Rebecca Alison Meyer
Ahuva Raya bat Kayla
7 June 2008 – 7 June 2014 image available athttp://tinyurl.com/mrkb3vw
On June 7, 2014, Rebecca Alison Meyer, age 6, of Beachwood, Ohio, passed away from complications associated with an anapestic astrocytoma ("brain cancer"). She and her parents, Kathryn and Eric Meyer, endured a multiyear struggle to save her life; Eric, a web technology expert concerning Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) blogged poignantly about the treatment. The final memorial Eric wrote for Rebecca can be read here; the Economist's Babbage (technology) columnist drew attention to it today here:
"The death of a child is always a tragedy, and people of good will try to make sense of it through whatever means they have."
Eric's friends had one tool at their disposal to memorialize his daughter -- in CSS. Style sheets control the appearance of certain items on a web page, and they allow colors to be expressed hexadecimally; #000000 is black, #FFFFFF is white. Other colors are combinations in between. However, there are a certain select group of colors that may be expressed by name. For example, #ADFF2F can also be described as #GreenYellow.
Rebecca was particularly fond of purple -- her parents asked that family and friends at her funeral wear purple in memory of her. Many who were touched by Eric's relating of Becca's story couldn't attend, for they were all over the world. But a group of technologists, led by Jeffrey Zeldman, suggested that #663399 in CSS be designated #beccapurple. As of the nightly Firefox build on June 23, the color has indeed been designated by name, but as #rebeccapurple. Eric requested the change, saying:
"A couple of weeks before she died, Rebecca informed us that she was about to be a big girl of six years old, and Becca was a baby name. Once she turned six, she wanted everyone (not just me) to call her Rebecca, not Becca."
"She made it to six. For almost twelve hours, she was six. So Rebecca it is and must be."
One particular passage from Eric's writings especially moved me, because it expressed and captured something so clearly important. In her last days, Eric and Kat made sure that, as long as she was able, Rebecca could go each day to kindergarten. His explanation of why is one of the most saddening and yet eloquent statements of the nature of education and parenting I've ever read. And so, as my tribute to Eric and Kat, as well as Rebecca Meyer, I include that passage, from May 1 of this year, from a post Eric entitled "Heroic Measures."
"This morning, I walked Rebecca and her best friend to kindergarten, all of us enjoying the crisp spring sunshine after the long, cold winter. The girls ran ahead of me to see if the playground had been re-flooded by last night’s rains (it hadn’t) and then balance-walked a low retaining wall. Once inside the school doors, I hugged and kissed Rebecca and told her to have a good day, collecting a hug and kiss and a 'Love you, Daddy' in return. I watched as she tromped down the hallway in her sparkly new Bella Ballerina shoes and pajamas (today is a special Pajama Day at school) and rounded the corner out of sight. And then I handed her principal a Do Not Resuscitate order."
"... [w]e carry DNR cards with us, and have given the school a DNR form sealed into a manila envelope with our names and phone numbers written on the outside, because if she suddenly seizes, our overriding goal is to make her as comfortable as possible while she dies. The EMTs or hospice or we ourselves will give her medication to take away the pain and, if at all possible, the fear. As much as she needs."
"... [w]e send her to school because she loves it there, however much she may complain about having to get up in the morning and get dressed and put on a coat to walk to school. Try as she may to hide it, she loves to learn. She loves her teacher, her classmates, and her friends, and they love her in return. It would be selfish of us to take that away, despite the risks, despite the hours of separation. It would shift some of our burden onto her shoulders, force her to pay the cost of our sorrow and fear ... we can give her her life, as whole and unbroken as we can manage, and an unspoken promise to fiercely guard it from even ourselves."
About six weeks ago, I ran across this story, sort of a typical California pre-election analysis piece. The title of the article (as reprinted in the Petaluma Argus-Courier) made me squint to make sure I was reading it right -- "Bay Area tops state's voter turnout." I started reading, and one paragraph in particular caught my eye, because it mentioned Sonoma. "Poor people from Sonoma are far more likely to cast a ballot than someone living in poverty in Echo Park [Los Angeles]." The article attributed the quote to Paul Mitchell, the vice-president of Political Data Inc.
High voter turnout, expressed as a percentage, is generally seen as evidence of the legitimacy of a political system, while low turnout can lead to unequal representation among various parts of the population. Low turnout tends to be concentrated amongst the young and the poor, leading to significant under-representation in elections, with the potential to lead to improperly skewed policy. If Paul's right, that's pretty good news for Sonoma County.
So I went and took a look at the election results last night and this morning, to see what the data looks like. California does a very efficient job of reporting election returns from different counties as they come in; the page is here. The Secretary of State conveniently makes the data downloadable as a CSV (thank-you!). I pulled it this morning and graphed turnout, expressed as a percentage. The results are on the right; a PDF of them is here (you'll probably need the resolution of the PDF to see the individual county names labeling the data points).
I plotted the data on the log of the number of voters in each county, because the massive variance in the number of registered voters (Alpine with 766, Los Angeles with 4,857,424) makes a lin-lin comparison nearly impossible. I did a power law regression on the data, which fits pretty well; as county size scales, voter turnout appears to decline fairly regularly.
So, the Bay Area doesn't lead the state in turnout. That award goes to the northern counties, and those of the Sierra foothills. Tiny Sierra County turns out more than 60% (Alpine, so small I couldn't even get it on this graph, turns out nearly 70%). There's a cluster of nine (admittedly, sparsely populated) counties clustered near 40%, all with 50,000 voters or less. Voting's a big deal in a small, perhaps remote community, and it shows.
A second cluster drew my eye -- on the lower right, seven counties, all with more than 1.4 million citizens. They are Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego Counties. Between them, they have 6,993,135 registered voters -- two million more voters than Los Angeles County, and a million more voters than the remaining 50 counties combined. Their turnout is exceptionally low; only two of them managed to clear 20%, Santa Clara and San Diego, and even then, it was by a whisker. Their location's also interesting; these counties are generally the southern (and to some extent, the eastern) neighbors of the California metropolises that garner an outsized degree of attention, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It was the third cluster that really got my attention, though. It's a cluster that's significantly above the trend line. This group of counties, despite their size, still turn out a relatively high percentage of their voters. From north to south, they are Sonoma, Marin, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties. The number of voters inside these counties is modest. But the number of votes they cast is significant. The four counties were responsible for 219,674 votes on June 3; only Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego Counties cast more votes than the four put together. The 1,453,951 residents of the quartet cast just 20,000 votes less than the 3.09 million residents of Orange County.
The parallel between Santa Barbara and SLO, and Marin and SoCo, strikes me as interesting. While it is Paul's point concerning poverty that got my attention, it is the similarities between the "1-2" northern territories of the great coastal cities, and the fact that they are both amongst the most substantial positive outliers (to the extent we consider higher turnout beneficial) on the graph, that holds my attention. The unusual motivation of their citizens to participate in their governments makes me wonder what other trends in the data patterns for the two sets of counties may coincide.
My father-in-law, Michael Joseph Ghilarducci, 66, of Sonoma, California,
passed away at home in his sleep on the morning of Monday, May 5, 2014. The following is his obituary, that will run in the Sonoma Index-Tribune, The Press Democrat, and the Marin Independent Journal on Friday, May 9.
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Michael was born on October 31, 1947 in San Francisco,
California to Francesco Ghilarducci and Mara Jean Ghilarducci (née Baker).Michael graduated from Woodside High School in
1965, and San Francisco City College’s Hotel and Restaurant Administration program
in 1967.He married Virginia (“Gia”)
Ghilarducci (née Wade) on April 12,1969.
Michael’s career in the restaurant business spanned
fifty-five years, beginning with his work in L’Auberge in Redwood City and his
father’s restaurant Villa d’Este in Los Altos.Michael opened his first restaurant, “Chez Joseph” on Jack London Square
in Oakland in 1970, followed by “Columbus Street” in Los Altos, and “Liaison”
in Palo Alto.
On December 9, 1985, Michael and Gia purchased Sonoma’s
historic Giacomo Mazza House, taking over a business long known locally as the
“Depot Hotel Restaurant.” Michael and Gia converted the upstairs floor of the
Mazza House into their family home, where they proceeded to raise their two
children, Gianna Ghilarducci Kelly and Antonio Francesco Ghilarducci.
Michael and Gia Ghilarducci
Cooking Class, Depot Hotel Restaurant Kitchen, 2013
In 1987, Michael and Gia began teaching cooking classes in
the Depot Hotel Restaurant’s kitchen. The courses proved popular and
successful; in 2001, Michael and Gia began leading groups of their students
through Europe, teaching classes linked to the locations visited.The curriculum included stays in Provence,
Tuscany, Argentina, and Umbria,
and along the coast of the Mediterranean on board Crystal Cruise Lines. In the
summer of 2002, one particularly memorable set of classes were taught jointly
by Michael and Jacques Pépin in
a weeklong series at Château de Villette, in Condécourt north of Paris.
In December of 2000, Michael and Gia purchased a vineyard
property, located north of Kelseyville, California.The Ghilarduccis began producing Cabernet Sauvignon
and Merlot under the Wildhurst label in 2003, and after development of an
additional portion of the property, in 2007, their own Fumé Blanc.Production from the vineyards continues
today, now under the family’s own label.
In 2008, after similar training to Michael’s at San
Francisco City College, and work at La Folie, the French Laundry, and Sonoma’s
El Dorado Kitchen, Michael’s son Antonio joined the family’s restaurant as head
chef. Michael thereupon became chef-proprietor, working alongside his son in
the kitchen.
Wedding, Gianna Ghilarducci Kelly and John Kelly Depot Hotel Restaurant March 24, 2002.
In total, Michael operated the Depot Hotel Restaurant with
his family for 1,482 weeks, during which time he typically supervised ordering,
menu preparation, and house operations.A week seldom went by without Michael pounding veal in the kitchen on a
Wednesday morning, negotiating with wine salesmen at the bar at midday, or
visiting tables and greeting guests at the door.
Michael was welcoming, gentle and affable; possessed of a
deep, genuine laugh and a marvelous sense of mirth, yet also a seriousness and
gravity as occasions called for. The survivor of the early and unfortunate
passings of his own parents, Michael’s response was to develop an irreverent
sense of humor, an abiding sympathy for any and all underdogs, and a near
comical repartee with his wife Gia that brought tears of laughter to friends,
staff, and family alike. He was an avid
amateur sailor and boater, and a lifelong fan of Formula One and the San
Francisco 49ers.He thought most wine
should be talked over, not about, that the best deterrent to bad driving would be
a sharp metal spike in the center of every steering wheel, and that the speed
limit should be waived for those, such as himself, capable of demonstrating
superior skill in operating an automobile.He was a decent shot but a better boxer; a lead blocker for O.J. Simpson
on the City College football team; a good bocce player but hopeless with
computers. He was fond of caffè lattesin the morning and spumoni at night; could impersonate a rabbit for
his grandchildren with nothing more than a napkin; and would, when pressed, demonstrate
a remarkable ability to impersonate Donald Duck.
Michael Ghilarducci with first grandchild, Siena Kelly
Depot Hotel Restaurant, January 31, 2008.
Michael is survived by his wife of 45 years, Virginia Wade
Ghilarducci; his daughter Gianna Ghilarducci Kelly (John Alexander Kelly), his
son Antonio Francesco Ghilarducci (Sarah Duran Ghilarducci), and his four
grandchildren, Siena Grace Kelly, Allegra Elizabeth Kelly, Lucca Emerson
Ghilarducci, and Zoey Emiliana Ghilarducci; He is also survived by his four younger
brothers, Vincent, Robert, Nicholas and Gregorio, and his two younger sisters,
Antoinette Emerick and Victoria Dockstaeder.
The family thanks Duggan’s Mission Chapel in Sonoma for all
their assistance. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that a donation
instead be made in Michael’s honor to the Wounded Warrior Project, P.O. Box
758517, Topeka, Kansas 66675 (http://tinyurl.com/mikeghilarducci).
features in my weekly reading list, and his segment on the NewsHour with Mark Shields on PBS is a Friday night favorite at our house. According to Wikipedia, he's "the sort of conservative pundit that liberals like, someone who is 'sophisticated' and 'engages with' the liberal agenda[.]"
Today is one of the better examples of him doing so. His column is entitled "The Moral Power of Curiosity," which is particularly apt. The illustration in the column is about the discovery of flash trading in stock markets, which is a form of front-running. The specifics of the example are interesting, because Brooks' notes the limitations of the business metaphor for understanding human behavior:
"One lesson of this tale is that capitalism doesn’t really work when it relies on the profit motive alone. If everybody is just chasing material self-interest, the invisible hand won’t lead to well-functioning markets. It will just lead to arrangements in which market insiders take advantage of everybody else. Capitalism requires the full range of motivation, including the intrinsic drive for knowledge and fairness."
I could literally not agree more, and this phenomenon is especially crucial in education. You can't just rely on individuals pursuing equilibrium strategies -- the effectiveness of democracy turns on motivated individuals driven by a desire for knowledge and fairness -- our government, and our civil society, is a product of the essence of education.
I'm kind of a fan of Apple's ads. Heck, I'm just a fan of Apple. While Apple's practically omnipresent in 2014, it was a far different world fifteen years ago, with me carrying my blue clamshell iBook to class in law school. Back in the 20th century, in the corporate world, Apple was a non-entity; there might be one Mac, sure -- it'd be in the corporate suite, in marketing, where it was the purview of the "graphic designer," the safe, corporate-oriented name for the company's artist.
The realm of the Mac through the 1990s was education -- perhaps an old IIGS, running a library's card catalog software, with a copy of "Encarta" perpetually stuck in its CD-ROM drive. Apple had long since stopped seeming cool. The company was barely hanging on, the last gasp of hippies, diehards and art nerds. Destined to be "upgraded" as soon as the school got a bit more budget.
Apple didn't become the most valuable company in the world because their computers were better than everyone else's. Their hardware was often both worse and more expensive. But Apple's long been special in education and the arts. Apple just hung in there, for years. What made their products different was and is what you can do with a Mac -- with an iPhone -- not processor speed or display resolution.
But Apple itself is special because it survived through pure grit.
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So, I tend to keep an eye out for when Apple's creative team goes in a new direction. There's careful thought put into what they say, even when they say very little. And I noticed a distinct change in the middle of 2013.
The Apple advertisement at the right is called "Music Every Day." It's an odd one for Apple, strangely somber, almost a memento mori, or perhaps sounding the theme "et in Arcadia ego." There is happiness, yes, and youthful energy; athletics, dancing, mass transit, a trace of the international, but there's something else, not fully captured artistically. There's a sense of individuals striving towards achievement, who haven't yet made it.
Towards the end of 2013, watching college football, I noticed that UCLA was running a spot that was as dissimilar from the standard "Everything is Awesome!" college promos as an Apple advertisement is from one for Radio Shack.
"It's not always easy being the exception, the square peg. They'll tell you, you don't belong. That it's not your place. That it'll never fly."
"But here, you learn you have a choice. You can listen to those voices."
"Or you can leave them all speechless."
The UCLA spot lacks the winsome ambiguity of Apple's; it is unselfconscious in its evocation of "carpe diem." But it was the speaker's directness with the student -- you have a choice, and it's not going to be easy -- that caught my attention.
And then, this week, I saw "Your Verse." Maybe Apple decided that because it's been twenty-five years since "Dead Poets Society" was released, that it was as good a time for an homage as any. But one way or another, Apple got ahold of the rights to Robin Williams' monologue as John Keating. I think they thus completed the circle they started with "Music Every Day" -- that they captured the educational ethos so lacking in the business metaphors that permeate the software and computer industry, and most if not all of late modern/contemporary American life:
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer -- That you are here -- that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse."
Apple uses of the voice of education -- Robin Williams as Keating -- to tell us education is about art, and that art's about grit. About persistence in the face of defeat. It's about commitment, about being driven by passion, even when daunted, fearful, and afraid. Apple turned to Dead Poets Society for words intuitively understood by a generation less inclined towards the commercial metaphors so readily employed by those who perhaps still cling fondly to old copies of Windows 95. For "Your Verse" is the speech of a teacher ultimately fired by his private school for unveiling the subversive nature of poetry -- of education -- of art -- to his students.
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I've been working with UC and CSU performance data for about the past six months, thinking about measuring grit. I've been comparing the grade point averages earned by students in college who attended different high schools, and I know from the data that the students in Sonoma Valley have done very well indeed. Whether compared to similar schools or private schools, at CSU or UC, the students from Sonoma Valley earn better grades. Further, more and more students from Sonoma Valley are admitted to CSU and UC with each passing class -- UC admissions increased by 70% in the past decade, and CSU admissions have increased by 180% since 1996. In addition, the admission rate for students from Sonoma Valley to UC continues to rise, from 74% of the students who applied in 2000 to 96% of the students who applied in 2007.
As I've been looking at the data, I've had a particular model, a particular equation in mind. The idea, more or less, has been to take the high school grade point averages of initially enrolled students, and then comparing that to the first-year grade point averages of those who remained in college after the first year. Of course, when I put it that way, the issue leaps off the page for most readers. But it took a while of looking at a screen of numbers and strings of SQL to see the important point being missed. CSU calls it continuation, UC calls it persistence, but it's really just grit. For the correct denominator in calculating averages should be the number of students that initially enrolled, not the number continuing.
And that's when the data (PDF here) got very interesting indeed.
I wasn't surprised at all to see the Pumas at the top of the table; most any way you cut it, Maria Carrillo's the best high school north of San Francisco.
El Molino and Analy, on the one hand, and Piner and Vintage, on the other, are the schools where CSU and UC data diverges the most. That kind of makes sense; the West Sonoma County schools have strong reputations, and UC's probably reaching deeper into their classes than they would otherwise, which is why their kids appear to do so much worse in relative terms at UC than CSU. The reverse is likely true for Piner and Vintage. A student attending El Molino and Analy that's on the bubble for UC probably heads for CSU if she earns the same numbers at Piner or Vintage.
Marin Academy and Branson are a real study in contrasts; no one appears to have lower High School grade inflation than Marin Academy (a very significant achievement). But MA's students look brittle. Their drop out rate in college's the highest for both UC and CSU. This clearly isn't simply correlated with their being an expensive private school; the Branson students don't mirror the trend.
But the surprise was that, despite months of looking at the data, I just hadn't realized how well Sonoma's students would do. Because Sonoma's students refuse to break. The impact of drops at UC for Sonoma's kids is the lowest in the table. Apparently, when you throw silver and green in the wash, those colors just don't run.
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Instilling grit is no easy thing, and measuring it's even harder. Yet Sonoma's teachers and administrators are making it happen, which reminds me that if talent's defined as the ability to hit a target no one else can reach, genius is hitting a target no one else can see. And the students are responding -- because the more I've talked with parents, the more they've told me that students want to go to school in Sonoma Valley -- that it is the parents that are interested in other schools.
Understanding the dynamic has taken time; parsing the cognitive metaphors has been tough. Parents talk, for instance, of the quality of private schools as they do of cars; hearing about them sounds like nothing so much as a newly minted Yuppie gushing over a leased 325i. "You should see the acceleration! And the class size!" But the conversations seldom include the phrase "my student's so excited to be there ..." Instead, the business metaphors start flying by fast and furious.
Private school administrators have often wholly adopted the business metaphor for education, emphasizing features that most attract the interest of the implicit customer, the parents. More disconcerting is that there appears to be a certain amount of grade inflation being allowed at the less expensive private schools, perhaps to aid in convincing parents that their "investment" really is paying off. Yet alarm should be focused on the seeming failure of private schools to prepare students to handle failure and adversity, to coach grittiness.
I have tremendous sympathy for parents approaching high school for the first time, and the concerns they feel. To help me understand those fears, I turn to Mark Rothko and the Seagram murals. Of one piece in the Tate Modern, Simon Schama tells us:
"... a hanging veil, suspended between two columns, an opening, that beckons, or denies entrance. A blind window? A gateway -- if some of those portals are blocked, others open into the unknown space that Rothko talked about, the place that only art can take us, far away from the buzzing static of the moment ... to feel the poignancy of our comings and our goings, our entrances and our exits, our births and our deaths, womb, tomb, and everything between. Can art ever be more complete, more powerful? I don't think so."
For when I think of the concerned parent, shopping schools with every iota of their energy, I think of them gazing upon a high school much as Schama views Red on Maroon. A school, particularly a high school, is a gateway through which their family may struggle to pass, to a destination unknown. A blocked portal, through which they're not even sure they want to go, knowing only that they feel little choice, on a path they sense will be fraught with danger, danger that they fear.
Rothko understood that fear. Rothko had become used to poverty and failure. He had gone through 30 years of financial hardship and mental struggle to find his style, to become perhaps the premier artist of the late 1950s, if not the 20th century. For Rothko had learned the meaning of grit, and what it takes to get it:
"When I was a younger man art was a lonely thing ... no galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large, I will not venture to discuss. But I do know that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence, where we can root and grow."
Rothko's use of the metaphor of the forest brings me to James Scott's concept of legibility. For it can be hard to appreciate all the subtleties of the social dynamics of a diverse high school like Sonoma Valley. The understandable inclination may be to come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what the school ought to be. But our public schools are producing students that are gritty and resilient -- that have the vitality of a natural forest. It may be that there are benefits to be had from the walled gardens of "elite" private high schools. But the "scientific forests" James Scott studied eventually underwent ecological collapse, while the complex, confusing, "illegible" natural forests thrived.
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So to the parents, swallowing perhaps more than a bit fearfully as they gaze at Red on Maroon, I say that the data shows that students in Sonoma are authentically, personally engaged in pursuing their own education. They speak the language of Robin William's John Keating. That the results are strong, and getting even stronger.
To the students, by contrast, I say take your common core skills, and make an argument for Sonoma from evidence. The PDF is here. Should your parents suggest they're not sure whether you're right, try to not be too hard on them. They may be just a bit of a PC. You're probably becoming a Mac. And that's not so bad. Especially if it reminds you of the most important point of all.
That Apple survived through pure grit. And so will you.
"It's time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a 'Mad Men' episode. This year, let's all come together – Congress, the White House, and businesses from Wall Street to Main Street – to give every woman the opportunity she deserves. Because I firmly believe when women succeed, America succeeds."
The City of Sonoma has an eight member Planning Commission, entirely composed of middle-aged men. The six voting members from the City all live in expensive homes on the "East Side" (the average value exceeds a million dollars). The Commission has become a class-and-gender monoculture that's failing in its basic role of providing predictable evaluations of the viability of any given project with the voters, because its members no longer represent the community -- the essence of representative democracy.
Change won't come easily. There are many in Precincts 1801 and 1805 that, like me, if asked, are inclined to turn down the opportunity to serve. It's no accident that they would -- the system's built-in hostility to those perceived as "outsiders" shunts away potential representatives with a different view -- diverting them to places like the City's Cultural and Fine Arts Commission, which has ended up being composed of eight women. The selection process -- appointment -- encourages those motivated to participate to curry favor with elected politicians -- a craven process at best -- rather than to get to know their neighborhood, the essence of the metis our governmental system depends upon.
The problem's getting out of hand. The City faces expensive litigation that might have been avoided if the Planning Commissioners had been able to give voice to the concerns that led to the Council blocking AT&T's cell tower. Developers like SunLever can't count on the Planning Commission's approval to mean much of anything when the City Council's overruling unanimous decisions. And Measure B was a not-veiled-at-all effort to hamstring the ability of the Planning Commission to approve any hotels, a clear-cut vote of no-confidence from half of the electorate.
This post is devoted to explaining why allowing the situation to continue is outrageous. If this post makes you upset, that's a feature, not a bug. A body of unelected individuals, serving lengthy terms, that rarely (if ever) are subject to supervision or direction from the council (let alone frequent replacement) isn't democracy in action, and it isn't serving the best interests of the community. When we establish a system that depends on a process of currying favor, we shouldn't be surprised when it gets dominated by wealthy, middle-aged men. But Sonoma County's a different kind of a place - it's a place where women win elections. The appointment process has produced a dramatically unbalanced group, and it should be changed. Promptly.
Because when women succeed, Sonoma succeeds.
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It's been an interesting ten weeks since Measure B went down to defeat, as illustrated by two sets of events. The first is the City of Sonoma's turning down AT&T’s request to install a cell tower, and the second's a "meeting" called by Owen Smith of the SunLever Companies, regarding the old Sonoma Truck and Auto site on Broadway.The loss by AT&T was surprising -- the proposal had won 7-0 at the Planning Commission level, and AT&T went so far as to seek reconsideration of the decision, which was denied (expensive litigation is now expected.) The meeting by the SunLever Companies was perhaps even more unusual -- the potential developer told participants he was "open to any reasonable idea" for the parcel -- the opposite of the choreographed presentation usually made to the public for what are preconceived projects.
And in the midst of these two issues, a third point, a quote from the Mayor, came to mind. Tom Rouse (the only member of the City Council to vote to allow AT&T's cell tower) argued that the City should trust the unanimous decision of the Planning Commission. "We have a commission we put our trust in," he said, and "I must believe they did their homework."
Watching an elected leader deferring on the weighing of private rights versus public goods, trusting in an unelected commission to make decisions about the balance and character of the community, caused me to raise an eyebrow. In general, that sort of decision making is at the core of why people run for a City Council seat -- they're personally engaged with the facts, motivated by a sense of duty to serve their constituents even where their individual interests are not at issue -- and that such leaders aren't therefore prone to defer to the decisions of unelected appointees whose relationship with the voters can be tenuous at best.
Yet in a certain sense, I feel like Tom's not entirely wrong -- he should be able to rely on the Planning Commission. But he can't. And then I realized why SunLever feels the need to go directly to the public rather than develop a proposal first ... and why AT&T (and indeed the Mayor) were surprised the cell tower went down to defeat. And it turns on the makeup of Sonoma's Planning Commission.
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Who planning commissioners are, as most every voter agrees regardless of what the voter knows about embodied cognition, is directly relevant to the execution of their duties. Their names are posted on the City's web site, and unless one of them is concealing a very significant secret, they're all men. Further, where the different commissioners live is anything but hidden -- their addresses arefreelyavailableontheweb.
I've run the map on the right before; it is the map of the precinct returns for Measure B. Those precincts in favor of hotel construction are in silver (gray). I've gone and highlighted the lots where each of the six Sonoma residents who are voting members of the planning commission live, and have added flags so that the locations are clearer. I also mapped the location of the residence of Tom Rouse (his flag is the yellow one).
As can be seen, every one of the six voting planning commissioners from the City lives in the portion of the town that voted to allow hotel construction; none live in the west, or “green” side of town.
"The Magnificent Seven,"
Image available at http://tinyurl.com/ml2uldv
I also grabbed the Zillow valuations for each of the properties. The average value of a planning commissioner’s home in the City of Sonoma is $1.277 million (and one is over $2.5 million). I note that the Mayor's $1.462 million home is on 5th St E, and that he and the City's voting planning commission members are thus effectively the "Magnificent Seven" -- middle aged men living in expensive homes on the East Side of Sonoma.
But it wasn't until after hearing the President's State of the Union speech last night that I decided that I really should publish something about this. Because criticizing the Planning Commission solely on the basis of the neighborhoods its members are drawn from is an instance of me pulling my punch. Because the really atrocious part of this situation is that not a single member of the Planning Commission is female.
It's not hard to see why Tom Rouse felt he could trust the Planning Commission -- they pretty much all look and live exactly like he does. But elections in Sonoma aren't solely decided by the policy preferences of the East Side of Sonoma, and the City Council doesn't measure decisions solely based on their acceptability in Precincts 1802, 1804, and 1813. The Planning Commission is an excellent vehicle for assessing projects to the degree it represents the community -- the essence of representative democracy -- and the unpredictability of the AT&T outcome and the uncertainty surrounding SunLever's project are evidence of the fact that the Planning Commission is failing in its basic role of providing predictable evaluations of the viability with the voters of any given project, due to the fact that it has become a class-and-gender monoculture.
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This situation has been a long time in the making. Planning commissioners can serve three terms -- a two year term, followed by a four year, and then another two year term. Commissioners are rarely removed once appointed, and the ability of the City Council to take action to make the Planning Commission reflect the community is limited by the current status of the City's code.
But municipal codes can change. And millionaire middle-aged men aren't the only occupants of the City of Sonoma. Reform could include adding commissioners, changing the composition, or moving to a system where council members each appoint a commissioner (or two) to serve coterminously (as Sonoma County does). But none of these would address the core problem that reform should be designed to address.
There is no substitute in democracy for personal engagement with the facts. Developing that kind of local knowledge means abandoning the influence-oriented appointment process we have in favor of the kind of institution that encourages metis -- democracy. There is every reason to shift to direct election of planning commissioners on a per-precinct basis.
Precinct elections encourage Commissioners to get to know their neighborhoods. Such elections recognize the importance of the two-way relationship between our representatives and our government's professional staff -- that oftentimes it is our representatives who will explain our government's policies to us, rather than merely supervising the conduct of those decisions by the experts we hire in specific policy areas -- a function of elected officials that will only gain in importance with the burgeoning of smaller-scale "social" media. Frequentprecinct elections (these should be two year terms) are a natural stepping stone for Commissioners to move to higher office, because it causes them to learn how to conduct smaller elections and develop campaign teams-- and developing qualified candidates by providing them a zone of proximal development is an important characteristic of any political system -- for we must recognize that we are constantly engaged in the process of developing our own leaders.
For the development of those leaders, the nurturing our leaders, is why elections are really the solution to the problem we face. As David McCuan, the Sonoma State political scientist, has noted before, female candidates in Sonoma County typically do 5 to 8 percentage points better in elections than men. This is not a point that should surprise anyone -- there's a reason that Nicole Mann came from Rohnert Park ... or the New York Times national education reporter is from Petaluma ... or that the Maria Carrillo High women's soccer team is often the best in America. Because when it's not about influence or favor, when it's on the merits, our voters reward the self-evident ability and achievement on display.
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I can see how this argument would lead one to conclude that the City should change the Council itself to precinct elections. This has come up in other cities in Sonoma County before. The charter process is a burdensome, overwrought solution that's looking for a problem; a Council elected by the City proper encourages a broader view of problems, that allows an important second pass in any process of decision making, and one of the key reasons that direct elections work best at a lower level. We want the Council to consider the common good, and Commission decisions are always subject to the retained power of the Council to overrule the Commission.
Pragmatically, electing commissioners is a process that could be done at the General Election on November 4. The Council should act, to ensure that the planning commission proceedings are a fair prediction of what will occur at the Council. The appointment process has produced a dramatically unbalanced group of middle-aged men living in expensive homes nearly next door to each other. Cronyism has resulted in the exclusion of women from the decision-making process, to the detriment of our community. This situation should be brought to an end. Now.
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"Nothing in life that's worth anything is easy."
-SFCCory Remsburg.
I quoted Obama to start this post, and I end with a link to the video of the key part of the speech. Because the quote was the applause line of the night. When Nancy Pelosi stands to clap, and John McCain smiles in agreement ... when Dianne Feinstein rises and leads the standing ovation, it's clear that on a federal level, the unique characteristics of California, where Malala Yousafzai becomes Janet Yellen, should and very well could have the same power nationally as they can in our little town.
Reforming Sonoma won't come easily. Nothing worthwhile is, which was the second applause point of the evening, for Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg. But it is high time we take the action necessary to reform our small, broken, but important political system here in Sonoma. All it takes is the same commitment to achievement, merit, and democracy that, increasingly, is defining the Golden State's model. And the audience that is watching stretches far beyond the bounds of our own familiar shores ...
