About two years ago, our City Council decided that we ought to take a comprehensive look at whether it needed to be updated. The Council appointed a ten-member committee of Culver City residents to examine the Charter and make recommendations. The committee met for almost a year to study the charter. There were twenty public hearings, two Town Hall meetings and two City Council meetings.
The Path Toward Recommendations
A number of Culver City residents, including Ms. Deen, as well as several city employees, expressed their views on the existing Charter and the committee’s recommendations for a new Charter.
The committee considered everyone’s opinion, incorporated many suggestions from the public and, at the end of this year-long process, made its recommendations for a new charter. Those recommendations were adopted by the City Council late last year. And now the new Charter is going to be considered by the voters of Culver City on Election Day, April 11.
Opponents of the new charter say they are opposed to it because voters don’t have the opportunity to pick and choose what parts of the Charter they want to vote for — sort of like the menu in a cafeteria.
Can you imagine what would happen if the City Council had decided to place every section of the new Charter up for a separate vote? Theywould have to put really comfortable chairs in the polling booths, because we’d all be there for quite a while.
Seriously though, the Charter is really just another candidate in the April election. As with any other candidate, voters are going to have to consider whether or not, as a whole, the new Charter is good for our community.
There are several reasons the supporters of the new Charter believe it is a good thing for Culver City. First of all, it creates a structure where our part-time City Council can devote their time to leading the city and allow the day to day running of the city to be handled by trained professionals, just like every other charter city in California does it.
The Cost Will Not Be Exorbitant
No, the city manager won’t cost us an arm and a leg. In fact, we pay our current Chief Administrative Officer over $176,000 a year, which is above the average of what other charter cities our size pay their city managers.
And no, the new city manager won’t demand a larger, more expensive staff, at least not without the approval of the City Council, which will still have complete control of the city’s purse strings. I suppose if you wanted to be cynical, you could say, as the Measure V opponents do, that it won’t be long before a city manager starts hiring “old friends.” They would have to be really good old friends since they would have to work for free unless the City Council approved their salaries.
Besides, the CAO already has an assistant CAO, an intergovernmental relations officer, a management analyst, an associate analyst and an administrative secretary.
In a democracy, we elect policymakers and hire managers. For some reason, the current Culver City system has two elected department heads.
The City Clerk, who is responsible for preserving the city’s records, runs a department. The City Treasurer, who manages and invests the city’s money, collects revenues and handles most of the city’s accounting functions, runs a department of twenty-six employees.
When we were on the City Council, sometimes the only way to get either the City Treasurer or the City Clerk to participate as a department head was either to beg them or impose on their sense of teamwork. Sometimes neither worked and the “I’m an elected official and I don’t have to go to no stinkin’ Department Head meetings” was the all too unfortunate response.
Do They Retain One or Both?
The Charter Review Committee debated long and hard about keeping one or both elected positions, but not as department heads. It turned out that if the committee had adopted that approach there would have been two elected officials hanging around City Hall with absolutely nothing to do.
The current Charter doesn’t even designate an election official. So, under the current Charter, three members of the City Council could appoint an “old friend” to be the city’s election official. Of course, we all know they wouldn’t do that. Still, the new Charter fixes that loophole.
The current Charter has no ethics or conflicts-of- interest rules. The new Charter fixes that as well.
Under the current system, some department heads are part of civil service and some are not. Does anyone really think that the top echelon of the city’s executive management team, most of whom have six-figure salaries, need civil service “protection?”
Those department heads who are not in civil service have employment contracts with severance packages that would pay them more than $50,000 plus benefits if they were terminated “at will.” That’s a pretty expensive exercise of somebody’s “will.” If it weren’t done for a darned good reason, there’s no doubt that the voters of Culver City would not stand for it. What the new charter does is level the playing field and treat all members of city’s executive management team equally.
In closing, Ms. Deen points out that merely because our Charter is fifty-nine years old, that does not mean it is outdated. After all, the United States Constitution is over two hundred years old, and still going strong.
Well, she’s got us on that one — except that the Constitution has a “city manager” form of government. We call him the President.
Ms. Deen forgot to mention that the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation — which was, in many respects, like Culver City’s current CAO form of government. It didn’t work very well then, either.
We hope that after you study the current Charter, the new Charter and the arguments for and against Measure V, you will join us with a resounding Yes vote on Measure V and help bring Culver City into the twenty-first century.
(Signed) In addition to Mr. Wolkowitz, a former Mayor of Culver City, who wrote the essay, it is signed by former mayors Paul Netzel, Dave Hauptman, Richard Marcus, Paul Jacobs and former City Councilman Ed Little.
