As I speak with Santa Cruz City Council candidates, the third-most-recurrent theme after affordable housing (everyone’s top issue) and post-pandemic economic recovery is the power imbalance in our city-manager form of government between career staff of the city bureaucracy and elected but transient representatives of the public serving their four-year terms on the council (with the chance of doubling down for four more before being termed out, then being able to run again after a two-year break from office). City staff has the historical and professional knowledge to guide the council toward policy outcomes it considers necessary or beneficial for the city. Council, in theory the executive branch, may also formulate policy and direct staff to execute it. Whether or not such initiatives are ever implemented is a measure of the system’s capacity to accommodate or ignore an agenda not of its own making.
This is less a matter of any Trumpian “deep state” conspiracy to thwart…
