My two cents:


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I appreciate Mueller's recommendation and support this suggestion.

As community members, it is very challenging to extract information out of the city if it doesn't appear in the press. The City Council meetings, while public, are a challenge to engage with for the majority of the city residents. Providing this level of transparency would keep members and city staff accountable, residents prioritized, and help with the flow of information.

Thank you Councilman Mueller for this recommendation.

I agree with you, Stu. It's really simple. Representative Government (presumably that's what we have) requires/demands, full disclosure. More information is always better. Less information = less representation. Our City Council and City Administration need to work for us, not their own resumes. If we're not being kept fully informed, we need to change our representation. Yes, term limits are a good idea.

"Under the proposed policy, each council member, planning commissioner and the city manager would have to submit a calendar each Wednesday by 5 p.m. covering the previous Monday through Sunday."

Excellent idea! I would like to impose this requirement on Sequoia Healthcare District CEO, Lee Michelson, and his staff. I have used the CPRA to obtain the calendar when Stephanie Scott was CEO. Unfortunately, Lee Michelson is on record as stating that he does not "... keep communications of any type nor do I plan to in the future", and, "I do not keep emails that I send."

I suggest that, in the spirit of transparency, the City of Menlo Park should post prior years calendars of those individuals cited by Ray Mueller. That would be in addition to the weekly requirement sought by Ray.

I applaud Mr Mueller's suggestion and the unanimously supportive comments above. Also: we would do well to apply the requirement to other commissions often engaged in contentious issues - Transportation for one.

I, too, support Ray's proposals. One of the comments in Stu Soffer's blog refers to the additional need to monitor staff contacts. I concur with that as well. That is especially true of Community Development staff, who too often, in my opinion, serve developers rather than residents.

In a larger sense, though, city staff--indeed, all public sector staff--are the primary beneficiaries of public support. The Brown Act ensured that legislators could not collude out of the public eye (or solve problems informally, either), but it allowed staff members to engage in private actions that put compensation, benefits, contracts, and performance issues largely out of the reach of remedial action. Worse, public workers are permitted to finance political campaigns, with the result being that the master (the public, via its representative) sometimes ends up working for the slave (employee unions).

The problem, of course, is going to be defining what is public business. At what point does discussing the trees in my yard cross over into discussing their removal, which suddenly becomes a public matter.

--Chuck Bernstein
444 Oak Court

As a long-time former Menlo Park resident, I applaud Councilman Mueller for his desire to increase public oversight of city business. His accountability to voters is exceptional in these times, and in particular when compared to business-as-usual in the Town of Woodside, where sloppy management, obfuscation and secrecy hold sway.

[Cross posted from Stu's blog comments]

[...snip...]

There's nothing that prevents Mueller from asking Council members to also report their own meetings with staff, or to have Council, as a body instruct the City Manager to instruct staff, particularly planning staff, to log meetings and phone calls with developers and other applicants. This was done in the past. The log is public record. That way council and the public can know whats in the system and whats coming into the system.

Another way is the Palo Alto method of "disclosure" whereby Council, Planning Commission, ARB, etc are required to report their contacts from applicant and public lobbyists, and briefly disclose those contacts and their content during a specific period of the approval meeting.

The point that the City manager is a spoke in the wheel is quite astute. In "Staff driven" councils, the City Manager is often in a unique position to effectively circumvent Brown Act limitations simply because the City Mgr can have serial contact with a majority (or all) council members on an issue and the City Mgr controls the Staff Reports. The City Mgr may not tell Council member B what council member A said, but he/she can easily take temperatures of all council members. If the City Manager is driving the agenda then he/she is in a unique position to gain information about how council feels on "his/her" agenda and can manipulate Staff Reports accordingly.

In "Council driven" staffs. This is less of an issue because Council is actively driving agenda contents and actively monitoring Staff Reports presumably through a "stong mayor."

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