The City of Petaluma Government is Broken
– Typical afternoon traffic dealing with the re-Striping of D Street –
We have a dysfunctional city council in Petaluma. For too many years, major projects that have major impacts on the quality of life in Petaluma have been planned and organized behind the scenes between city council members, our out-sourced planning department, and out-of-town deep-pocketed developers. These projects are then sprung on us with little notice, and the public has little time nor opportunity to respond. The city council is doing great as far as serving the interests of Basin Street, EKN and other big property owners and developers, but it is broken in the sense that the council doesn’t adequately represent the interests of those who live and work in Petaluma.
The proposed zoning overlay in our historic downtown is just the largest example of this dynamic. The first time the public heard about any type of “overlay” to allow a 6-story luxury hotel to be built in our historic downtown was in June, 2023. At that time, the city proposed to put an overlay over our entire downtown, that proposal fell flat on its face. But did the city quit there? No. They came back with the current three-zone overlay which was first introduced at a planning commission meeting in November of last year. 72 hours before that meeting, hundreds of pages on the details of the new overlay proposal were made public for the first time. Even though this information and the topic of the meeting was sprung on Petaluma citizens at the last minute, Petalumans got to work and read through the entire report. Enough people showed up at that meeting, that it ran for 8 hours until the early morning. Petalumans who care deeply about Petaluma are a great asset for our city, but the city apparently doesn’t see it that way.
It is claimed that this overlay will improve the economic conditions and provide needed affordable housing to our downtown. But where are the economic studies on the current economic conditions? Where are the surveys about the concerns of our current downtown business owners? Where is the consensus among downtown businesses on what needs to be done to improve business conditions? How can you propose a solution when you haven’t even defined the problem?
And where are the housing proposals that are now being thwarted by not having a (6-story, 100% lot coverage, no parking) overlay? Where are the scale models that show how great our downtown will be with 6-story and possibly 9-story buildings? Where are the story poles for the proposed EKN hotel to show Petalumans the true scale of that hotel as currently proposed?
They don’t exist.
Several of us noticed this dysfunction years ago, and we went to work on changing the composition of the city council. Over two election cycles, we worked hard to break up Mike Healy’s majority on the city council and elected people who we thought were going to finally work for us, the residents of Petaluma. When we managed to get Brian Barnacle elected with the highest vote count 4 years ago, we thought we were well under way to reform. He had criticized the city’s arrangement with the M Group, the secrecy of city government, and rampant violations of the Brown Act. We thought we could rest for a while.
It finally became clear that we were badly mistaken when he criticized a grand jury report on problems with the city’s outsourcing of almost all planning functions to the M Group. Instead of saying, “We should look into the findings of the grand jury report and correct any deficiencies”, Brian wrote an op-ed in the Argus-Courier in July of 2023 with a staunch defense of the M Group and their arrangement with the city. Many of us felt we had wasted all our efforts to get him into office at that point. The secrecy is now as bad as ever, and projects keep getting approved against the wishes of the people that are most affected, and with no apparent benefit to our overall quality of life.
This past week, I was watching the most recent city council meeting on YouTube, and I saw the frustration of a group of Petaluma residents over a housing development on Casa Grande Road. Of course, their agenda item was the last item of the session and many of them had to leave before they got a chance to speak. I have seen this script many times before.
One speaker complained how he couldn’t comment on the design of the project when it came to the planning commission, he could only comment on the EIR. And when it got to the city council this week, again, he can only comment on the EIR, not the design. It seems that there was never any point where the community could make any suggestions about the design of the project nor explain the impacts on their neighborhood by the proposed design. Many of these people have lived in that neighborhood for decades and probably have valuable suggestions for making this housing project better (for everyone), but this is just another in a long line of examples of what has been happening in our town for years. A complete shutout of public input. This has led to several lawsuits by the citizens against the city, and that serves no one.
This whole process needs to be changed so that that city government starts “working with” Petaluma residents rather than “doing things to” Petaluma residents.
If I am elected, the two incumbents who support the current process will be gone, and my work to change this dysfunctional process will begin.
Hopefully on November 6th, we can say to the City of Petaluma “Can you hear us now?”.
Your vote matters!
Lance
An Endorsement from a District 6 Voter
“I recently moved to Petaluma and chose this town to make my new home because I fell in love with the history of the area and its close knit community feel. I support this campaign because its vision and mission for the future of Petaluma aligns with mine. It also upsets me that the public’s voices matter less in the current city government”
To help spread the message of this campaign, consider getting a yard sign and/or making a donation. I am running against two incumbents simultaneously, and changing how our city is run isn’t easy.