Sunday Commentary: The Local Elections Are Not Addressing Key Problems

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We have watched the battle for Measure Q with some interest.  The one competitive council race has largely been sidelined from the public’s view.

It’s not just that District 2 only directly involves about 20 percent of the city’s voters.  It’s not just that two of the three districts have no competition at all, allowing two incumbents to get a free pass.

In an at-large voting election, with an open seat and two incumbents, we probably would have seen five candidates—and maybe more step up to challenge the status quo.

District elections have taken a lot of steam out of the council elections—in ways probably not predicted when the city acquiesced to outside pressure and implemented districts rather than at-large voting.

Ironically, (and perhaps that’s not the word), it is still possible that district elections will end up expanding the representation on the council of people of color.

There are still advantages to smaller districts that are more easily walkable and cheaper to cover with flyers and perhaps mailers.

But it works both ways as we have seen.  The Vanguard this week reported on flyers distributed by the Davis Firefighters, who have endorsed Linda Deos in District 2.  The district elections have made it easier for such interests to influence these elections.

Dillan Horton, following the Vanguard’s article on Thursday highlighting the mail drop, questioned the process by which Deos received the endorsement.

“When 3494’s new leadership called the campaign to communicate their endorsement decision, they shared that union leadership already promised it to Linda in a “backroom deal” months prior,” a statement from Dillan Horton’s campaign said. “This undermined the endorsement process, which should be based on thorough evaluation.”

Horton’s campaign felt like their candidate had the union support credentials over the campaign that the firefighters ended up endorsing.

“How shocking!…How unprecedented!” said Alan Pryor, responding to the news.  Pryor heads up the No on Measure Q campaign and pointed out in an earlier op-ed the reemerging influence of the firefighters.  He added, “Well, maybe not so much unprecedented as they did the same thing for both Bapu Vaitla and Gloria Partida in 2022.”

In the meantime, all the focus on Measure Q has caused a reemergence of the issue of the City’s finances.  That’s perhaps a good thing.  The problem is the fight is actually over whether to pass a one percent sales tax increase—an increase the city says it needs and an increase that opponents have attacked as another means to allow for employee compensation increases.

In the meantime, people like me find ourselves a bit torn.  On the one hand, I agree that the city has a considerable revenue problem.  On the other hand, I view a sales tax increase as normally low hanging fruit (unless you make unnecessary commission changes that inflame the anger and passions of key stake-holding citizens), but overall a band aid.

What we need is to revitalize our retail base, starting with the downtown and continuing with economic development.  That’s the long term revenue fix, but we haven’t touched that—although I do applaud the city’s hiring of an economic development director who can help put that issue back into the forefront.

At the same time, the council made a conscious decision to sideline the most consequential and also by far the most contentious issue—housing.

The point of my piece yesterday is that a huge driver of staffing cost increases is the housing crisis—because you have to compensate people enough to off-set the huge increases in the cost of housing.  We can talk about things like inflation and cost of living adjustments, but those pale in comparison to the nearly 80 percent increase in the cost of housing just since 2020.

That cost of housing, if it is not addressed both locally and regionally, will continue to pressurize employee compensation costs.

But we have done very little to move the needle on housing in the last year and this election, while each candidate has prioritized housing, has done little to move forward that vital discussion.

We still have to address things like: two Measure J projects that have come forward, potential amendments to Measure J, the General Plan update, and how we are going to address housing needs going forward.

As I have written before, the council wanted to clear the lane for the sales tax increase—and then inflamed the opposition with their poor handling of the commissions.

There are those who have questioned why I keep bringing up the commission issue, but the fact is a considerable percentage of the No on Q leaders got involved because of the council’s handling of the commission issue.

Several recent councilmembers I have spoken to in the last week made this same point, and literally shook their heads.  As they put it, it was not the changes to the commissions that drove the anger, it was how it was rolled out and the fact that they didn’t rethink their approach.

During a contentious time, it was unnecessary damage.  The kind of damage they said they wanted to avoid by putting off the more pressing issue of housing.

The city has known for a long time that sales and other taxes are simply short-term band aids for the city’s fiscal woes.  At some point they will reach the limits of tax increases.  This campaign is a sign that that time might be sooner rather than later.

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