It was about power and incumbency, and it was about municipal bankruptcy. The City Council met in regular session Monday night and gloriously stole their own show, but there was more to it than met the eye.
Town Hall was packed, not the standing-room-only that often distinguishes our small, vibrant democracy, but there was a respectable turnout. In little Fort Bragg, a city of 7,000 residents, Council meetings are routinely attended by crowds far exceeding the who-cares-let-it-happen emptiness one ordinarily observes in the meetings of the County Board of Supervisors representing 80,000 constituents.
Monday night’s meeting drew a large audience attending for various reasons, among them being that it’s the last regular spot for the indigent to get a meal in the city. They had collided with city regulations and the city closed its doors to the hungry. (More on that later.) Some folks came to object to that.
The city was officially cutting our badly overworked police force by a single officer (we have 8 when they are fully staffed). The police lieutenant quit outright and two more former Fort Bragg officers have quietly migrated over the hill in recent months looking for a better gig.
But the headliner on the Monday night agenda was the city's next grudging step toward, perhaps, capitulation to The California Voting Rights Act as misapplied to Fort Bragg. That item was fundamental and apocalyptic but no one at the meeting was there for that. The impending termination of at-large elections has certainly angered the city, but since the CVRA is so hard to get one's head around, no one knows quite what to say. For sure no one in the folding chairs was expecting any stunning announcements.
Districting the city under the provisions of the CVRA allows voters to vote for one, not five city councilmen, every other election. Effectively, it crushes traditional Fort Bragg democracy. It is a bad law, a stinking law, resented and resisted by dozens of local governments across the state. It purports to address the racial injustice of vote dilution. Minorities (in our case our respected and beloved Hispanic community) are presumed to have special interests specific to race.
The CVRA postulates that those special interests are submerged (diluted) in the agendas of white majorities. That might be true in some places but in Fort Bragg, with its highly integrated deeply unified population, the presumption is patently offensive.
The new Latino candidate for the council, Ruben Alcala, told the City council Monday night he knew of zero support in the Hispanic community for districting. Mr. Alcala was expressing a city-wide consensus that crosses all ideological lines. There is literally no support for districting and no way out of it. That’s true across the state. But opportunistic attorneys riding the CVRA to personal fortune have crushed every city and every school board that has taken the fight to court.
Prior to the meeting Monday night, the City Council had only discussed dodging the bullet. The safe harbor provision of the CVRA immediately cuts the city into districts but saves the city from catastrophic costs of complex litigation that in CVRA lawsuits routinely run into millions. Extortion in the Safe Harbor is limited to $35,000 dollars.
It looked like the city was headed for that safe harbor when, wham out of the clear blue sky Monday night, the Mayor took the microphone to dramatically announce that the council was rescinding the Safe Harbor resolution and going to court to fight districting!
The council, to everyone's shock and awe, was standing up to Jacob Patterson, the lawyer threatening to sue the city, and his faceless cowardly committee. There was repressed cheering when they made the announcement (since public clapping is forbidden).
But courage can be costly.
Palmdale, California fought districting and paid out $4.5 million in court costs, the Madera Unified school district paid $1.2 million. The city of Modesto got hammered for $3.5 million. The Hanford school district got off easy with $110k payout. Anaheim paid $2 million. Santa Barbara got away with paying a mere $600k by caving in quickly. So did Santa Clara, paying $600k.
The Fort Bragg City Council has indicated its firm intention to fight not cave so we can't expect those nominal figures. That’s just a sample of the list of cities that have gone down in defeat and humiliation. They all paid ruinous financial penalties and they all got court imposed districting anyway.
The record of futile resistance is not 99% it is 100%.
In some cases, the courts tossed the elected representatives. The court has redrawn districting lines and commanded cities and school boards to pay and conform. Local government in California has been sacrificed on the altar of districting.
Fort Bragg has a skimpy $200k legal reserve trimmed from $300k a few months ago when they juggled the books to balance the budget. The capricious CVRA guarantees that everybody's attorneys' fees, the cost of expert demographers, and anything else they can think of is paid by the city to the attorney who sues them even if the assailed municipality gets down on their knees and settles. Normally if you lose you have to pay the other guy’s attorney fees. If you settle everybody pays their own lawyers. But the disreputable CVRA bestows lopsided power on the plaintiff and loads the dice outrageously against the defendant.
Ever since Saint Jacob [Patterson] of the Legal Process arrived in Fort Bragg, the legal pressure on the city has been unrelenting, ominous and implicitly apocalyptic. Attorney Patterson, otherwise unemployed, has the city over the proverbial barrel and has left the Fort Bragg City Council with no palatable choices.
Patterson, backed by a committee that won’t identify itself, won't justify his assertions of racism. Nobody has made a compelling argument or any argument at all about the reasonability of the reform perhaps because districting as a reform is not reasonable. The committee that allegedly hired Patterson won't confess their identities.
It’s been a rough ride for the City administration as well as the Council. The City administration has been besieged by Patterson with public information request forms and hammered with inconsiderate demands for meetings and outright harassment. Our exemplary and elegant City Clerk, a paragon of administrative efficiency and courtesy has been formally charged by the Pattersons (Patterson and his Mommy) with racism for making one mildly ironic, vastly not racist remark on social media.
The Monday night meeting left zero doubt the Council has taken all this harassment personally. One after another they stepped up to excoriate Mr. Patterson. Will Lee was notably pointed in his critique. Dave Turner was witty and succinct, calling it a solution in search of a problem.
And that settled it. Fort Bragg is joining the ranks of the hundreds of other local governments that have gone to court. Every one of them has plunged their constituencies into huge legal costs. Monday night Fort Bragg also took the leap.
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