But it indeed looks like it was exploited for publicity[/quote]
As we’ve seen on this blog, your idea of exploitation may quite possibly be somebody else’s idea of education.
Lamar needs to put flattery aside and seriously consider what he presumably seriously considered months ago. What’s changed? The possibility for a new council environment? Issues in Davis will surely be no less contentious. We’ll need to hear his reasons, but in the interim I’d wish for Lamar to seriously check his ego. That “extraordinary” public effort is peanuts.
[i]As we’ve seen on this blog, your idea of exploitation may quite possibly be somebody else’s idea of education.[/i]
Hey, I got my lesson in the mail on Monday. With the bleak picture of education cuts in California this year, it’s gratifying to know that someone is willing to pay in full to advance my knowledge.
I just wish I knew who it was.
GK: [/i]””I would never, ever want someone who mistakes professional wisdom for disloyalty.”[/i]
RR: [b]”What does that mean?” [/b]
GK: [i]”There are unfortunately a lot of people who reject good expert advice by figuring that the source of the advice isn’t “trustworthy”.
“That is exactly the way that it looks with the city’s labor contracts. Navazio, Emlen, [u]Saylor, and Souza[/u] all clearly said that the contracts that they obtained were the best we could do without getting much less in return, one way or another.”[/i]
First, you are confusing this issue by throwing Don and Stephen in as “experts,” but not including Sue and Lamar as experts. It’s one thing to call our professional city manager and his top lieutenant experts. But you do your argument a disservice, in this instance, by including the two elected representatives.
Second, your contention [i]going in[/i] has always been that the City of Davis is operating in a tight labor market in which we have two stark choices: pay the highest wages, benefits and pensions in order to retain our “high caliber” staff at the expense of not being able to afford city services or pay less and lose our high caliber staff to other higher bidders and suffer by having lower caliber people replace them. Because you have this strong (unfounded) bias, you are like George W. Bush: you look for “experts” who confirm your bias. It never seems to occur to you that this labor market is not that tight and that there no longer are any other agencies willing or able to bid away our people.
Third, you ignore the fact that cities and counties up and down the state, facing the same problems Davis is facing, are making the changes in contracts which people like Lamar and Sue have called for. Davis is one of the few cities left which still gives such a rich cash-out on its medical. Davis will soon be one of the only agencies which requires its retirees to pay nothing for their medical benefits for life. Davis is the only city I know of (I surveyed all of our “comp agencies”) which does not make our non-safety personnel pay the “employee share” of their pension contribution.
Your conclusion is that our “experts” have driven the hardest bargain possible and that “there will be war” if we do what just about every other city is doing. That, my friend, is Bushy!
GK: [i]”But the reaction from Lamar’s backers is that Saylor and Souza are “bought and paid for”, while Emlen and Navazio are shilling for office coworkers.”[/i]
It is Don and Stephen’s fault that they have created the appearance of a conflict of interest by accepting tens of thousands of dollars from members of Local 3494 and then going to bat for them in labor deals for the last 8 years. That is their fault. That is their ethical challenge. If they didn’t want to be accused as such, then don’t take the money from the people they are supposed to negotiate against. If you were in a lawsuit with me, would you want your lawyer in the case dependent on my payments to him?
Second, the idea that you think Bill and Paul and Melissa, all of whom I like and respect, are not affected by the fact that they have strong and long personal and professional relationships with city workers is the stupidest thing you have ever said on this blog. It does not prove that they are not experts or professionals. But it clearly is a conflict of interest. And the answer almost every city up and down this state has come up with is to hire [i]outside professional[/i] contract negotiators who don’t have to work with on a day-to-day basis the people they are hired to negotiate against.
[i]”Everything that they say has just been waved off as biased. I have not seen any good record in public planning on the other side to justify such a reaction. Instead it looks like sheer ideology.”[/i]
I think you need to look in the mirror. Your bias has warped your thinking. Facts don’t seem to matter to you, [s]George[/s] Greg.
Lamar himself hasn’t openly accused people of disloyalty, but his stunt with his so-called alternative budget is part of the same song. I don’t know that he did any more than bent Navazio’s own numbers for his own convenience. However he got them, Lamar used his worse numbers to argue that we should cut services less than Navazio said we have to. How do you go from, “you need to lose more weight than your doctor said,” to “and therefore you can eat more than your doctor said”. It’s not very far away from, “your doctor isn’t loyal to you”.
“Lamar himself hasn’t openly accused people of disloyalty, but his stunt with his so-called alternative budget is part of the same song. I don’t know that he did any more than bent Navazio’s own numbers for his own convenience. However he got them, Lamar used his worse numbers to argue that we should cut services less than Navazio said we have to. How do you go from, “you need to lose more weight than your doctor said,” to “and therefore you can eat more than your doctor said”. It’s not very far away from, “your doctor isn’t loyal to you”.”
“Stunt with his so-called alternative budget”? No one else on the City Council was willing to go out on a limb and offer a possible solution/different budget scenario. Lamar actually took the time to offer an alternative, and Lamar’s assumptions turned out to be more accurate than those of Paul Navazio, who is paid to know what’s what.
“But the reaction from Lamar’s backers is that Saylor and Souza are “bought and paid for”, while Emlen and Navazio are shilling for office coworkers. Everything that they say has just been waved off as biased. I have not seen any good record in public planning on the other side to justify such a reaction. Instead it looks like sheer ideology.”
From where I sit, it looks like your unwillingness to fault Saylor, Souza, Emlen and Navazio for the latest round of unconscionable contracts that are going to bankrupt this city is sheer ideology in support of the Council majority…
“Lamar himself hasn’t openly accused people of disloyalty, but his stunt with his so-called alternative budget is part of the same song. I don’t know that he did any more than bent Navazio’s own numbers for his own convenience. However he got them, Lamar used his worse numbers to argue that we should cut services less than Navazio said we have to. How do you go from, “you need to lose more weight than your doctor said,” to “and therefore you can eat more than your doctor said”. It’s not very far away from, “your doctor isn’t loyal to you”.”
Lamar’s “worse” numbers proved to be more accurate than Navazio’s. Paul will be the first to tell you that assumptions are just the best available guesses, as you should know as someone with a background in mathematics. Lamar and others felt that his assumptions were too rosey and that proved accurate. Lamar’s assumptions were almost spot on.
[i]First, you are confusing this issue by throwing Don and Stephen in as “experts,” but not including Sue and Lamar as experts.[/i]
Stephen is doing no more than keeping his ears open. Don, on the other hand, has actual professional experience in public planning. So yes, when he devotes time to it, Don Saylor is an expert in public planning. Sue and Lamar are different. They don’t sound like public planners at all, they sound like radical politicians.
[i]It is Don and Stephen’s fault that they have created the appearance of a conflict of interest by accepting tens of thousands of dollars from members of Local 3494 and then going to bat for them in labor deals for the last 8 years.[/i]
You’re awfully quick to leap onto the conflict of interest of everyone you disagree with. The fact is that almost anything that’s a conflict of interest on one day is also harmonious interest on another day. I have no loyalty to firefighters in Davis; frankly I don’t care what happens to them. But the fact is that they do have an important common interest with the city. Namely, both they and the city want Davis to put out its fires.
As keen as you are to see conflicts of interest when the government reaches a labor agreement, you’ve missed a far greater potential conflict of interest on the other side. Namely, some politicians promise the impossible and mess up government plans, in order to cast blame and promote themselves. It all the more convincing when they believe in what they are doing.
[i]Second, the idea that you think Bill and Paul and Melissa, all of whom I like and respect, are not affected by the fact that they have strong and long personal and professional relationships with city workers is the stupidest thing you have ever said on this blog.[/i]
It’s the stupidest thing that I never said. Of course they are “affected” by the fact that they have to work with other city employees. I never said that they weren’t. What I would say is, first, that it is a common interest as well as a conflict of interest. Emlen, Navazio, and Cheney want the employees that they manage to actually do their work, and so does the city. A professional negotiator would be in a different position. It would be no skin off of his nose if city workers never get anything done.
Second, again, this conflict of interest is not nearly as great as a politician’s potential interest to cast blame and mess up government functions.
[i]Lamar’s “worse” numbers proved to be more accurate than Navazio’s.[/i]
What I meant, David, was worse in the sense of more pessimistic numbers. I know that you have taken a Nostradamus attitude about these numbers. I.e. because they “proved” to be more accurate than Navazio’s, that means that Lamar’s feelings must be a sound method of accounting. But that is just not how these things work. First, anyone can feel that it’s going to rain tomorrow or that it’s not going to rain tomorrow, and it is also true that real weather forecasting involves guesswork. But you should still base weather forecasts and economic forecasts on science, not feelings.
Again, Lamar had it easy if he could take Navazio’s work and fiddle with it for his own convenience. Suppose that I take a medical report from your doctor and fiddle with it, and the truth happens to fall in my direction. That would not make me a better doctor, or even necessarily any kind of doctor.
But above all, the real red flag was not whether Lamar’s numbers were accurate or inaccurate, it was how he and you used those numbers. The argument was, we were more pessimistic than Paul Navazio and we were right, and therefore you should take our advice not to cut services. That is when credibility goes out the window.
his stunt with his so-called alternative budget
Stunt? I actually thought this was a helpful exercise at the time. To be able to throw out and discuss more than one potential option allows a chance to ask more critical questions about assumptions and priorities.
Polite though Lamar may be, his record works much better as a platform to blame the city council and city staff, rather than to get things done
I would never, ever want someone who mistakes professional wisdom for disloyalty.
Rich, it means exactly what it says. There are unfortunately a lot of people who reject good expert advice by figuring that the source of the advice isn’t “trustworthy”.
Lamar himself hasn’t openly accused people of disloyalty, but his stunt with his so-called alternative budget is part of the same song.
… this conflict of interest is not nearly as great as a politician’s potential interest to cast blame and mess up government functions.
Greg, I usually can follow your comments, but I’ve read these three or four times without understanding why you seem to dislike Lamar’s Council work so much. Can you give something specific (without citing George Bush’s behavior or Lamar’s “backers”)? With respect to the budget deliberations that concern you, it seems other folks found Lamar’s actions to be legitimate and useful. I get your point on that, but think you’re attributing motives to Lamar that really don’t exist. Something else must be bugging you.
[i]To be able to throw out and discuss more than one potential option allows a chance to ask more critical questions about assumptions and priorities.[/i]
If it was only a vehicle to ask questions, it was fabulous. But if it was really meant as a realistic “option”, it certainly wasn’t one. Simply asking for more services in exchange for less pay is a wish, not an “option” or a “priority”.
For instance, suppose that you expect to make $60K and you decide that you can afford a Camry for $23K. Suppose that your spouse says, “you’re WRONG, you’re too optimistic. Actually we will make $55K. So my option is to buy the Camry AND a motorcycle for $20K.” Is that best described as an “option”? No, it’s a wish.
Folks here have a political narrative in which the work that employees actually do is one “priority”, while what they get paid is entirely different “priority”. In reality, any fool can ask for more work in exchange for less pay. The hard part is to negotiate a better deal, and the most important step of all is to decide what you want to buy.
I’d have to go look up Lamar’s proposal, but I don’t recall it being “simply asking for more services in exchange for less pay.”
[i]I’ve read these three or four times without understanding why you seem to dislike Lamar’s Council work so much. Can you give something specific[/i]
Okay, JustSaying, it’s a fair question. First of all, since Lamar is at least civil, I can’t and don’t want to point to any one thing that really comes across as outrageous. All I will say is that I don’t see that he knows how to save money for the city.
His so-called alternative budget is a good example of that. He said that Navazio’s budget was too optimistic, but as best I understand it, his “alternative” was fewer service cuts. The logic doesn’t work. It is if you said that a $23K Camry is not affordable; instead you want the same Camry and a motorcycle for $20K. His budget figures weren’t really part of his point. He demanded more wage concessions without saying anything about how to actually win them. Spreadsheets don’t leap up and win labor concessions.
[i]I’d have to go look up Lamar’s proposal, but I don’t recall it being “simply asking for more services in exchange for less pay.”[/i]
The discussion was was here on this site ([url]https://davisvanguard.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2846:commentary-heysteks-budget-changes-the-game-but-will-council-listen&catid=58:budgetfiscal&Itemid=79[/url]). Was part of it just the way that David explained it? David warned that Navazio was asking for service reductions, and he warned that Navazio’s budget projection was too optimistic. He then said,
[quote]Instead of taking a mere 2.69% total compensation reduction, Mr. Heystek proposes 5%. … But at 5%, Davis can continue to provide the public–i.e. the billpayers–with their services.[/quote]
If that summary is accurate, the idea was as simple as asking for more services for less pay.
What I’m wondering is, if proposing a 5% compensation reduction is such excellent leadership, why stop there? Why not 10%?
Thanks, Greg, I went a little further back to find Lamar’s actual proposal:
[url]https://davisvanguard.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2839:heystek-presents-alternative-budget-proposal&catid=58:budgetfiscal&Itemid=79[/url]
He made more conservative revenue assumptions, proposed some modest revenue increases, proposed some expense reductions via a 4-day work week and more labor concessions, and swapped some expenses. So no, your summary is not accurate IMO.
Don, there is no question that Lamar’s response to Navazio is mostly a right hook from left field. He got his foot in the door by saying that Navazio’s revenue projection was too optimistic, but at the end of the day, he wanted to keep more services than Navazio. The other stuff about swapped expenses and all that is window dressing — although items such as a four 10-hour workdays would be yet another tall order in labor negotiations.
All of this is evidence that Lamar is excellent at wanting the city to save money, but very bad at actually knowing how to do it.
While I’m writing this, I’m wondering why anyone would think that I, as a city taxpayer with no personal or professional relation to any city worker, would want the city to do anything other than save money with its labor contracts. In fact, I would have no problem with some of these service cuts that other people seem to think are intolerable. Frankly, some of what the city does seems to me to be gilding the lily. I only reject the idea that the way to save money is to throw the staff’s work back at them and demand more concessions. In my whole life, that has always looked like bad management.
“All of this is evidence that Lamar is excellent at wanting the city to save money, but very bad at actually knowing how to do it.”
Oh, and what did the Council Majority do to save money for the city? For all practical purposes Nada. Yet all you can seem to do is attack Lamar as pulling “stunts” to make himself look like he is doing something. In fact, Lamar put forth a modest proposal to cut spending, revising projections that turned out to be far more accurate than Paul Navazio’s. If the Council Majority had listened to Lamar, heeded his more negative projections, maybe the Council Majority would have seen fit to strike better deals in the contract negotiations. But then why would they considering where their campaign contibutions came from? I find it puzzling that you hold Lamar up to ridicule, but have not a negative word to say about the City Council majority – who has refused to come to grips with the city’s fiscal reality.
“While I’m writing this, I’m wondering why anyone would think that I, as a city taxpayer with no personal or professional relation to any city worker, would want the city to do anything other than save money with its labor contracts. In fact, I would have no problem with some of these service cuts that other people seem to think are intolerable. Frankly, some of what the city does seems to me to be gilding the lily.”
I personally would agree with you here. The city of Davis has many services that do not occur in other parts of the country. For instance, back East they do not have separate trash pickup for branches and yard debris. Any common areas are serviced by homeowner associatiions, the gov’t doesn’t do it – but that is because people actually have their own yards. There are no city mediation programs, no city child care subsidies, and very few community pools – most are privately owned and only open in the summer. If you want to go to an indoor pool in the winter, you join a private exercise club. Recreation programs are run by the counties, not the cities. Every little perk in this town has become sacrosanct.