The Zero-Sum games of Elk Grove City Hall, Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen and her city council
https://www.elkgrovenews.net/2025/02/the-zero-sum-games-of-elk-grove-city.html
Modern discourse, especially in the era of Donald Trump, is controlled by zero‐sum thinking - a perspective that reduces complex interactions to simplistic contests of winners versus losers.
An example of this zero-sum mentality was displayed on Wednesday, February 26, at the Elk Grove City Council. The display came when Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen and her city council abandoned a flood control project for one neighborhood to support other projects in newer, sleeker parts of the city.
Speaking to the mayor and city council during public comment on consent calendar items, Elk Grove resident Ms. Kathy Lee cited numerous reports that a long-planned flood control project for Bond Road was necessary. Elk Grove public works director Jeff Werner, who already had his marching orders, did not have any part of that thinking, saying conditions had changed (see Ms. Lee’s comments in the video below).
Despite having a public information session about the abandonment of the long-planned flood protection on the changes earlier this month – a fig leaf of concern on the part of the city - the decision had already been determined. Placing it on the consent calendar was a legal formality.
The residents near the Bond Road project would be the losers, and another neighborhood or pet project of Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen would be the winner.
Classic zero-sum mentality.
The mayor and city council operate with a zero-sum game mentality. For every one of the mayor’s victories, such as saddling taxpayers with hundreds of millions of dollars of high-cost debt for a new zoo, comes at an equal loss to other potentially life-saving projects like building over/underpasses for the rail crossings that beleaguer old Elk Grove neighborhoods east of Highway 99.
These fruitless battles are waged against the monolithic institutions of bureaucracy. The proverbial struggle against City Hall epitomizes a fight against a prearranged outcome.
In municipalities like Elk Grove, and for that matter in Trump's Washington DC, decisions are made behind closed doors, with public input reduced to mere ceremonial objections recorded in three-minute blocks. When opaque power structures and entrenched special interests predetermine the outcome, any public resistance becomes a symbolic gesture rather than a catalyst for genuine citizen engagement.
Once the mayor sets the bureaucratic machinery in motion, fighting it is little more than a ritual that expends energy without altering the inevitable. Ultimately, Mayor Singh-Allen and the city council are puppets on a string controlled by the rich and powerful, who give them cash, and the average citizens are collateral damage.
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