Scoopy Plays the Race Card

I didn't think it possible for the Sacramento Bee to come up with a less persuasive case for Kevin Johnson's strong-mayor push than the one I took apart in the last post. But then this editorial got dropped on my porch this morning.

The Bee repeats its plaintive cry: "Sacramento must separate Measure L from the mayor." As I previously noted, this is impossible. Kevin Johnson and the strong-mayor push are like conjoined twins who share one heart. They are inseparable. One can't live without the other. Even Kevin Johnson thinks so. Look at Measure L's own campaign materials.

It's all about Boss Johnson, and always has been. When the Bee tries to suggest otherwise, it's pissing into the wind.

From there the editorial goes downhill.

When we subscribe to a newspaper, one of the things we expect for our money is journalism that provides some context and depth to make sense of the flood of events, information, and spin that come at us every day. The Bee can no longer seem to do that.

It attributes the opposition to Measure L to "some in the old guard," people who never fully accepted Kevin Johnson and who "would prefer to keep a political system that worked when the city was smaller." Leave aside for a moment the obvious fact that the council-city manager system continues to work pretty well in big cities that are doing much better than Sacramento, a fact that an intellectually honest editorial would have to acknowledge. The big lie here is that somehow it's the "old guard" behind the opposition to Measure L.

That's nonsense. There's nobody more "old guard" than the people supporting the Measure L push: Angelo Tsakopoulos, the Friedman family, the Chamber of Commerce, the cops and firefighters. On the other hand, the opposition campaign is headed by rookie Councilmember Steve Hansen, who, at age 34, is hardly a member of the old guard. The fact of the matter is that there are young and old, both people who voted for Johnson and people who voted against, on both sides of the strong-mayor debate. When you don't have any evidence to support your position but aren't honest enough to say so, tarring your opponents becomes a temptation.

And that's when the editorial spirals down into the muck: "It does make you wonder whether some of these personal attacks on Johnson, Sacramento’s first black mayor, have something to do with race."

That's an astonishing thing to read in what purports to be a professionally edited metropolitan newspaper. Not because there aren't people who will vote against Measure L because the mayor is African-American; this is, after all, the United States. But because it maligns a wide swath of the community with no evidence to support the claim. A leading foe of the strong-mayor measure was the late Grantland Johnson, the city's most prominent black politician for three decades as council member and county supervisor, who signed the opposition ballot argument before he died earlier this year. It's also signed by Bonnie Pannell, another long-time African-American member of the council. Does the Bee believe their opposition has "something to do with race?" Does it believe that they would have associated themselves with the opposition if it did have "something to do with race?"

It's an axiom of Internet debate that the first person to invoke Nazism loses the argument. There's an even older newspaper corollary: An editorial page that "wonders" in print, without supporting evidence, whether a large and active part of its city and its readership is racist has not only lost the argument; it has lost its moral compass.

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?

Strong Mayor? Why? Part 3

Like every reform, the push in Sacramento to crown Kevin Johnson a “strong mayor” is an effort to change the rules of a political game. And like all such reforms, it comes wrapped in rhetoric about good government. But as we’ve seen in the last two posts, reality doesn’t confirm the rhetoric. Council-manager or strong-mayor system: the choice doesn’t matter to how well a city is run or responds to its residents.

So voters are left to judge Measure L, a change in the rules of the game, by how it will affect who wins. When the clerics in Iran fiddle with the election rules or Vladimir Putin and his oligarch buddies change the constitution in Russia, we understand immediately: Reform is about making it easier for one team to win. It’s no less true when it happens closer to home. If you want to understand the push by Sacramento’s wealthy and powerful for Measure L, think of it as Putin envy.

The backers of the push for “strong mayor”—developers, downtown property owners, public safety unions, the consultants and fixers who hang around city hall—have been power players in city politics for decades. Often they’ve won policy fights and elections. But not always.

Vladimir Putin

There have been checks on their power: independent politicians like Mayors Anne Rudin and Heather Fargo, who had support from women’s, neighborhood, and environmental groups; strong liberals like Joe Serna and Grantland Johnson, whose background in civil rights and labor struggles gave them a commitment to broad sharing of public resources; active and resourceful neighborhood groups; scrutiny by the Sacramento Bee operating in the McClatchy family Progressive tradition of distrust of concentrated private power in business or labor.

But in the Kevin Johnson era the balance has tipped toward the powerful. Ambitious, pliable, and lacking a reliable ethical compass, Johnson has been a perfect front for the dominant coalition: a celebrity African American basketball star with proven ability to attract attention and cash from the corporate foundations and donors that drive so much of the policy agenda of this new Gilded Age. Over the last six years Sacramento has seen the rise of a shadow city government, dubbed K.J. Inc. by the city’s leading political reporter, Cosmo Garvin, who has chronicled it so diligently in the Sacramento News & Review.

The coalition is a new kind of urban political machine, fueled by “behest” gifts from corporate, foundation, and wealthy individual donors and employing a crew of operatives it shares with special-interest groups. Directly and through independent expenditure committees, it has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns to reelect its favored candidates. When challenged by independent voices in community and nonprofit groups, it has bought them off or tried to bully them into silence with threats to cut off charitable donations.

It even managed to engineer the dismissal, at least temporarily, of the executive secretary of the central labor council. When a business-dominated coalition can control the voice of labor, you know Sacramento is seeing an unprecedented change in its politics.

Measure L is best understood, I think, as the coalition’s attempt to create what UC Merced Prof. Jessica Trounstine calls a “political monopoly.” By passing a strong-mayor measure, it aims to tilt the game to hobble its foes and assure reelection. If a governing coalition can do that, it “gains the freedom to be responsive to a narrow segment of the electorate at the expense of the broader community,” she writes.

Kevin Johnson whines when foes of his strong-mayor push call it a “power grab,” and he’s halfway right. Unlike Putin, KJ can’t grab, he must ask. Measure L is more like a “power reach.” But he can’t deny that it’s all—and only—about handing him and the dominant coalition more power. (If you doubt that, ask yourself whether the oligarchs would be pushing this measure if Heather Fargo were still mayor.) And the power they seek would go far toward sealing their political monopoly.

Kevin Johnson

The mayor would gain control over jobs in city departments, letting him reward political allies. He would gain control over the budget, writing the first draft and having veto power over the council’s final choices. That would give him a way to reward or punish community groups and nonprofits that receive city money. Concentrating so much power in a single office elected expensively in a citywide campaign would amplify the influence of the wealthy people and organizations who can supply the election cash.

Perhaps most important, the mayor would gain control over information that citizens and the city council need to assess the performance of the city.

Former San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders showed how it’s done. After that city adopted a strong-mayor system a decade ago, he “moved to consolidate his control over the city bureaucracy by concentrating information in the mayor’s office,” University of California political scientists Steven P. Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott A. MacKenzie write in Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Governance Failures in San Diego. “Sanders forbade city employees from speaking to the press, allowing department heads to conduct interviews only when a member of the mayor’s public relations staff was also present.”

K.J. Inc. already excels in spin and restricting press access. It took a lawsuit to reveal that the purported city analysis of the benefits of the Kings arena giveaway was a cut-and-paste job from the deal’s backers. Combine increased mayoral control with the Bee’s declining capacity to cover the city and you can count on city hall’s becoming an information black hole.

Sacramento has already gone far down the road toward what Erie calls, in its San Diego form, the “politics of extraction,” through which “civic elites succeed in channeling the powers of government to benefit narrow, private interests at the expense of the broader city interest.”

While police and fire unions win and protect pay and pensions unimaginable elsewhere in the country, Sacramento residents get stuck with the unenviable combination of high crime rates and among the lowest levels of policing of any major city.

Billionaire sports owners get handed $300 million in subsidies, Sacramento taxpayers get handed taxes higher and more regressive than any other in the region, which provide levels of services for things like libraries and recreation that are far below the standard in comparable cities outside California.

When Erie describes San Diego as “an American Potemkin village—an impressive privatized facade with a dark public-sector underbelly—featuring a gleaming new downtown and bevy of tourist attractions but saddled with billion-dollar pension liabilities and deficient public services,” you pause and ask yourself whether he wasn’t talking about Sacramento instead.

So forget about all the rhetoric and Measure L as some abstract proposition. Think about it concretely. Do we want to risk handing a political monopoly to this mayor and this coalition of self-serving interests who have rung up this record of bringing Sacramento this low?

Strong Mayor? Why? Part 2

In the last post, I disposed of the claim that switching Sacramento to a strong-mayor system would make city government more efficient. Let’s look now at the oligarchs’ second argument: that strong-mayor cities are more responsive and accountable to voters.

Unlike the first, this second argument is at least plausible. The wealthy businessmen who promoted the city-manager system a century ago were no friends of the urban masses. They argued that “good government,” as they defined it, was more important than self-government. City managers were to be freed to run cities according to dictates of science and efficiency and to operate outside of “politics,” the realm where responsiveness and accountability reside. The possibility that city-manager governments can ignore the wishes of their voters is encoded in that system’s DNA.

In practice, though, scholars haven’t found any evidence that one form of city government is more responsive or accountable to voters than another.

The most recent and sophisticated of these studies, by political scientists Chris Tausanovitch of UCLA and Christopher Warshaw of MIT, compares the ideological leanings of residents of 51 large cities with the policies adopted by their local leaders. They find liberal cities get more liberal policies and conservative cities get more conservative policies, regardless of the form of city government.

“In contrast to the expectations of reformers, we find that no institution seems to consistently improve responsiveness…,” they report. “City manager systems, designed to be more professional and less political, appear to be just as responsive to public opinion as their mayoral counterparts. Given the same set of public policy preferences, a city with a mayor looks almost exactly the same as a city with a city manager for most policy outcomes.”

Jessica Trounstine, the UC Merced political scientist, provides a similar perspective in her fine recent book, which looks at occasions when powerful and unresponsive coalitions were able to establish political monopolies in city governments. These unaccountable monopolies arose, she finds, in both strong-mayor and city-manager governments, differing only in the tactics they used.

The verdict? Judged as to whether a strong-mayor system provides more responsive and accountable city government than Sacramento’s current city manager system, the oligarchs’ case once again fails.

So why do the wealthy and powerful pouring so much money into the strong-mayor campaign continue to argue that the reform will make the city more efficient and responsive even when decades of scholarly research and experience show that it won’t?

Because what alternative do they have? Words like “efficient” and “accountable” are talismans in any debate over city government organization. If the oligarchs and Kevin Johnson didn’t claim those magic words and try to own them, their opponents would. It was for the same reason that the wealthy civic reformers of a century ago so often invoked their devotion to “the people” even as they busily went about suppressing voter participation and shifting city power away from voters and toward unelected professional administrators.

Having taken the would-be reformers’ rhetoric seriously enough to assess it and find it empty of substance, I’ll offer, in the next post, a hypothesis about the real meaning of the push for strong-mayor system.

Strong Mayor? Why?

The Sacramento Bee ran a nice graphic the other day detailing the big dollars that out-of-town oligarchs and special interest groups are pouring into Measure L, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson’s November campaign to make him a “strong mayor.” Since it’s safe to assume, as Johnson himself once complained to me about his donors, that “they all want something,” the obvious question for voters to ask is: What?

Their official line is that ditching the current council-city manager setup will help get things done, make the city more efficient, and make its leaders more accountable and responsive to voters. It's hard to take that line seriously, because neither logic nor experience supports it.

Start with the formal name of Measure L itself: the Checks and Balances Act of 2014. The phrase “checks and balances” is meant to give voters a warm glow, evoking dimly remembered school civics lessons about wise men in powdered wigs writing the U.S. Constitution.

But if you paid full attention in class, or follow the news, you understand that the checks-and-balances systems in federal and state constitutions notoriously put up obstacles to “getting things done.” And with good reason: The framers of the Constitution were more concerned about restraining power than enabling action.

The system they created frequently results in divided government. A president of one party vetoes the agenda of the party that controls Congress, while the party that controls Congress tries to undermine the agenda and legitimacy of a president of the opposite party. Sometimes, even when a president and Congress get something done, a Supreme Court controlled by their adversaries barrels into the fray and strikes it down. Our history tells of long periods when federal and state governments sat paralyzed in the face of big problems, and of moments when even day-to-day activities like budgeting become occasions for crisis—think federal government shutdowns, state-issued IOUs, and the collision between President Obama and the Republican House that brought the nation to the edge of default.

Measure L invites the same gridlock in city government. Under Sacramento’s current charter, a mayor and four members of the city council can pass ordinances and a budget. It takes five members of the council, a majority, to block what a mayor wants or set a different course. Under Measure L’s “checks and balances,” a mayor would have to win over five of eight members of the council to get anything done, and it will take six of eight members of the council, a three-fourths supermajority, to pass a measure the mayor opposes.

No wonder the oligarchs talk abstractly of “checks and balances.” Telling voters that they want to make Sacramento city government more like Washington probably isn’t a winning argument.

There’s a big irony in hearing today’s rich and powerful tout a strong-mayor/council government as more efficient than the council/manager model. Because a century ago, it was the very same social group, the rich and powerful, the corporate barons of America’s first Gilded Age, in partnership with newly organized chambers of commerce and a growing class of college-educated professionals, who drove the creation and spread of the city-manager form of government that the rich and powerful now want to dump.

They sought, and often won, changes in city charters to take power away from mayors and councilmen, transfering it to unelected professional city managers. The elected city officials of that day were too parochial for the oligarchs’ taste. Typically drawn from the ranks of local leaders like shopkeepers, artisans, and contractors, they won election by steering services and jobs to their voters and protecting their constituents, many of them immigrants, from the assaults on their religions and pleasures being launched by nativists and prohibitionists. They were focused on neighborhood, not the broader city-wide investments corporations wanted.

“Reformers loudly proclaimed a new structure of municipal government as more moral, more rational, and more efficient and, because it was so, self-evidently more desirable,” the historian Samuel P. Hays writes. Trained city managers, freed from patronage and politics, would deliver more honest and efficient services and attend to city-wide interests instead of neighborhoods and working-class needs. Sacramento adopted that system in 1921.

And now the heirs and successors of those oligarchs say their ancestors got it all wrong. A strong mayor will bring more efficient government.

The political scientists and economists who’ve compared the two systems disagree. They’ve found that whether a city has a strong mayor or council/manager government does not change how much it spends and taxes, how it spends its money, or how efficiently it delivers police, fire, and sewer services. As one study summarized the research, “There is no apparent difference in the efficiency levels of the two municipal government structures.”

The verdict? Judged as a spur to efficiency, the case for “strong mayor” is weak and unproven.

Next: Does having a strong mayor make a city more responsive and accountable?

KJ’s Klavern

You might expect, or at least hope, that a city that makes its living providing government for the rest of California would be a place that understands the workings and values of democracy. Two related reactions to the citizen campaign in Sacramento to force a public vote on subsidizing an arena say otherwise.

1) In a recent letter to the Sacramento Bee, a reader attacked the very idea of voters having a voice. “There is a reason why we are a republican democracy,” he wrote. It’s a refrain often repeated in the arena debate: “Don’t you meddling old fools know that we elect representatives to make decisions for us and, if you don’t like what they do, you should have voted for someone else.”

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That may be true of the federal government but it hasn’t been true in California for more than a century, ever since Sacramento native Hiram Johnson got voters to approve the initiative, referendum, and recall. “All political power is inherent in the people,” says California’s constitution. “The people have the right to instruct their representatives” and “petition government for redress of grievances.” There’s not a word suggesting citizens must sit around and hold their tongues until the next election.

California mixes representative and direct democracy in a hybrid system that’s too often at war with itself, as Joe Mathews and I show in California Crackup. You can argue that California would be better off if Hiram Johnson had never fallen out with his corrupt politician father over “boss rule” at Sacramento City Hall (plus ça change...) and never ended up as a reformer. But if you start your argument pretending the system Johnson initiated doesn’t exist, you’ve only revealed you are a century out of date.

2) And speaking of people a century behind the times, you can’t do better than Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and his team of hired liars. They are demanding that the citizens who submitted petitions against the arena pay to have the signatures counted by election officials.

Anyone familiar with the country’s history will hear an ugly echo of the past here. Making citizens pay to exercise their fundamental civil rights is a revival of a kind of poll tax.

Poll taxes were a device used by the white Southern elites in the late 19th century to protect their wealth and power by disenfranchising blacks and poor whites. They were outlawed in federal elections by the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964. And as the civil rights revolution marched through the country, the U.S. Supreme Court swept away most such financial burdens on citizenship in the states, ruling that a state violates the Fourteenth Amendment “whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard.”

I wrote earlier this year about the dark side of sports loyalty that reveals itself in battles over subsidizing the home team. But even I would never have predicted that it would end up here: with the first African American mayor of Sacramento wielding a tool of the Ku Klux Klan.

An etiquette question

Dear Miss Manners:

What is the appropriate tip to leave to Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson for so ably driving up the sales price of our Sacramento Kings basketball franchise? We do not wish to appear gauche or ungrateful.

With thanks for your assistance,

The Maloof family

The Shadow Government of Kevin Johnson

In 2008 I ran into Kevin Johnson, the former NBA basketball star, at a restaurant near his condo in midtown Sacramento. I congratulated him on advancing into the runoff in his campaign to oust then-Mayor Heather Fargo. He thanked me, and then asked if I had any advice.

I replied that the most important skill in politics was being able to say “no” to the people funding his campaign. As I spoke, Johnson winced, as if having gas pains. “But they all want something,” he moaned. “Sure they do,” I said. “But remember what the great Jesse Unruh said. ‘If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them, you have no business being up here.’”

In a terrific bit of reporting at Sacramento News & Review, Cosmo Garvin makes clears that my playfully offered advice was not heeded.

As Sacramento’s mayor, Johnson has built a shadow machine of nonprofit front groups funded through large and often undisclosed contributions. Although figures at Sacramento City Hall have long had ties to state government and the Legislature—former mayor Phil Isenberg was a legislative staffer, Fargo was a parks bureaucrat—Johnson is the first to tap so heavily into the assembled hordes of lobbyists, consultants, liars for hire, and fund-raisers who have infested the capital city as a result of the Prop 13 centralization of power in California. In fact, it is hard to know for certain whether Johnson formed what Garvin calls KJ Inc. to advance his political fortunes and whether KJ Inc. has latched on to him as a way to generate fat paydays for themselves.

Whichever may be the case, the strategy has worked. The four years of Johnson’s tenure as mayor has been the worst of times for Sacramento. Its economy is among the worst performing in the nation, public safety is being cut in the face of one of the highest big-city crime rates in the country, foreclosures have been rife, and the city budget, burdened with outsize pay and pensions for cops and firefighters, faces a large structural gap. Yet Johnson has done little to nothing on the housing front and has declined to pursue the full-court press for pension reform such as that pushed by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed. Instead he devoted his attentions to a clownish pursuit of building an arena for the equally clownish NBA Kings franchise. A failure in every respect, he nonetheless had built so formidable a money and institutional machine around him that no serious candidate was willing to challenge him for reelection.

So I’m changing my political advice. To wannabe politicians: Don’t worry about being good, just try to look good.