Fremont Henry

What happens if the economy continues to slump? Where do they cut? Someone asked if the next step was contracting with the sheriff for police protection.

My idea is to consolidate management costs so that the essential services can be delivered to the citizens. Take a look at this article from the Denver Post and you can see where this all can lead.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14303473

Have we forgotten that Fremont itself was first formed by merging the 5 towns? And to suggest we do this again on a much larger scale? Ludicrous.

For starters, being as big as Fremont is now, we don’t seem to have a functional government and great public services. For instance, the ratio of police officers to our population is very low.

How can we make our local Gov more accountable and representative of the whole city. A reporter at Argus (or another local paper) had a while ago suggested to make Fremont a charter city. That sounds like a more reasonable thing to do than to merge 3 totally different cities with different characters. Imagine 5 or 7 city council members elected from 5 or 7 districts in Fremont giving each district (zone) of the city good representation of the local issues of that zone. Instead of the current dysfunctional way we elect our candidates funded by developers and big wigs with no representation of different areas of Fremont.

If Fremont was absorbed into a larger entity with neighboring cities, would that make it more likely or less likely that your individual input would be heard? Would it make it more likely that that your needs would be met? Would your representatives be more or less interested in the specific local issues that effect the quality of your life?

Back in November, did Fremont residents care about the outcome of the Newark Utility Tax measure? Right now, do you care about neighborhood crime in north Union City? Enough to go to a Union City Council meeting to talk about it? Of course not – Newark and Union City residents don’t make a practice of coming to Fremont to support our concerns. Why would they? These issues are far enough removed from them to not effect their lives in a direct way.

If we had our civic act together, if our elected representatives actually represented us, if we were providing adequate basic services to local residents, I’d say that we might be a good candidate for consolidation. As it is, we need to clean our own house before we think about moving into a co-op.

My personal opinion? Fremont management would love to get all of the cities together under one big roof for one big reason. They could then propose changes in one part of the newly-consolidated city that might be supported by residents in those parts of the city that are geographically insulated from the effects of those changes. The new City Council could then say that they were supported by a majority of “the people”, even though for a long time most people would still think of themselves as really being Newark or Fremont or Union City residents (much as some of us still identify as Irvington, Niles, Centerville, etc.). If the Council made some Godawful decision that effected Union City, why would I complain if I’m in Warm Springs?

That’s the problem the Fremont City Council is currently having; even though Fremont is large geographically, the consequences of their actions are still too concentrated within the current city limits to escape the notice of residents. They’re looking for a larger field upon which to play, in the hope that we’ll do what comes naturally and only look out for our own little neck o’ the woods.

In my proposal, I think we wind up with the best of the mix. We have a city of moderate size, not one of the 10 biggest in the state. Still small enough to keep touch with the people but big enough to provide the services needed to support the community. And there are huge cost savings from a consolidation.

Just start listing departments and figure the new city would have administration costs of 40% of the combined costs today. It doesn’t take many departments and you’re saving millions. And, without affecting the worker levels where the service is actually provided to the people.

http://www.smcl.org/external.html?www.plsinfo.org/aboutus/index.htm

Gus (or anyone with expertise on this suggestion) -

If taken to the extreme, Gus’ basic suggestion would argue for something (rhetorical here) like the City of California. . . . with a single city hall responsible for everything therein.

I know that isn’t real but my question is, what are the practical limits to this kind of consolidation ? What are the REAL (forget the emotional nonesense about how “different” we all are for example) trade-offs and how would taxpayers assess the relative likelihood of those negative consequences (if any) becoming a reality ?

Jurisdictions consolidate to save money, and a large part of those savings do not come from economies in the actual working, service providing segments of city workers. Those economies come from the consolidation of the highly-paid administrative positions and the elected officials in the organizations that are being consolidated.

A consolidated tri-cities would not require three separate City Councils, three city managers, three department heads for each department in the newly consolidated city. Not three police chiefs, not three city attorneys.

It would require a lot of personal character for the management and elected officials of our local cities to do what might be financially right for their/our city when they would know that taking that action would result in rendering their $200,000+/year jobs superfluous.

Has anybody observed that caliber of character emanating from any of our local officials lately?