Publication Date: Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Our Town: Mid-season gut check
Our Town: Mid-season gut check
(July 07, 2004) by Don Kazak
It's about that time when baseball teams know enough to say what's gone right or wrong, what can be fixed and whether the season is a total loss.
A different hometown nine is about half-way through its annual "season," too -- midway through Bern Beecham's year as mayor.
Beecham inherited what was either a very good or a very bad situation on the Palo Alto City Council, depending on whether one is an optimist or a pessimist.
For the optimists, last year was so difficult, from the first meeting in January when Dena Mossar was voted in as mayor up until near the very end, that anything by comparison was going to be easier.
A big part of the reason to be hopeful was when Nancy Lytle lost her reelection bid in November.
Lytle was, many people thought, the stick in the bicycle spokes.
At any rate, it turned out to be a trying year for Mossar as mayor.
Beecham, as a result, took the helm of what should have been a more harmonious council.
Except, of course, it hasn't exactly worked that way.
There have been little flare-ups and short tempers from time to time as one or more council members lost patience with each other.
That included Jack Morton walking out of an April Finance Committee meeting in a snit and, a few weeks later, Judy Kleinberg and Hillary Freeway each trying to speak at the same time and not wanting to yield to each other.
Beecham has seemed exasperated, from time to time.
The pessimists would say some conflict was bound to happen because of raw feelings left over from last year.
But Beecham remains upbeat.
"I have great optimism this will be the most productive council in years," Beecham told the Palo Alto Rotary Club recently.
But he also admits that providing leadership to independent-minded people (who can be quick to get testy) can be difficult. "Each one, at one time or another, may have felt I dealt with them unfairly," he told me recently.
There may be something else going on. Unlike veteran councils of the 1980s and 1990s, this is a relatively inexperienced council, largely due to term limits.
But there is another difference, too, as several people have pointed out. There was a time when half or more of the council came up through the Planning Commission. Of the current nine, only Beecham and Vic Ojakian have that experience.
Among other things, that's when people learn how to run meetings, find consensus, and work toward something doable.
"It's one of the most difficult councils," said a former member. "It doesn't take much to yank them apart."
For the remainder of the year, Beecham has said he will continue with the main themes he outlined after being elected. Those priorities include difficult budget decisions and trying to rebuild the city's infrastructure, fixing the city's process of getting projects approved, and reaching out more to the community.
The city's approval process has been revamped, to some degree, and Beecham has been pointedly outspoken about the problems when speaking in the community.
"Other cities have certainty, but we're not there yet," he told a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in April. "It's hard to change the attitude of the organization. We have to change the hearts and minds to get it done."
He was critical of how long it takes to get projects approved, including five years for 800 High St. and six years for Hyatt Rickey's, which later bailed out on rebuilding its hotel.
But both of those projects had problems because no one liked the original versions and the respective developers refused to budge. That can hardly be blamed on the Palo Alto process.
There seems to be almost as much talk about things going wrong as there are things going wrong. The public perception of a council in difficulty will remain out there until the council gets on a winning streak.
In baseball terms, the council's still in the pennant race but with a sticky part of the schedule coming up later -- including consideration in August of the future of the baylands after the closing of the dump in 2011.
Weekly Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.
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