Your September HoodLink is up

Link here (.pdf).

I'd like to call attention to this editorial:

OH DAN...

It would be easy to jump all over our Mayor’s latest faux pas. Far too easy. We believe that “appliance-gate”, “loan-gate”, and “bank-gate” are serving as distractions to what is really going on in City Hall.

Our City Council has five members. One of the members, elected by the five members of the Council, serves as Mayor for a year at a time. Our Mayor is chosen by the majority of the Council with no regard to the votes a Council member received from the voters in a general election. We have a City Manager who is selected and hired by a vote of the five members of the Council.

As mentioned elsewhere in this issue, the current Council majority, which includes our Mayor Dan, likes to run roughshod over the concept of open and fair play in our
representative democracy. Their behavior is nothing new. Some would say it is so common, that we should grow up and get used to it. But their behavior is no longer simply boorish or tiresome. The fruit of their behavior is getting toxic. We can, and need, to do something about it.

It is all about the power of counting to three, and the trouble of going too far with running a City using that limited knowledge...

Up until this summer, to get an item on the public agenda for a Council meeting, it took two members of the Council to agree that an item was worth public consideration. Regardless of whether the item was submitted by a member of the Council or a member of the general public, if two members of Council agreed it was a topic worth discussing, the item was placed on the agenda.

For reference, in Solana Beach it only takes one member of the Council or of the public to get an item on their agenda.

Democracies, even representative democracies like ours, are messy by design. But ours is supposed to work in the open and with a majority’s dogma unable to violate the rights of a minority, of even one, to have their voice heard.

What our current representatives in the majority on the Encinitas City Council have done is to exclude all issues from the agenda which were not chosen by the majority. The vote was, wait for it… 3 to 2… with Dan Dalager, Jim Bond, and Jerome Stocks voting to require that three members of the Council must agree to adding an item to the agenda.

Those three have been telling us for years that omnipotent knowledge is divined by counting to three. Now, in addition to telling us that they have no responsibility to listen to an opinion they do not hold, they have voted to totally exclude items from the agenda that they do not want to be officially discussed.

It is time to break up that poisonous triumvirate. Regardless of what a friendly guy
he may be, or how long he and his family have been in town, we need to step into a better future by voting Dan off the Council. Now!

The Leucadia Blog also chose to highlight the same editorial. I swear I'm not copying, just thinking alike.