Steve Pomerance

First, the big shocker: Ballot Question 2C more than triples the pay for the mayor and council members! Beginning in December 2026, pay would go up to 50% of Area Median Income for the mayor and 40% for council members. It wasn’t so long ago that council members were not paid at all. For much of my time on council, we all were volunteers. Council members worked hard to do a good job, just because it was their civic duty. But after pay was added and then increased over the years, in my observation, council’s performance deteriorated. The role of the council used to include unbiased and complete agenda preparation, full and open discussion of issues at council meetings, giving all citizens enough time to say what they needed to, then listening and asking questions, and making decisions based on facts and not just abstract values. Now, the agenda materials are not reviewed by the Council Agenda Committee, which was created expressly for that function....

I read  Proposition 131  for the first time many weeks ago. The concepts in it were very appealing: open primaries and ranked choice voting (RCV) for candidates. But something didn’t feel right. I understand that no voting system is perfect. But identifiable problems should be fixed. Here are my thoughts on the major ones. Prop 131 creates open primaries by allowing the candidates selected by political parties and qualifying unaffiliated candidates to be listed on a single primary ballot. In June each voter gets a single vote, and the top four vote-getters go on the November ballot. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that a particular party’s candidate will make the general election.  Then in November, voters get to rank these four candidates. Using the standard RCV process, the one with the fewest first-place votes is dropped, and those voters’ second choices become their first choices, and the process is repeated until there’s a winner. ...