Strong Mayor? Why? Part 4

The expensive push by out-of-town oligarchs to crown Kevin Johnson as “strong mayor” of Sacramento has spawned a lot of dubious arguments. But the most wrong-headed is the one being retailed by the mayor’s cheerleaders at the Sacramento Bee. Measure L is about Sacramento’s future, they tell us, “this decision should not be about Mayor Johnson.”

In fact, the strong mayor push has always been about Johnson. He and his allies started agitating to give him more power from the moment he was elected in 2008. When their first effort was ruled unconstitutional by the courts, they kept at it, until a city council majority finally agreed last year to put it on the ballot.

In other cities that have voted on strong-mayor measures, it’s been typical to have voters first decide whether they want a strong-mayor system, then separately elect a mayor fit to fill the newly expanded role. Not in Sacramento. Passage of Measure L would immediately give more power to Johnson.

And perhaps only to him. The strong-mayor powers in Measure L go away at the end of 2020 unless voters approve them a second time. Is there anybody who believes that the coalition backing Measure L—billionaire fat cats, developers, sports owners, cops, firefighters—will be ponying up another $1 million in campaign cash to extend the strong mayor if the likely mayor after 2020 were to be a liberal environmentalist, a pension reformer like San Jose’s Mayor Chuck Reed, or a fiscal conservative opposed to welfare for sports owners and other corporate rent-seekers?

No, forget the Bee’s silly argument. Measure L is about Johnson, and nothing else. The voters’ decision about the strong-mayor system is inseparable from the question of whether Kevin Johnson is qualified for promotion to chief executive officer of the city.

What do we know about Johnson’s executive skills? His only prior management experience was running St. HOPE, a small Sacramento non-profit organization. A federal investigation by the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service found that Johnson, in that management role, diverted federal grant money to personal use; illegally forced AmeriCorps members to live in and pay rent on apartments owned by Johnson’s own development company; and illegally required AmeriCorps members to campaign for his favored candidates in a local election.

On one occasion he entered the apartment of an AmeriCorps member he supervised, climbed uninvited into her bed, and put his hand under her shirt. When the young woman reported the sexual harassment to St. HOPE personnel, Johnson sent his personal lawyer to ask her to change her story and later offered her $1,000 a month to keep quiet. In the midst of the federal investigation, a St. HOPE board member was sent to delete Kevin Johnson’s e-mails from the St. HOPE computers, e-mails then under federal subpoena. The superintendent of St. HOPE’s charter schools resigned in protest of these incidents and of other mismanagement and misappropriation of funds by Johnson, as did two widely respected members of the St. HOPE school board, Bernard Bowler, a businessman, and Robert Trigg, former superintendent of Elk Grove schools.

Johnson’s record of managing his current mayoral duties follows the same pattern. A top aide stole more the $19,000 from taxpayers by charging personal items to a city credit card. The state’s Fair Political Practices Commission has fined him twice for failing to report dozens of gifts from businesses and corporate foundations to his political machine’s front groups. In 2012, as the lead city council opponent of the Measure U tax increase to balance the city budget, he was designated to write the opposing ballot argument. He forgot to submit it. “As a result, no argument against Measure U was included on the ballot,” the Sacramento County Grand Jury found.

Over the course of my career, I’ve often been involved in hiring decisions. I think it’s fair to say that on none of those occasions, in either the private or the public sector, would a candidate with Kevin Johnson’s record have been considered an appropriate choice for even a minor supervisory position, let alone chief executive officer of a $900 million-a-year enterprise with more than 4,000 employees, the position he is seeking with Measure L. In fact, hiring a manager with that record would likely be seen in court as recklessly negligent, putting at risk both the property of shareholders and the safety of employees.

And it’s also fair to say, I think, that the same standards would apply to hiring at the companies of the oligarchs funding the Measure L campaign. Theft of public funds, political corruption, sexual harassment of employees, coverup, neglect of oversight and rules—that’s not the résumé you want to send when you apply for a management job at Apple, Disney, Bloomberg, or even the Sacramento Bee.

So here’s the question that hangs in the air, unasked by the media and unanswered by the oligarchs behind Measure L: If you would never hire someone with Kevin Johnson’s sleazy record to manage your own businesses, why do you insist he’s good enough to manage our city?

The Scent of the City

A year ago, when Sacramento's city staff presented the council with an analysis of the proposed giveaway to the new owners of the Kings, I wondered why it paled, in economic sophistication and concern for the public interest, beside a similar analysis performed for the Maloof family. We now know the answer: Corruption.

In a deposition given in the lawsuit that citizens have filed against the giveaway, James Rinehart, the city's economic development director, testified that the city's staff has made no effort to analyze the economic effect of the subsidy or weigh it against the potential benefits of alternative uses of the money. In fact, Rinehart admitted he had never seen the giveaway term sheet and was unaware of any effort by the city to place a value on the non-cash assets—land, parking spaces, digital signage rights—it proposes to throw into the deal.

Hiram Johnson

So how did the city staff report come to conclude that the giveaway "would have multiple benefits to the City"? Documents discovered in the lawsuit show that those claims of benefits were invented by the subsidy seekers themselves, e-mailed to the city, and, by the magic of cut and paste, placed into the staff report, where the city's elected leaders and the public were defrauded into believing they were reading the considered judgment of the professionals of government. When the city staff spoke, the welfare seekers' lips moved.

If you think this kind of thing is par for the course in government, you're wrong. As a deputy treasurer for the state of California, sitting on boards and financing authorities and overseeing staff work on behalf of the treasurer, I watched professional public servants test the claims of organizations seeking state financing and tax credits and analyze the potential risks and benefits to the public. Their scrutiny was applied routinely and across the board, even to projects and financings three or four orders of magnitude smaller than the proposed Kings giveaway, which at over $300 million, is roughly equivalent to an entire year's worth of pay and benefits for Sacramento's city workforce. For the past three decades I've often seen Sacramento's city council bend to the wishes of the developers, downtown property owners, and unions whose dollars dominate city politics. But until now, the city staff, under honest professionals like former city manager Bill Edgar, usually played things straight.

But the evidence collected thus far in the lawsuit shows that the city management's sins go beyond playing ventriloquist dummy to those looking to boost $300 million out of taxpayer pockets. Staff is also actively obstructing the public's right to know. Councilmember Kevin McCarty testified that he repeatedly asked staff for a valuation of the "sweeteners" the city was throwing at the Kings' superrich owners but was consistently rebuffed. "You're not going to vote for it anyway," McCarty said the staff told him.

This, too, is misconduct. In my time at the State Treasurer's Office, many of California's financing authority boards comprised three officials running for governor: Phil Angelides, Steve Westly, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But in their frequent jockeying and disputes, I can't remember a single instance of the professional staff's withholding requested information from an elected official, even when doing so might result in a different policy result than they or their boss sought. When such things happen in state government, as when parks officials failed to report all their revenue to the governor's finance department, it was rightly considered a scandal.

A century ago Progressives successfully pushed many American cities to adopt the city-manager form of government as an antidote to corruption. The idea was that professional civil servants, disinterested and armed with the social science and economic knowledge coming out of the newly burgeoning universities, would be a source of honest, efficient government. Cities would be freed from the handouts and special deals for politically connected businesses that bribed politicians and financed their campaigns and political organizations. Reform would protect the many against the few.

But Progressives did not imagine what is unfolding in Sacramento: professional managers marching in lockstep with wealthy boodle seekers; ignoring principles of sound public finance; rejecting expert knowledge showing the economic infectiveness of sports subsidies; putting special-interest spin into official reports to masquerade as professional analysis; depriving the public and elected officials of a full accounting of their sweetheart deals; even going so far as to try to frustrate Sacramento citizens' use of the very tools of direct democracy that the Progressive created as the bulwark against special interest giveaways and corrupt government.

The state of the city is fragile: Public services and budgets not recovered five years after the end of the recession. High levels of debt and unfunded liabilities, of violent crime and poverty. Low levels of job growth and the college-educated workers vital to future growth.

But the scent of the city? Ripe with a stench that Hiram Johnson, the reformer, and Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, would have smelled in their youth in Sacramento—so ripe that maybe the people paid to report on and police these things might even begin to notice again.