Humboldt Sentinel
News 10/21/08
By Charles Douglas
Multiple vacancies and repeated failure to hold regular meetings cited
On the consent calendar of tonight’s special meeting of the Arcata City Council is a staff recommendation to accept two vacancies from the Arcata Committee on Democracy and Corporations, leaving it with only three out of its seven seats filled, and to “suspend” all meetings and activities of the DUHC-inspired committee indefinitely. All items on the consent calendar are typically approved with a single motion, unless a member of the Council or public pulls an item for further discussion.
The last meeting of the Corporations Committee was on June 17. According to committee staffer Mike Mullen’s letter to the city manager, CDC Chair Sean Armstrong verbally stated that he would resign at the June meeting, but never did actually submit a letter of resignation, and in the mean time, the absence of CDC member Eric Surber, as well as Armstrong, resulted in a lack of a committee chair or a quorum. This means the committee conducted no business at its regularly scheduled meetings in July, August and September, with its monthly meeting for October, scheduled for 4:00 p.m. today, cancelled.
”Sometimes circumstances change and I regret the CDC had to come off my plate,” Eric Surber said in a letter to the city.
Even though the handling of committee vacancies, even multiple ones simultaneously, is routine for the Council to deal with, the act of actually suspending a city committee has not previously been proposed by city staff in modern Arcata political history. Senior city officials suggest it may be connected by the repeated rejection over the last year by the Council, the Economic Development Committee and the Planning Commission of attempts by the Corporations Committee to slap a cap on the number of retail stores in the city.
Although the Corporations Committee is supposed to be an organ of the city government, the CDC has undertaken a number of activities outside its Council-approved which could fairly be described as electioneering. Typically these activities, such as the use of city resources in 2006 to support Measure T (since enjoined by the federal court over constitutional issues), are on behalf of projects hatched up by Democracy Unlimited, which claims to have “helped provoke” the creation of the CDC via the Measure F ballot initiative in 1998.
The website for DUHC still claims the taxpayer-funded Corporations Committee as one of its current projects, to which the Eureka-based Democracy Unlimited “provides resources and advice.” DUHC also considers the city committee to be a project which “falls within our Building Alternatives Program and our Shifting Culture Program.” In its ten-year history, the CDC has only been chaired by someone who identified as a member of Democracy Unlimited, blurring the line between local government and this obstensibly non-profit organization -- although DUHC itself is not a 501(c)3 corporate entity, but rather a "project" of the California Center for Community Democracy, a non-profit which operates out of a P.O. Box in Albion (Mendocino County).
Measure F, the “Arcata Advisory Committee on Democracy and Corporations,” originally called for two town hall meetings on the subject, which were held in 2000. The measure also called for the creation of a committee to consider questions of corporate power -- but neither the initiative, nor the Council with their mandate approved later in 2000, granted authority to the CDC to draft commercial restrictions or engage in electoral activities on the city’s dime.
Councilmember Michael Machi, running for a third term this fall, told the Sentinel in an interview earlier this month that he would like to consider merging certain city committees to achieve cost savings, the CDC and the Nuclear Weapons Free Zone and Peace Commission topping the list.
DUHC has provided no public statement on what role they would play in relation to the Corporations Committee in the event that it ceased to operate.
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