Vanguard Interview: City Council Candidate Jon Li

It has been a long week and thus instead of completing all of the candidates interviews this week, we have only gotten to two interviews.  On Monday we ran Joe Krovoza’s interview.  Today we will run Jon Li’s interview.

Vanguard: You have been a harsh critic of the city throughout your campaign, can you explain what’s wrong with the way the city operates from your perspective?

Jon Li: Wonderful question, I’m not sure I have the easy answer.  The best example I can give you is a town in Austria went through exactly the proposal, the process that I’m proposing.  They came up with 120 sensitive indicators to measure daily.  Out of that 120, and I haven’t seen them yet, I’ve emailed the people that did the process – I’m trying to find out more, but probably 20 of those 120 indicators would have to do with fiscal and economic issues.  Probably another 20 or 30 would have to do with quality of life and environmental issues.  All of which are very sensitive concerns to the citizens of Davis.

So those would be the kind of things where – if for example we said, unemployment currently or underemployment in Davis is currently ten percent, and we want to drop it to nine percent.  How can we do that?  That becomes a different policy question than oh we’re at ten percent unemployment and lord only knows where you go from there except to complain. 

We need to talk about the retail sector; we need to talk about creating jobs, and creating new employment particularly for college graduates.  Those are not easy answers.  But the point is the viable systems model will give you a context where you can reach agreement about what the issues are and about what the lay of the land is.  Then you can actually talk about some options that maybe people can reach agreement on. 

It’s not an easy answer, the only point is that you can reach agreement about what the questions are, then you can debate what you want to do and evaluate what it is that’s transpired subsequently and actually have real time, fairly realistic data to compare what you think.

Vanguard: What do you see as the solution to the fiscal crisis, what does the city need to do differently?

Jon Li: I think we need to renegotiate our contracts.  Basically Lehman Brothers went down three months after the last city council was elected.  We have a whole new reality that the city council politically has not acknowledged.  The closest they’ve come is they’ve talked about the PERS contribution is going to be substantially increased because the Stock Market’s no longer a good deal.  In the most recent issue of the Economist, what they called the latest version of the Stock Market as the hokey pokey – you put your right foot in, you put your right foot out.  It goes up, it goes down.  Nobody knows what’s happening anymore.

I think we’re over-obligated to our city employees.  I think we need to go back to the 1950s when you’re lucky you have a job.  People in the public sector take for granted that it’s not a gravy-train.  The good times are behind us.  Just expected a salary increase doesn’t mean you’re going to get one.  I don’t think we can afford it.

Vanguard:  So if you’re talking about daily monitoring of unemployment…

Jon Li: I’m talking about the daily monitoring of the entire economy.

Vanguard: To what level?

Jon Li:  The level of detail is one of the points of power of the viable systems model.  The idea of recursion is that you have different levels of the organization and the statistics should be specific to the level of the organization that you’re talking about.  For example, if you’re talking about managing the entire city parks program that would be different than talking about managing a particular park.  The problem is that we tend to consolidate the two, or even consolidate three or four. 

At this point, Parks and Recreation, at least the last time I check because I’m not even sure if it’s a department anymore, had tremendous responsibility outside of Parks and Recreation because John Meyer the city manager back then, trusted Jeanne Hippler, the Community Development Director.  These people are long gone.  The institutional relationships that they had are no longer there.  We need an ongoing present future, and that’s the point of keeping daily statistics.  Because you continue to look forward as opposed to saying ‘oh we’re going backwards and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

Vanguard: How would you propose to be able to track some of these measures on a daily basis?

Jon Li: That’s the fascinating science is that the economics traditionally counts and measures what’s easy to measure.  The point of the viable systems model is that it may not be easy to measure but it’s what you need to find out.  The two examples that we know of, that everyone can relate to, in the human body are blood pressure and temperature.  If someone says your temperature is 100 degrees, they say, oh you’re temperature is a little high.  If someone says oh it’s 102, most people will know you’re in trouble.   If it’s 104, you’re in real trouble. 

Similarly with unemployment, current statistics, Sacramento we’re at 12.6 percent unemployment, state of California, those are tremendously high numbers.  That’s a clear indication that there’s a problem.  How you break that down into an analysis of identifying where the problems are becomes the challenge of the science and the politics.  That becomes the debate – you debate why the numbers are the way it is and how to change it.

Vanguard: Give a couple of examples of where you would like to see this kind of analysis applied.

Jon Li: The most blatant and obvious one is how much people drive their cars and how significant our carbon footprint is dependent on how many people are dependent on their automobile for ongoing transportation needs and on that one we can get down to the neighborhood or the individual level and have people actually keep a diary and monitor.  That would be the kind of thing where if somebody was doing three-quarters of their transportation needs by car and they monitor that on a daily basis and cumulatively it went from 55 percent to 40 percent, that might be something that might encourage other people to improve their behavior – improvement being not driving their cars.

Now globally we can find out how many gallons of gas are sold in filling stations in Davis.  That can give us a global number that certainly superficial.  It’s certainly not a strong indicator of reality but it is a sensitive number that we can look at on a regular basis.   The Franchise Tax Board probably only collects that on a monthly basis.  That’s a great example of a bad old statistic that we would need to adapt to make it useful to both public policy and rhetoric.

Vanguard: What about those people who work out of town?

Jon Li: There is an interagency organization that’s federally funded to encourage local entities, because it’s more than just the city of Davis, to collaborate in ways that lead to car-sharing and ride-sharing and utilizing public transit – at that point we have some tools because the university has a program that I happen to be very familiar of evaluating annually what the mode share is.  It’s called the mode share study.  The point is to get people out of their cars.  The more the university can do to encourage carpooling and ride-sharing – I understand that it’s inconvenient to take the bus rather than drive your car, but if it’s possible that a person can arrange their schedule that’s obviously what it becomes.

Vanguard: What do you see as the solution to the fiscal crisis, what does the city need to do differently?

Jon Li: I think we need to renegotiate our contracts.  Basically Lehman Brothers went down three months after the last city council was elected.  We have a whole new reality that the city council politically has not acknowledged.  The closest they’ve come is they’ve talked about the PERS contribution is going to be substantially increased because the Stock Market’s no longer a good deal.  In the most recent issue of the Economist, what they called the latest version of the Stock Market as the hokey pokey – you put your right foot in, you put your right foot out.  It goes up, it goes down.  Nobody knows what’s happening anymore.

I think we’re over-obligated to our city employees.  I think we need to go back to the 1950s when you’re lucky you have a job.  People in the public sector take for granted that it’s not a gravy-train.  The good times are behind us.  Just expected a salary increase doesn’t mean you’re going to get one.  I don’t think we can afford it.

Vanguard: We have already seemingly obligated ourselves fiscally with pensions, retirement health care, cafeteria cash-out, do you see a way to get out of that?

Jon Li: The only thing that the Democrats are willing to consider now is a two-tiered process.  I think we have to go back and reassess those contracts and plan on fighting a lawsuit that some people are going to want.  In Vallejo we see people saying we don’t care if the city exists, we just want to get paid.  There may be some court cases where the unions win on that one and some court cases where the unions lose.  It’s where we are in the budget process.  We can’t live with the obligations that we have.  We’re going to have to cut back and I think we’re better off cutting back a little with each individual rather than hacking away wholesale.   I don’t believe in 10 percent across-the-board cuts, but I do think we need to go back and do a zero-based budget.

Vanguard: How would a zero-based budget fix things?

Jon Li: You know what it’s like the last week of the legislature, they get to the point where they’ve talked about something for five minutes and they vote on it and they should have spent a couple of hours talking about it, just because they’ve got a long list that they’re trying to get through and it’s late at night.  When you do a zero-based budget this a little of that about it, you prioritize according to reality and some things that all along you’ve always done, you say wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t do that.  I studied zero-based budgeting when Carter advocated it back in the 70s.  I think that we need to recommit what it is that the city is supposed to do for the citizens of Davis – reestablish the social contract.  In some ways it’s a painful process.  In some ways it’s liberating.  In some ways it’s very scary because it means uncertainty about things you thought were certain in the past.  But my point was, they’re not certain now.

Vanguard: What do you see as the essentials of city government service and what do you see as things that we should be cutting?

Jon Li: I’m not going to be popular about this, obviously we have do some level of police and fire, but the gross statistic of one uniformed badged officer per thousand population is a statistic that we haven’t quite met up until now and I think we can’t afford to meet it at this point.  Probably the most controversial thing I can say, although I’m not alone about it, is we have fifteen planners on the city staff and I don’t know what they’re planning because there’s no development out there for them to actually be moving.  They’re people that are friends of mine, I like them, but I don’t see what work we have for them for them to do and I think that we need to re-assess what the city should be doing at all.

Vanguard: How does the city economically development?

Jon Li: Part of it is that Jim Kidd thinks he can get cutthroat rents.  I think that we need to go through an adjustment in the entire city.  We’re in a donut.  The price of doing business in Davis is 10 to 25 percent than it is in Sacramento or Woodland.  It’s competitive internally, but it’s not competitive externally.  People leave town to get their needs meet because it’s too expensive in Davis – and part of that is the rents of the commercial businesses.  I think we need to do an assessment – it’s kind of like on a bigger scale what people are talking about Picnic Day.  I think we need to seriously talk about our future and not assume that we can continue to do things the way we always have.

Vanguard: Where does the city get the funding to pay its current obligations – can we look to economic development as a solution?

Jon Li: That presupposes status quo maintenance of current revenue levels.  We don’t have the market to meet (the kind of supply it would take to pay for our future obligations).  We barely have the market to just support one Target.  

Most people I know throw up their hands and then they go shop in the bay area or shop in Sacramento.  The fact that we can’t keep a department store in a city of 50,000 or 65,000 people is tragic.  We should be able to keep a department store going there was one Dotry’s, there was one’s Winger’s when I was a college student that lasted a long time, but they were pretty out of date style wise.

Vanguard: Where do you see economic development, do you see it in the core?  Do you see it out on Second Street?

Jon Li: I think we need to riding their bikes more, out of their cars more, and driving their cars less part of that’s about higher density.  That’s my long term answer so I do see neighborhood shopping increasing but only as a result of more people per square mile in the area immediately surrounding the neighborhood shopping centers. 

It’s habits.  It’s routine behavior and making a conscious decision to change it.  Going back to earlier examples with cars, people who drive their car to work every day take the bus one day a week.   There are things that each of us can do incrementally to have a lower carbon footprint impact on the planet.  There are things we can do to be more socially aware and responsible. 

—David M. Greenwald reporting

Categories: