☆ Smith: Council appointment process stifles diversity, embraces bureaucratic groupthink
Disenfranchisement. Voter suppression. Lack of transparency. Backroom deals. The list of concerns about SJ Council’s wrongheaded moves to deny District 8 and 10 citizens the right to vote continues to grow. Irene Smith, head of Business and Housing Network—SJ adds a new critique: The appointment process aims to erase the city’s much-vaunted diversity. From an exclusive phone chat with Opp Now’s Christopher Escher.
Opportunity Now: Rowdy City Council meetings, Mercury Op-eds, statements from past mayors—heck, even overwhelming poll numbers all say the same thing: The people of SJ want to let D8 and D10 vote for their councilmember. But a stubborn council majority refuses to honor voting rights. What’s up?
Irene Smith: The system has become far too easy to manipulate from the inside and succumbs to pressure from special interests. It has barricaded itself behind arcane processes, it exerts wasteful power, and it blithely ignores direct input from the people. The Merc can run opinion pieces; people can give completely reasonable, heartfelt speeches at council meetings; and CM’s just plow forward regardless. We are seeing the wielding of centralized power over district voices.
ON: It does feel like a power grab by the centralized, bureaucratic city state. Last I looked, councilmembers were elected by district. They’re not at-large. They’re not staff.
We have districts for a reason—because we’re a very big city, and we realize that in order to be truly representative, to get closer to the people, we need smaller geographic districts. The appointment process blows that concept up and makes it feel like the CM’s are hiring an interim project manager who will report to them.
IS: The mindset is upside down, and it's going in precisely the wrong direction. We need to be moving to a government model that is more district-specific, not less. That gives neighborhoods and areas more power, not less. That looks to more elections and more votes, not less.
Each District has its own needs. D3 has the most unhoused and needs additional resources; D8 has concerns about Reid-Hillview Airport and public transit; and D10 needs safer neighborhoods and urban services. Each District has a unique mix of residents, and to claim that a representative knows what's best for another district is like saying the governor of Texas can tell California who our governor would be if Newsom stepped aside. It would never happen, but it’s the same principle.
I offered a full explanation of how we need to be more decentralized when I ran for D3 council member [see here nearby]. Our districts are the size of many smaller cities in California, which often have their own mayors and city councils.
ON: This is not what valuing difference looks like.
IS: We are rightly proud of how diverse we are, how many different races, ethnicities, immigrants, cultures, languages, experiences, educations, orientations, and world-views we encompass. It may be cumbersome and listening to voters may be time-consuming, but embracing diversity and difference should be our organizing principle.
But our current government model erases those differences and tries to get everybody to fit into a mushy big government bureaucratic mindset that suffuses City Hall.
The people are saying: We want to make our own decisions, we want a vote, we want our representatives to actually represent us and the people who live in our communities.
This process is not advocating for our very different needs; it is ignoring that they exist at all. It is not celebrating our diversity; it is stifling it.
ON: Some people say the interim elections are a pricey approach.
IS: The money issue is a deflection, and an unconvincing one. This is about trying to institutionalize groupthink and silence independent, grass roots voices. They are trying to force a one-sizes-fits-all mindset onto a city that should have many sizes, many fabrics, many ways of presenting itself.
ON: This idea of a small coterie of leaders making decisions for the hoi polloi regarding who will represent them has a long and discredited history in the U.S. From the original view of the Electoral College, in which a bunch of previously elected pols decided for the people who their president will be. Or state legislators deciding who their Senator will be. I would’ve thought we got rid of this way of thinking by the end of the century. The 18th Century.
IS: It is throwback, retrograde thinking. Yes, the City of San Jose’s charter does allow the council to appoint a rep for an open district seat. But I am confident whoever wrote that ordinance did not foresee two whole districts being disenfranchised for a two year terms; they probably thought it was for emergencies. Two years is a long time: A lot can happen, and it also leads to a big political advantage for the appointee and the backers of the appointee.
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Image by James Vaughan