More to bite

Sacramento city school-board elections this fall were unusually competitive, basically a contest between a good-old-boy group of incumbents and a field of candidates pushing for more open, democratic governance of city schools.

Mostly, the good old boys won. So it goes. The exception was East Sacramento’s Area 2 school-board seat, where challenger Ellen Cochrane upset incumbent Jeff Cuneo.

What was the difference? Both were good candidates. Cochrane enjoyed significant financial support from the teachers union. But union support didn’t help other candidates, and may have hurt, given the steady stream of anti-labor propaganda coming from The Sacramento Bee.

It would be more satisfying to think voters in Area 2 decided to dump Cuneo for the terrible policies he supported. But they didn’t.

Certainly the school closures he supported were no factor. The election for Area 7, hardest hit by the closures, had less than half of the voter turnout of other local school-board races. But we knew that would happen. That’s what made those neighborhoods so easy to target for closures in the first place.

There was little in-depth reporting in the local press on the policy differences between the candidates. And how many voters would have read a story about school-board candidates, anyway?

In reality, it probably doesn’t take a lot of fancy analysis to figure out why Cochrane won. You could just compare the two candidates’ ballot designations. Cuneo’s said “School Board Member.” For Cochrane, it was “Public School Teacher.”

Not to diminish Cochrane at all; she’s very smart and was the right choice on many policy issues. And her Area 2 district had by far the highest voter turnout—suggesting a more committed and informed voter. But when you get into these down-ballot contests, those short little ballot designations can make the difference. That’s depressing in a way. But it also suggests that for all the teacher-bashing that goes on in this town, people still like teachers and trust that they know something about education. There’s hope in that.

Interesting Bee opinion piece recently on the long-building success of the R Street corridor. Columnist Marcos Breton rightly praised the city’s foresight in rejecting developers like Angelo Tsakopoulos, who wanted to wall in R Street with high-rise offices in the 1990s.

The column then goes on to laud the courage and vision of a few powerful dudes like Joe Serna, Deputy City Manager John Dangberg, and “cool” developers like Mark Friedman.

Cool. But the Bee is engaging in a little R Street revisionism here, ignoring the role of neighborhood activists and players like the Sacramento Old City Association. It was engaged citizens who agitated for human-scale development on R Street and pushed the then-radical notion of more downtown housing. The bureaucrats and developers followed.

Of course, those activists are the same people that the Bee worked hard this year to disenfranchise from local decision making—with Measure L and the Kings arena petition fight before that. But that’s hardly worth mentioning, either.

Just in time for Christmas, new toys for armchair analysts and open-government geeks from California State Controller John Chiang. The new “By the Numbers” website allows citizens to slice-and-dice data for California’s local governments. The tool lets users quickly explore all sorts of financial info for cities and counties, including a breakdown of tax revenue, expenditures and pension assets and liabilities.

Chiang also just posted raw data on the 4,800 “special districts” in the state—including fire districts and water districts—and is challenging tech-savvy citizens to come up with new apps and databases to engage the public.

The controller also made some changes this week to the Public Pay database, debuted by the controller in 2010. Earlier this month, the Center for Investigative Reporting published a report critical of Public Pay because it lists compensation for local government officials, but leaves out employee names and “falls short on transparency,” according to CIR. Still no names, but the updated tool includes 2013 payroll data. Check out the tools at ByTheNumbers.sco.ca.gov and PublicPay.ca.gov.

Larry Carr and Jeff Harris were sworn in to the Sacramento City Council last week. Bites has high hopes for these two. Each seems to have a healthy reserve of brains and integrity, and they’ll need it to resist the clubbiness and low-grade corruption that’s endemic on the council now.

“We all work for the same boss, the people of Sacramento,” said Carr in his first remarks from the dais. “They expect us to work together and put their interests ahead of our own.”

They do. Of course, politicians disappoint every time. It’s just hard-wired. If and when that happens, more for Bites to bite.