Sacramento residents keep hearing and reading about how ridership on Regional Transit’s Light Rail is up – regardless of the fact that city residents rarely see a train with many people on it. I refer to any passing light rail train as A Streetcar Named Deserted.

Unfortunately, the strong-mayor proposal on the table does not resemble any of the systems that have worked … except perhaps, Chicago.

Emulating Chicago-style politics, replete with the Daley family monarchy, is hopefully not what Johnson had in mind when he supported the strong-mayor concept. However, one need not look much further than his ambitious political advisers, supporters and "Kitchen Cabinet" members for complicity. Developers and hopeful city contractors will have to cater only to the mayor, not all nine council members. Johnson's friends, groupies, consultants and advisers looking for future appointments will have plenty of jobs to consider – Chicago-style.

According to Johnson's strong-mayor proposal, the mayor would have the power to hire and fire the city manager, city treasurer, city clerk, city attorney and many layers of subordinate staff – up to 800 city employees.

Under this scenario, the City Council would be powerless to stop the removal of city employees.

The strong-mayor proposal would give the mayor veto power over council decisions.

The strong-mayor proposal would give the mayor the ability to introduce a budget that would automatically become law unless the City Council voids it in a specified period of time.

The lack of an ethics commission or term limits is troublesome as well. Claiming that voters can vote a bad mayor out of office is disingenuous, with the multiple layers of mayor- appointed positions and staff.

Johnson's strong-mayor proposal lacks key ingredients pertinent to a healthy, constitutional checks-and-balances mayoral system. Specific areas of concern include:

• The immediate transition time after the election is unrealistic and potentially dangerous. The successful strong-mayor cities that were researched took, at minimum, one year to transition.

• Other cities have found that an ethics committee was needed to monitor and review strong-mayor governments for areas of conflicts of interest with elected officials, appointees and lobbyists. These committees also investigate complaints regarding possible ethics violations and campaign financing abuses.

• Johnson's strong-mayor proposal allows for the mayor to appoint city charter officers (city attorney, city manager, city treasurer, city clerk) and department heads. The mayor will control who works for the city, and has hiring and firing power over most of the city staff. This is acceptable in private business, but an open and transparent government should not be run CEO-style, as it begs for pay-to-play practices.

• In City Attorney Eileen Teichert's analysis of Johnson's proposal, she concluded that the proposed measure creates an imbalance of power among the city's elected officials, lacks vital checks and balances, and "blurs the lines of authority and accountability" adopted by other strong-mayor cities. She is correct.

• Term limits should only be a last resort, if all other checks and balances are not in place. Term limits are at least one way to somewhat balance an all-powerful executive mayor.

Much of the criticism heaped on Johnson for his strong-mayor proposal has been that his proposal is all about him. Critics accused him of being too impatient to even learn how to be mayor, when he introduced the proposal before he'd even warmed his office chair. Johnson has made no secret of the fact that as a voting council member, minutiae is not where he envisions spending his time and talents. Johnson is less of a detail guy and more of a big-picture, rainmaker style of mayor – the exact opposite of former Mayor Heather Fargo, who was known for her administrative acumen.

Somewhere in the middle lies the answer for Sacramento. Business as usual is not acceptable or realistic. While Sacramento has grown up and out, it still seems to be run using a town-council, neighborhood-activist mentality. Sacramento has a difficult time attracting big businesses, and officials still complain about not having a major-league arena.

Sacramento sits on two undeveloped rivers and has two railyards that have remained blighted, polluted, vacant and undeveloped for decades. Many people believe that the current City Council wastes precious time on the little things, while progress on the big-picture issues and long-term planning continues to elude Sacramento.

California Conference Committee on Water Charged with Solving States Water Woes
With only a matter of days left in the 2009 legislative year, lawmakers have formed a Legislative Conference Committee on Water. The conference committee is charged with creating a series of reforms that help reform and shape California’s antiquated water system and lead to a reliable supply of water for the state's water users.

Mayor Kevin Johnson is fighting the Sacramento City Council on when Sacramento residents will be able to vote for the Strong Mayor Proposal.

Police Officers, Fire Fighters and members of the Military are often called brave and valiant Heroes. And they should be; much of what they do is dangerous and requires a degree of courage, selflessness and valor.

They are also, public (government) employees.

Police are at-risk every moment of every day they are on-the-job; from the cop on the beat to the patrol officer, every person they speak to, every car they pull over is a potential risk to their life. They serve voluntarily and selflessly, putting themselves in harms way every day.

Military personnel who serve in war-torn countries serve voluntarily and selflessly, and often give their lives in the course of defending democracy.  Stateside military personnel tirelessly train in preparation for the day they will be sent into battle.

Fire fighters are faced with treacherous work conditions when fighting fire. Of particular note are the California Department of Forestry (CDF) - fire fighters, who work tirelessly trying to prevent wild fires in our summertime parched state.

Missing from the discussion of selfless, tireless public safety workers, is the union representing the City of Sacramento Fire Department who of late, have been behaving more like hoodlums, than heroes.

Months ago when the City first started talking about the need for sizeable budget cuts due to a record budget deficit, the Sacramento Police Officers Association union (SPOA) almost immediately stepped up and agreed to make their $6.4 million budget work – cuts, salary freezes and all. The Fire Fighters union, Local 522 (an AFL-CIO union), instead turned on the machismo, did a few chest bumps, and began a months-long public tantrum played out dramatically in the media, by refusing to live with and manage their $5 million budget.

Remember the City of Vallejo’s recent Bankruptcy? It was their Fire Department that forced the city into the financial dire straights that led to insolvency, due to record and unsustainable salaries, benefits and pensions. This is a common theme in the state of California, and a severe lesson the City of Sacramento seems unwilling to experience.

The Sacramento Police Department and the SPOA actively educated members in order to get input and involvement on the inevitable budget problems the city was facing. Already down by 104 sworn staff officers since 2007, the Sacramento Police Department decided they could not afford any more police officer cuts. SPOA agreed across the board to accept the City’s budget, freeze salaries as of the last budget, and take cuts where deemed necessary in order to save jobs.

Contrast this with Local 522, the Fire Department union, and even city employee union Local 39: both unions propose sacrificing only lower paid workers, while insisting on raises for the older, more highly-paid workers. Many Sacramento residents are critical of firefighters for being hypocritical for claiming union “solidarity” with their firefighting “brothers” while rejecting a deal that will lead to the City laying off 50 of their “brothers.” Fire Fighters are behaving like thuggish teamsters, forgetting that they are city employees, and serve voluntarily.

Additionally, Fire Fighters have come under intense scrutiny for excessively high overtime abuse and ongoing abuse with sick-leave usage. With city fire fighters largely on-call while on duty, their antics are becoming intolerable.

What happened to the days when fire fighters called to a medical emergency showed up as a first-responder, in a two-person team driving a light-duty truck? The fire fighters’ demand for 4-man teams on every truck for every call, is unrealistic and absurd, and demonstrative of their refusal to prioritize staffing levels based on the nature of the emergency calls. Current staffing levels and call response tactics are purely to justify their pay, pensions and big budget.

This from the same local fire fighters union who recently threatened that they were considering sponsoring a ballot initiative that would seek to ban the City Council from ever reducing firefighters’ pension benefits without a vote of the public. 

This is all behavior inherent to Chicago-style unions, not most individual fire fighters. However, the fire fighters who consider themselves union members first and only secondarily fire fighters, made their voices clear at recent city council meetings.

When was the last time police or military personnel threatened using thuggish teamster tactics because they weren’t getting guaranteed pay and pension increases? Military and police personnel respect integrity and distinguished public service.

 Fire Fighters, police and military personnel choose their career paths voluntarily. Society honors those who choose careers that require courage and valor in the face of danger. But when Sacramento City Fire Fighters threaten tyranny while already receiving abundant wages, rich benefits and inordinately large pensions, while most of the rest of the city’s employers are laying off employees and cutting wages and salaries, we know that the union running the show has reached beyond usefulness and is moving into foolishness. Thus is the inherent problem with labor unions representing public employees.

Public employees work for the citizenry, but appear to work for the supremacy of the city, county or state. The law and the government are intended to serve American freedom and self-determinism — not the other way around.