Sacramento’s strong mayor ballot measure was defeated. Parts of it might still happen
Sacramento’s “strong mayor” ballot measure is headed toward defeat. But a handful of items in the measure aimed at uplifting the city’s communities of color and low income neighborhoods are still alive.
“I am absolutely committed to following through on all those elements,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg said.
During a City Council meeting Aug. 4, activists criticized Steinberg for including equity plans in the ballot measure, describing it as an “all or nothing” package. Some even accused him of holding the equity measures hostage as a way to sweeten the proposal that would have given the mayor more power under a new form of government. At the end of the meeting, Steinberg defended his decision, but said he wanted the council to vote on the equity pieces within 30 days.
That did not happen. But the council’s Law and Legislation Committee has been discussing one of the main items — incorporating social equity analysis into city decision-making. As written in the Measure A ballot language, that would mean a new annual audit and commission to analyze “potential council decisions for their effects on residents most negatively and disproportionately harmed and impacted by socioeconomic, environmental, and historical factors, including taking into account racial, ethnic, gender, sexual-orientation, and sexual-identity equity.”
But it should go farther than that, Councilman Eric Guerra said. He wants the city to train staff to assess how items impact the city’s communities of color. If staff find a proposal would have a negative impact, he’d like staff to include measures to improve it or bring it to the City Council with a recommendation to reject it — something rarely done currently.
Last year, the council prohibited new mini storage facilities and auto service shops from opening along sections of Stockton Boulevard and Broadway — part of a plan to make those automobile-centric corridors more walkable and bikeable. Guerra sees adding equity analysis to council items as a way to make that kind of consideration common citywide.
“We need to train staff about the positive or negative externalities of everything we do,” Guerra said.
Similarly, a few years ago, Councilwoman-elect Katie Valenzuela joined residents of south Sacramento to urge the city’s planning commission to reject a proposal for yet another fast food restaurant with a drive-thru and no outdoor seating. They did not prevail.
“It undid the potential for that site to be walkable, right next to a light rail station,” Valenzuela said. “If an equity analysis was in place then, it might have looked at that ZIP code and found it had a high rate of respiratory illness and death. It maybe could’ve included the fact a (similar) project in East Sacramento was better.”
Yet in 2015, the city denied a request from developer Paul Petrovich to build a gas station near a light rail station in his Curtis Park Crocker Village development — an affluent neighborhood, Valenzuela pointed out.
The change could also require staff to put a paragraph on every agenda item for “equity impacts,” similar to how “environmental impacts” are done now. That could include, for example, an analysis of the contractors the city is planning to award projects and whether they’re from a diverse background.
“Much like surgeons go through a checklist before walking to an operating table, or pilots go through a checklist before taking a commercial flight, we’re asking governments to use a checklist to make sure they’re making decisions that drives towards an equitable future,” said Nora Liu of Race Forward, a national nonprofit that has been working with city leaders on the effort.
There isn’t a uniform way of ensuring equity analysis in government decisions. The city of Austin, Texas, created an equity assessment tool that helps city departments better understand how their services impact residents under an equity lens. Each department self-assesses strengths and weaknesses, then plans and budgets around goals to reduce disparities. According to the city’s Equity Office website, “It tries to make Staff recognize who their work serves and doesn’t serve.”
Following Austin’s example would be a good step for Sacramento, said Malaki Amen, executive director of the California Urban Partnership.
“This country has a 400-year-old racial equity problem that’s not going to go away overnight,” Amen said, “but for Portland and Oakland and Austin, Texas to have started and made progress, (that’s) the most important measure that we can look at and appreciate.”
But it seems unlikely Sacramento will be able to add staff to create an Equity Office like Austin’s anytime soon. The coronavirus pandemic has caused the city to lose more than $90 million in expected revenue, prompting the city manager to institute a hiring freeze.
Increasing public input in the budget
The “strong mayor” measure would have also included something called “participatory budgeting.”
The idea under that system — which cities like Chicago, New York, Vallejo and Long Beach use and which activists here have been requesting for years — would be to increase public input in the budget. That would happen with a series of workshops and staff presentations that would give the public a greater say in the creation of the budget.
Currently, the city allows the public to give public comments on the proposed budget in the spring, but few people show up. Those who do speak at the podium are cut off after two minutes. This May, when the council adopted the current budget, no one called in to give a comment.
Tamie Dramer, executive director of local advocacy group Organize Sacramento, said participatory budgeting would help more residents directly determine where their tax dollars are spent.
“A lot of ordinary humans don’t understand how the budget process works and why their needs are not being met,” Dramer said.
Big ticket projects and economic development such as the Golden 1 Center and the Sacramento Convention Center have been concentrated in the city’s urban core, Dramer said, while other neighborhoods like in North and south Sacramento struggle to secure similar investments.
“Those are important things for us, but they’re not doing anything for the people in District 2 and District 8, and that’s where our largest communities of color are based,” Dramer said. “If it’s brought to the attention and forefront, perhaps there will be more care and thought and consideration about where the city is distributing its money.”
Some neighborhoods that might most benefit from equity reforms in the city voted in favor of Measure A, including parts Meadowview, Valley Hi, Del Paso Heights and Hagginwood, according to the county’s early returns.
What else could be done?
Nearly one in four Black residents and one in five Latino residents in Sacramento County lived in poverty from 2014 to 2018, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. About 11% of white residents lived in poverty during that same period.
“People are not thriving,” Liu said. “People are not thriving equitably.”
Measure A also included a slew of other items: The creation of a fair housing and human rights commission; requiring the city to analyze impacts of items on small businesses; and helping council offices better respond to constituents’ concerns.
It’s unclear whether the council will enact those items, and in what form. Some community groups and activists are pushing for the city to adopt additional actions, beyond what was in the ballot measure.
This summer, the City Council of Asheville, North Carolina, apologized for the city’s history of slavery and racist policies, and voted to provide reparations in the form of investments in neighborhoods where Black residents face inequities.
Nia MooreWeathers, a community organizer with Youth Forward, said she hopes Sacramento can similarly take unprecedented actions to rectify longstanding disparities in the city. Sacramentans and city leaders, she said, are more receptive than ever to change.
“I think that the City Council is different. I think they’re different than they were six months ago. COVID has changed all of us, in a way,” MooreWeathers said. “While there is still work to be done, I think we’re headed in the right direction.”
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
