I remember a picture from the early 1960s of a nerdy-looking guy
with crew-cut hair, black horn-rim glasses, wearing slacks and a
short sleeve white shirt, its pocket filled with pens next to his
narrow tie. He was holding a slide-rule, and a caption over his
head said
”
Six weeks ago I couldn’t even spell ‘engineer,’ now I am
one.
”
I remember a picture from the early 1960s of a nerdy-looking guy with crew-cut hair, black horn-rim glasses, wearing slacks and a short sleeve white shirt, its pocket filled with pens next to his narrow tie. He was holding a slide-rule, and a caption over his head said “Six weeks ago I couldn’t even spell ‘engineer,’ now I am one.”
That bit of dry humor may have started to circulate during the great race for space, but I was thinking how the picture’s caption is kind of symbolic of the Nov. 4 election here in Gilroy. The winners of course were Al Pinhiero for mayor, incumbent Roland Velasco, and newcomers Russ Valiquette and Paul Correa for City Council seats. While not nerds or engineers, these men are now our elected officials – now they “are ones” so to speak.
And no, I’m not criticizing their looks, or their intelligence.
Over the past months we’ve heard and read these men discussing, debating, and philosophizing the issues facing Gilroy over the coming months, while at the same time plugging their own merits why they should be elected. So now that they’ve been elected, what will they actually be doing as members of the City Council? Remember, you can’t measure someone’s job performance if you don’t have some criteria to base an evaluation upon.
Well, thanks to outgoing mayor Tom Springer, I’ve been enlightened. Tom was gracious enough to send me information that might be considered a “job description” for a City Council member. So, I’d like to shed some light on what a Gilroy City Council member actually does, for those of you who don’t have a clue.
Tom wrote: “…the Council acts as the board of directors of the city, deals with policy and legislation matters only, and doesn’t have any role in the ‘administration’ of city affairs. The (City) Charter is very strong and clear that all actions of the Council are legislative only, and all administration activities are through the City Administrator (Jay Baksa) who acts as the CEO of the city.
“In terms of ‘responsibilities,’ then, stemming from the ‘duties’ role, the Council has the responsibility, according to the Charter, for adopting the Capital Improvement Budget (which describes all capital spending in the city each year), and the General Budget (which is the operating budget for the year).
“The Council has an ‘advise and consent’ responsibility regarding the hiring and firing of department heads, but does not have performance review duties for these heads; the only (people reporting) to the Council are the City Administrator, the City Clerk and the City Attorney, and these are the only ‘hire and fire’ positions the Council owns.
“In terms of meetings, the Council sets their own schedules, rules, procedures, etc., subject to state law requiring open access and notice, so there is flexibility there. The Council also has ‘hire and fire’ responsibility for the Commissions, which are created by the Charter, and for all committees it feels it needs; our so-called ‘task forces’ are such ‘committees’ and operate under the rules the Council puts together.
“All of this is the ‘formability’ of the job. In the real world, the Council’s responsibility as what you’d expect: fiscal prudence, maintaining public access to city government, acting a ‘ombudsman’ for the people of this city, being prepared, reaching out to people and other communities. As there are no ‘seats’ or ‘districts,’ everyone being elected at-large, there are not supposed to be ‘constituencies’ and each Council member is supposed to represent all the people, not any one area or group or whatever.
“In reality, one would think that the responsibilities also include honesty, trustworthiness, all of the traits one learns as a Scout that should be found in any elected official, but we all know reality is different.”
Yes Tom, reality often is different. I’ve always thought that a good illustration between imagery and reality is found in the classic movie The Wizard of Oz, where “Oz the Magnificent” is initially imaged as a frightful deity-like face appearing on a wall surrounded by fire and the rumblings of thunder — but as we later find out, reality is not the fire or noise or growling face. Instead we find a very human person in back of a curtain turning wheels and pulling handles to create only an image.
So now with “job description” in hand, and the curtain pulled back (so to speak), let’s hope for these three Council members and our new mayor that imagery and reality will be the same thing.
No fire and noise, just turning wheels and pulling handles – and getting real results. Time will tell. And we’ll be watching.
