SAN JOSE — After steady outcry over perceptions they were trying to sideline a charter commission’s reform work on police oversight and climate-change response, city leaders allowed a memo that touched off the discord to die in committee, keeping it from reaching the full city council.
The memo in question was intended, in co-author and Vice Mayor Chappie Jones’ telling, to ensure timely completion of the panel’s work on evaluating whether the mayoral election should be aligned with the presidential election and if the mayor should be granted more executive power.
Seems simple enough, since those issues were the genesis of the council’s decision last summer to form the 23-member volunteer commission, tasked with recommending how such matters might be proposed as city charter changes on next June’s ballot.
But the commission’s mandate also included latitude for members to take on other issues where the charter amendments could improve the city’s inclusiveness. Exploring the formation of community-based police-oversight and climate-change bodies became two of the commission’s adjacent pursuits.
Then, over this past weekend, the “stay focused” memo from Jones and Councilmember Sergio Jimenez caused an uproar, particularly with its aside stating that “in retrospect, prescribing the scope of work to include ‘additional measures and potential charter amendments, as needed, that will improve accountability, representation, and inclusion at San José City Hall’ may have been too broad of a direction.”
That language, combined with a September letter from City Manager Jennifer Maguire nudging the commission away from police-oversight work on the premise it would duplicate police-reform processes already underway, deflated several commissioners.
At the Wednesday Rules and Open Government Committee meeting, a multitude of residents and activists, including several commissioners speaking in a personal capacity, gave Jones and his colleagues an earful. Many took aim at the implication in Jones’ memo, and Maguire’s previous letter, that the commission’s exploration of a new police-oversight structure would be redundant with the work of the Reimagining Public Safety Community Advisory Committee, formed to recommend policing policy changes in the wake of the George Floyd unrest and demonstrations last year.
Several members of the “reimagining” committee told Jones and his council colleagues plainly that their work and the charter commission’s work were symbiotic rather than redundant.
“We are in unison with them,” Laurie Valdez said.
That was echoed by Lavere Foster, a “reimagining” committee member and policy coordinator for the city’s African American Community Services Agency. He read off a list of 30 local civil-rights and community-advocacy organizations that signed on to assert the policy aims of their committee were distinct from commission’s work on potential charter amendments.
“This is a community issue and as such should have a unified approach by all of the community,” Foster said.
They were joined by commissioners including Veronica Amador, Magnolia Segol and Sherry Segura, who objected to what they considered the late-stage timing of Jones’ memo, which they said threatened to derail nearly a year’s worth of work.
“We’re at the end of our process,” Segura said. “I also do not understand why people are so afraid of being educated, involving the community, and listening to what voters and this city want.”
Jones said that the prioritization message in his memo was needed because of concerns about whether the commission would complete its work on the primary mayor-related directives assigned by the council. He was backed by a handful of speakers, including Commissioner Tobin Gilman.
But Jones’ stance softened after commission Chair Frederick Ferrer assured Jones and the rest of the council committee that they were on track to finish work on all of their deliberations by early December.
“I have no intention nor a desire to have that work just thrown out,” Jones said. “My goal is to have this commission prioritize the direction that the council gave and get the work done.”
He ceded that the message of his memo should have been relayed far earlier, but that with the winter deadline approaching, it had to be addressed.
“There was no good time to have this discussion than at the beginning,” Jones said.
That brought limited comfort to commissioners like Segol, who asserted that had the mayoral election and power matters been presented as the the sole objectives of the commission, “Most of us wouldn’t have volunteered for this.”
The Charter Review Commission’s recommendations are scheduled to be taken up by the full city council Dec. 14.
Source: www.mercurynews.com