Employees controlled the Sacramento City Council in 2024. Here is how to change that | Opinion

When Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan broke the law by hastily placing his own pay raise on a City Council agenda, it was consistent with the performance standards that the council had set for him.

When City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood did nothing to stop the council from acting on an illegal council agenda item, that also aligned with the council’s direction.

When City Clerk Mindy Cuppy failed to give city-required public notice of a tax increase on the 2024 ballot that drew no formal ballot opposition, all was well as far as the City Council was concerned.

How can this be?

It’s because the City Council isn’t accustomed to truly managing the employees that it directly hires. It has no council-approved performance standards or expectations for its six top executives to follow — and for voters to ultimately hold accountable. Four of these officers do not even have employment contracts to codify anything.

“Our system is not working,” Councilmember Mai Vang said on Dec. 17. She said this as she was being asked to extend Chan’s contract. And she noted that she had never actually evaluated Chan by measuring his actions against adopted “benchmarks.”

A new year and new leadership are coming to Sacramento. After trying in every way possible for more than a year to raise his pay and lengthen his contract, Chan has decided to leave. A new mayor in Kevin McCarty has taken the reins at City Hall. He is joined by two new council members, Roger Dickinson and Phil Pluckebaum.

The worst thing this new mayor and council could do is to pretend that a year of repeated and serious mistakes never happened. This should be a learning moment. This should be when a mayor and council, having found themselves repeatedly manipulated by a manager who grew more powerful than them, take back control of Sacramento.

Abandon rubber-stamp self-evaluations

The council is the direct boss of the city manager, attorney, auditor, treasurer, clerk and director of the Office of Public Safety and Accountability, the independent police watchdog. To give you an example of how lax the council’s oversight of these managers has become, look no further than the July 30 meeting of its Personnel and Public Employees Committee.

On this day, these top employees essentially evaluated themselves in annual reports placed on the committee’s agenda. The documents were considered so meaningless that they were placed on the committee’s consent calendar (save for the city auditor), which is generally used for items that do not require the council’s attention. Chan didn’t even bother to produce his own evaluation.

The meeting was over in 36 minutes.

Self-evaluations have their place in both government and the private sector. But they are no substitute for managers — in this case, the mayor and City Council — actually managing. Under Chan, who steadily amassed political power in town over eight years at the expense of his actual bosses, the council retreated from its rightful duties.

That must end.

The mayor should use the full powers of the office

Sacramento has long had what’s known as a “weak mayor” form of government because the city’s top elected official has no sole authority in hiring the manager or crafting the annual budget. But looks can be deceiving.

Both state law and the city charter give Mayor Kevin McCarty far more power than his predecessors have chosen to wield. Particularly when it comes to setting the city manager’s pay, reform can happen with two straightforward actions.

Make the mayor the salary negotiator

City councils in California can meet privately to discuss labor negotiations, whether it is a raise for the city manager or the police department. The state’s open meetings law, the Brown Act, details how the City Council can hold these closed sessions over negotiations with its negotiators, its “designated representatives.”

Chan didn’t exactly face a formidable salary negotiator. The council’s designated representatives in Chan’s salary negotiations last July, for example, were two of his subordinates, Human Resources Director Shelley Banks-Robinson and Chief Information Officer Aaron Donato.

That’s nuts.

The mayor should be among the designated representatives to negotiate the city manager’s salary and subsequent adjustments. All it takes is a council vote to make it so.

Prohibit city manager arm twisting

City Council members hold all the power in setting the rules of engagement between them and the city manager. It’s time to wield that power.

Currently, no rule prevents a city manager from meeting privately with every council member and pressing for more money, something that Chan was notoriously known for.

The council can easily extract itself from the drama. It can amend its Rules of Procedure, the city’s official code of conduct, to limit any compensation discussions regarding the city manager to council meetings, save for the private negotiations between Chan and the designated lead negotiator, the mayor.

Hold the City Attorney accountable for legal meetings

It should be a top performance goal of the City Council that its city attorney never allow an illegal action to happen at a meeting. Absent this basic expectation, illegal things have happened. A hastily arranged special meeting in December 2023 to increase the top officers’ salaries, for example, had to be repeated due to questions about its legality. Privately this fall, Alcala Wood advised council members that Chan had violated the City Charter by substituting his approach to racial equity for one recommended by a City Council committee.

Yet in both cases, the city attorney said nothing in public. Failing to step in, in public if necessary as a last resort, should run contrary to the city attorney’s council-approved job requirement to maintain lawful meetings.

Hold the city clerk accountable for transparency

In November 2023, the City Council voted to place a proposal to increase taxes for various city businesses on the March 2024 ballot. But then, City Clerk Mindy Cuppy did not follow through with a requirement in the City Charter to provide public notice of this action within 10 days. No citizen stepped forward to file an opposition statement for the ballot.

Taxpayers and medical organizations ended up opposing the proposal, Measure C, after learning about it later. Voters ended up resoundingly rejecting it in March.

It should be a council performance measure for the city clerk to follow all transparency requirements rather than embrace her dubious claim that her inaction was somehow consistent with her duties.

Who will run Sacramento in 2025?

There is now a power vacuum in City Hall, with the departure of a once influential city manager and the arrival of a new mayor who did not have the support of the business or progressive communities.

McCarty and the council have all the power they need to change Sacramento for the better.

This story was originally published December 31, 2024 at 5:00 AM.