Item 21: Stephanie Reyes is being promoted from Interim City Manager to Actual City Manager. She’s been Interim for about a year, since Bert Lumbreras retired.
Everyone – literally everyone – falls all over themselves to be the most enthusiastic in congratulating her. But seriously: everyone is correct. She is great. I kinda want to fall all over myself and be the most enthusiastic, fawning cheerleader for her, too.
Obviously I have no idea what people are like off-camera, so I never know the whole story. But what I’ve seen on camera, Stephanie is always extraordinarily prepared, organized, and poised during meetings. She’s smart and speaks carefully, and her words generally indicate that she’s considering many different perspectives. She knows San Marcos very well. She comes across as a hugely competent leader. And a great leader is worth their weight in gold, no joke.
….
Item 23: Rules and procedures to committees. This was such vague-booking. There was no presentation and no background. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and had to dive into the packet.
Council has a bunch of committees, to study little issues outside of regular council meetings. Think things like the Workforce Housing Committee, or the La Cima Committee, Criminal Justice Reform, or Sustainability. Here, council is amending the rules that govern these committees. In other words, this is dry, dry, in-the-weeds business. They want to divide committees into three categories, and then further subdivide the types of meetings each committee may have into sub-categories. Each subcategory has different rules. And then post the recordings of many city council meetings, which would be new (I think).
Mayor Hughson has a few more amendments:
- If a councilmember misses more than two consecutive committee meetings, they get booted from that committee
- The staff liaison and the committee chair are in charge of screening which agenda items fit with the purpose of the committee, and which ones don’t. Before it just said, “Agenda items must fit the purpose of the committee” and left it there.
- (And some other minor ones.)
This would have seemed like minor organizing, except that Alyssa Garza was clearly biting her tongue.
At one point, Alyssa asked Jane Hughson what her conceptualization of a “subject matter expert” is. Jane gives a few examples from the homelessness committee and the animal welfare committee.
That’s all that is said on that. But I’m reminded of Max Baker raising the point that experts on police reform were being excluded from different meetings, because others didn’t think they qualified as experts. There’ve been implications, although never fully explained on camera.
The key moment comes at 1:07, and look, I’ll just quote Alyssa wholesale:
“I just want the record to reflect that I find the entire packet fundamentally problematic. I think it’s restrictive and unnecessary and quite frankly I have expressed my frustrations over this for the past three years, on multiple occasions. These rules are not applied across the board. We got the receipts, okay. My other question is then who is responsible for ensuring that these committee rules – if approved – are applied across the board?
So historically, as they have not been applied across the board, where is there some sort of road map or guide that shows how to proceed from there? Because historically this is just business as usual. We just ignore the blatant not-following of the committee rules.”
The other committee members respond to the easy parts of what she’s saying: Who will enforce the rules? The committee chair will enforce the rules! How will items get on future agendas? There’s a rule that the last agenda item now to plan future agendas! Everyone ignores the scathing accusation of structural bias behind the scenes.
There’s a complete mismatch in tone: Alyssa is clearly seething. Everyone else is mild and upbeat, like we’re choosing which typefont to use on next year’s internal memos.
I don’t know the backstory, but here’s my guess: Rules can entrench the status quo. People on the inside know the rules well, and they know how to play them. Rules are enforced strictly on outsiders, but loosely on insiders, and that’s how you perpetuate a status quo. My guess is that Alyssa has come to committee meetings ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work, and she’s finding herself cut off by committee rules enforced very strictly, while other councilmembers are given grace and flexibility to work around committee rules in order to get their work done.
It sounds like she raised this point to Jane Hughson, and Jane has responded by saying, “Let’s make the rules more detailed and prescriptive,” and Alyssa is saying, “You’re missing the point. You’re not responding to the underlying problem.”
I actually do think that Jane is acting in good faith, in this moment. She believes that strict, well-written rules enable people from different backgrounds to come together and solve problems. So that’s the philosophy that she’s applying to this problem: let’s tighten up the rules.
But she’s not acknowledging Alyssa’s basic point: that rules have been applied capriciously in the past (and possibly by Jane herself). So I’m skeptical that anything will change in the future.
The San Marxist 