I was immediately shot down by Wynne Furth, who said it would be a violation of the council rules for either one of them to respond or otherwise have a dialog with a member of the public during public comments. Both Messrs. Dobbie and Carlson refused to answer the question.
Notwithstanding this, Jerry Carlson went on to have such dialogs with members of the public in the public comments section of the next two agenda items.
Today I received a legal memo authored by Wynne Furth (that I have copied below in the first comment). It was forwarded to me with the express notation by Furth that it should be freely distributed. In it, Furth admits that it is not against the rules for council members to respond to the public, but (naturally) they can decide whether or not they want to.
However, the mission may have been accomplished. Both of these candidates, Dobbie and Carlson, successfully avoided answering this question, in public, at the council meeting.
Therefore, I will ask it again herein. I know both of them read these forums, and Mr. Dobbie has responded on these forums before. My question is: will you commit to not accepting campaign donations from groups doing business with the Town of Atherton (notably unions and real estate developers) as part of your campaigns for city council?
I encourage the Almanac to call both of these candidates and pose the question to them directly.
My opinion is that council members represent the residents of this community, period. Groups doing business with the Town donate money for the plain purpose of influencing the council members to act in an advantageous way to that business. I understand it is legal, and free speech. That doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean that Atherton voters should not take that into consideration when making their voting selection. I do not believe any candidate who accepts donations from groups doing business with the Town deserves even one vote.
As an aside, it seems the Atherton council should change its own rules of procedure to make the consistent with the Brown Act. Arguably they currently violate the Brown Act by attempting to put restrictions on public comments that the Brown Act expressly permits.
