Reading recently issued reports
prepared by Marin’s civil grand jury, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that
the county might be better governed by this groups of 19 volunteers than by the
politicians running the show.
It’s not that our individual
supervisors are bad folks. Generally, they are well-intentioned, personally
honest and intelligent.
It’s that when they assemble as
a group, so little of substance gets accomplished. The supervisors’ record on
reforming Marin’s creaky governmental structure is bleak. Unless they are
spending millions on bicycle paths, symbolic acts are their specialty.
Contrast that with Marin’s
top-flight grand jury. Its members addressed some of the county’s thorniest
issues and proposed bold, positive reforms. Unencumbered by political
considerations, jurors tend to check their own personal ideology and
predilections at the door.
Leading this year’s list of
progressive reforms proposed by the local jury and ignored by county
supervisors is COIN — Civic Openness In Negotiations. Adopted by a handful of
Southern California jurisdictions, COIN defines a transparent procedure
requiring agencies during each step of negotiations with public employees for
salary and benefits to publicly disclose terms being offered and their
long-term cost in an easy-to-understand fashion.
What a revolutionary idea! If
COIN had been in place since the late 1990s, California cities, counties and
special-purpose districts wouldn’t be suffering the dire consequences from
drained local resources caused by unsustainable public employee pensions.
COIN is an obvious step in the
right direction, but our supervisors don’t want to hear about it. Right now,
supervisors are negotiating with county workers for a new pay pact, but Marin
taxpayers have little notion of their bargaining’s long cost and implications.
Instead, when the deal is made Marinites will be presented with a fait
accompli, with little idea of the package’s fiscal implications.
Adopting COIN will anger public
employee unions who, understandably, prefer negotiating out of the spotlight.
These same unions play an outside role particularly in supervisorial campaigns.
That’s where the grand jury’s
institutional independence shines. Special-interest groups have no outsized
influence with jurors. Because they serve only one- or two-year terms and don’t
get paid, they are classic true public servants who will only-too-soon walk out
of the Civic Center and back into everyday private life.
The jury consistently had the
intestinal fortitude to tackle some of Marin’s most contentious issues.
Regarding the homeless that plague downtown San Rafael, they’ve made
responsible observations and suggestions that are too often ignored because
they upset the status quo.
This year, they proposed
closing the county’s Juvenile Hall. With new alternatives to incarceration, far
fewer young people are housed in the aging San Rafael facility. Its annual
population is down 85 percent, from 1,674 young inmates in 1995 to 251 today.
It costs $910 per day per inmate to house and care for an average 10 residents
per day.
That’s what a suite costs at
the Ritz Carlton. Expenses are high because 21 full-time staffers are required
to do the job.
Why not, as the grand jury
proposes, close Juvenile Hall and contract with a neighboring county to house
the young prisoners?
Other counties have taken this
cost-saving approach. Even if the Board of Supervisors makes the change, the
obvious question is, why didn’t they and their well-paid staff think of it
first?
In past years, grand jurors
spotted deficiencies and suggested reforms for Marin’s unsupervised
special-purpose districts. They foresaw problems at the dysfunctional Ross
Valley Sanitary District before it became a scandal.
The grand jury is Marin’s most
unheralded good government resource. Voters should note when local elected
officials ignore their sage advice.
July 7, 2015
Marin
Independent Journal
By Dick
Spotswood
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