Council Corner: The Journey -- Just the Beginning

By the time you read this column, a new council will have been selected to serve this city and the major focus will be on the city budget for the next fiscal year. Our City budget is important and needs to be continuously measured, evaluated and adjusted accordingly and the council will spend significant time and effort to do so. I wish them well and know they will proceed with solid planning and conservative decision making that will hopefully keep this city operating at its highest and best levels of service to all the residents.

I say “hopefully” because, after serving on the council for the last eight years, I have seen a subtle but consistent effort to eliminate city governance altogether. This is not something that might happen in 5 or 10 years, but is actively taking place right now. I believe residents should be aware of it and the new council should actively participate in assuring that our ability to make decisions in the best interest of Foster City, stays localized and within the power, control and proximity of all the citizens of this community.

City governments are a non-partisan way in which all the citizens of a community can have access to local government to address their concerns, participate in finding solutions and find immediate attention to their problems. However, local city government, having the authority to act on behalf of its community, may be accelerating toward being a thing of the past. The landscape of California has changed dramatically over the years with unsuccessfully managing its finances and finding itself in dismal financial condition. Who is at fault and how we got here has many opinions and political pundits offering the usual partisan pointing of fingers. Our State has daunting financial problems and it appears that the body politic decided that the way to continue business as usual was to invade the resources of its individual cities.

Cities will continue to face adversarial conditions as long as the State Legislature continues this practice of taking money from local government agencies even though the voters passed Proposition 22 to stop this practice. The state took recourse to block the will and vote of the people and immediately eliminated redevelopment agencies. Foster City was substantially affected by these state raids. This seemingly endless battle with the state is forcing local agencies to share essential services and make drastic cuts to city budgets.

Foster City has grown and developed well and its landscape continues to evolve as the needs of the residential and business communities change. When I first joined the council, regionalism was the new buzz word around. The word had a feeling of being connected and that meant opening doors for the 20 cities in San Mateo County to be able to work more closely together. Through a collective relationship we might see an increase in efficiency and enable cities to provide other types of services that their residents aptly would define as unique to their community. However, the ability to adjust the services to better serve our individual community will be substantially lost and decisions as to service levels and quality will be measured for an area much larger than just our city and individual citizen input will be further removed. The need of cities to drive their budgets with lower levels of revenue set against ever increasing costs of services will push this process into reality.

We are seeing an increasing movement in our Bay Area to consolidate in the name of conservation or climate control. Plan Bay Area is one of our region’s most comprehensive planning efforts to date. Based on SB 375 requirements, the Sustainable Communities Strategy will identify how the Bay Area region can satisfy the housing demand for its projected population across all income categories. It will adopt a forecasted development pattern for the 9 county regions, supported by a transportation system that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is a joint effort led by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in partnership with the Bay Area’s other two regional government agencies, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. And who will be in charge? The idea that seems to resonate here is that slowly but surely local control will be eliminated and larger regional governments will be in place.

All four agencies are collaborating at an unprecedented level to produce a more integrated land-use/transportation plan. The vision focuses on the location of growth areas around the Bay Area and outlines a future development pattern. The Bay Area’s biggest cities get even bigger, with San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland together accounting for nearly one-third of all new housing units. Equity is a central component of sustainability, along with the economy and environment, which together define the three E’s of regional planning. The Bay Area’s regional agencies have addressed equity over the years and will continue to do so as an essential component of Plan Bay Area. As part of this effort, a Regional Equity Working Group has been created to assist in identifying and providing advice on the major equity issues in the region, such as affordable housing, public health, employment access, environmental justice, affordable transit and schools.

What I have described is just a small portion of the unrelenting efforts and movement to homogenize our cities, equalize and concentrate all services to bring better utility and costs to the citizens. But will it? I wonder, if at the end of this process, we will not feel further removed from our ability to express our problems and concerns and actually have someone who cares and works not for their own political ambitions but for the community they have chosen to serve. I believe local government gives each of us a chance to be heard and a chance to have that voice actually invoke action. I also think it gives many of us a chance to serve our community and to feel inspired by the collective voice of our neighbors. Sadly this may become a thing of the past.

I invite comments on this and other issues: lkoelling@fostercity.org.