Commentary: Sacramento again refuses to grow up
By Dan Walters | CalMatters Columnist |
Sacramento is the Peter Pan of California’s larger cities — never willing to grow up.
That became evident again
last week when the city’s voters soundly rejected the latest attempt at
creating a big city governance structure, this time shooting down a second
proposal to make Sacramento’s mayor a real executive, rather than a largely
powerless figurehead.
It was a personal defeat for
Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a one-time president pro tem of the state Senate, who
argued in vain that he and his successors need real authority to deal with
Sacramento’s big city problems.
They include, most notably, a
surging homelessness crisis that impedes efforts to remake Sacramento’s
somewhat shabby downtown into a happening place of young professionals,
entertainment, food and retail business.
Steinberg’s Measure A, however, was caught in a cross-fire of opposition from
city council members unwilling to cede authority to a mayor and from leftist
activists who consider Steinberg, a liberal Democrat by most standards,
insufficiently militant and too eager to compromise.
It’s a repeat of what
happened to Steinberg’s predecessor, former basketball star Kevin Johnson, when
he tried to install a strong mayor system. Sacramento will continue to limp
along with an unfocused, unimaginative city manager system more suited to a
much smaller city.
What happened, or didn’t
happen, last week was unsurprising to anyone familiar with Sacramento’s
history.
At one point in the mid-19th
century, it was the largest city west of the Mississippi — the jumping off
place for the California Gold Rush and a transportation hub at the junction of
two major rivers — although soon to be overshadowed by San Francisco.
Even though Sacramento became
California’s capital, its civic leaders preferred to maintain its small city
atmosphere as the surrounding region’s population grew sharply during and after
World War II. They stoutly resisted expanding the city’s boundaries, thus
diverting regional growth into suburban communities, most of which were
unincorporated.
An effort was mounted in the
1970s to consolidate city and county governments and create a city with more
than 700,000 residents, but it failed, in part because Sacramento’s civic
leadership didn’t support it. Glen Sparrow, who had been executive director of
the city-county consolidation commission, later wrote a lengthy analysis of the
defeat and blamed much of it on what he called a hidebound “civic gentry” of
old families.
A second consolidation effort
a decade later was no more successful, resisted by the city’s Democratic
political figures who feared that merging with the Republican-leaning suburbs
would lead to a loss of power.
Consolidation failures
ultimately meant that Sacramento today contains less than a fourth of the
seven-county region’s 2.2 million residents. They also meant that much of the
region’s commercial activity shifted to suburbs, which ate into the sales taxes
that became the backbone of municipal finances after Proposition 13 curbed
property tax growth.
Three suburban communities —
Citrus Heights, Rancho Cordova and Elk Grove — became cities so that they could
benefit from tax collections in auto malls and shopping centers. As an
assemblyman, Steinberg carried legislation that, if enacted, would have forced
the Sacramento region’s suburbs to share some of their sales tax revenues, but
it failed after creating even more city-suburban hostility.
Having muffed so many chances
to become the major American city Steinberg and others envision, Sacramento
seems destined to remain what I termed it 35 years ago in a book about California
megatrends, a “gangly adolescent” stranded somewhere between childhood and
adulthood and unwilling to mature.
CalMatters
is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how
California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan
Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary
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