The Spin Bin

Post by **admin** » Wed Jan 29, 2025 8:28 am

Where do you draw your strength from? How do you keep persevering, even when government grinds so slowly?

Post by **admin** » Fri Jan 03, 2025 10:14 am

You are on an astounding number of boards and committees—both on your own and as part of your role as mayor. Why so many?

Post by **admin** » Thu Jan 02, 2025 8:30 am

In his short tenure, he has already achieved a remarkable goal: significantly shortening the length of city council meetings by means of his strict whip hand on the agenda.

Whip Hand rides again?

olivermarks · Post by **olivermarks** » Thu Dec 19, 2024 11:37 am

admin wrote: ↑Thu Dec 19, 2024 8:08 am Over the last two meetings, Councilmember Jill McLewis went on a one-woman crusade to demote the city-sponsored Climate Action Committee (CAC) to a community organization, unfunded and unaffiliated with city government.

This has to be the most bizarre and distorted post on Dale and his employee Laura's blog so far.

All the public comment, both written and spoken, encouraged the Climate Action committee to expand their reach unencumbered by Brown act restrictions in the context of the agenda item. City of Sebastopol tax payers have spent a quarter of a million dollars of our tiny budget since the CAC's formation to facilitate their organizing an action plan. There has been no oversight of goals and deliverables to the city.

I've kept quite a close eye on the youtube recordings of committee meetings over the years and there is no apparent clear plan in place other than evangelizing for the removal of gas to be replaced with electric appliances city wide, and creating mulch. The global 'net zero' goals have not really ever been put in focus or democratically discussed locally as a city.

The majority of the members don't live in the city, so it is entirely logical to expand county wide. Less energy would be used if the meetings were on zoom or similar rather than spending money on traveling to a meeting room and consuming city energy, IT staff time and space.

I'm perfectly ok with burning another $10k of city funds on continuing the committee despite the fiscal emergency, but the credibility of the current rather petulant committee members during the meeting that their efforts would cease to exist if they weren't budgeted for by city taxpayers was questionable at best.

Committee members only bother to show up to segments of council meetings pertaining to their concerns, and in the disastrous planning director Keri Swanstrom era the CAC was actually briefed on what had been discussed at the previous council meeting, presumably as they had more urgent matters to attend to rather than participating in the meeting.

I suspect despite the quixotic ideas the CAC debate during their gatherings, some members see themselves as a council enviroOversight panel who would like visibility into all city business in order to provide reeducation and citizen regulation.

New council member Carter is a member of the climate action committee and arguably shouldn't have been a voter on this topic due to bias. The core issue of course is the amount of city staff time the CAC expect as they provide their insights and recommendations, and not the ten thousand dollars of the city budget. Hopefully in the coming year they will be able to come up with some concrete value to the city of Sebastopol and spend less time debating nebulous concepts amongst themselves.

I'm assuming it will cost $10k just to use the city Zoom and recording staff? It would be good to see a breakdown of the CAC annual budget as they are continuing as a city entity.

It would also be helpful if Laura's views and perspectives on the blog were more representative of the citizens and less of what councillors did and said but I think most people are aware the site is primarily a pr vehicle for certain group's goals.