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Palo Alto swiftly rejected on Monday calls to reconsider how it elects its mayor, opting to retain the city’s long-standing tradition of leaving it up to City Council members to select who will lead them every year.
The topic of mayoral election came up last year as part of the council’s revision of its procedures and protocols. At that time, council members Alison Cormack and Greg Tanaka had both suggested that the city halt its current practice and switch to a rotation based on seniority, much like in Menlo Park, Mountain View and most other cities in the region.
Council members ultimately agreed to punt the decision to the new year so that newly elected council members could weigh in.
But as the council this week took on a broad revision of its procedures, members opted not to move ahead with the change. While Tanaka and council member Julie Lythcott-Haims both argued in favor of making the change and council member Vicki Veenker supported scheduling a full discussion of the topic at a future date, the other four members all agreed that maintaining the current system, in which council members vote on who will serve as their mayor and vice mayor, works just fine and that the policy should remain as is.
Changing the policy was always going to be a tough sell, given that it would require the council’s political majority to effectively give up its power to choose the two leadership positions in future years. The change would also elevate Tanaka, who frequently casts the lone dissenting vote on items that require major expenditures and who routinely criticizes his colleagues and city staff for being wasteful with public funds, to the council’s leadership position.
Even though Tanaka has been serving on the council since 2017 and is now in his second term, he has not served as a mayor or vice mayor. Last month, he was passed over yet again when the council selected Lydia Kou and Greer Stone to serve as its mayor and vice mayor, respectively.
Cormack, who concluded her four-year term last year, also could not get elected to a leadership position on a council that was dominated by the members who leaned toward the more slow-growth “residentialist” camp. She came closest in 2019, when the council split 3-3 along political lines on whether to elect her or now-former council member Tom DuBois as vice mayor.
Tanaka opted not to vote at all, triggering a stalemate that only concluded when Cormack agreed to throw her support to DuBois. With two of Cormack’s political allies, Liz Kniss and Adrian Fine subsequently concluding their terms, that was as close as she would get to obtaining a leadership position on the council.
In December, Cormack suggested changing the city’s policies to specify that the mayor “shall rotate based on consecutive years served and ranked by votes received in the general election.”
Palo Alto’s current policy, which is enshrined in the municipal code, states that the council “shall elect one of its members as mayor and one as vice-mayor at the first regular council meeting in January each year. The election of mayor and vice mayor shall be by a vote of a majority of the members of the council.”
While the mayoral position is largely thought of as ceremonial, a Palo Alto mayor does have some powers, including running council meetings, filling council committees, creating new committees and working with the city manager to shape the agenda for council meetings.
Lythcott-Haims, who last month backed Tanaka for vice mayor, supported moving ahead with such a change. She observed that the council has become more diverse in recent years with more women and people of color in leadership positions. Unfortunately, she said, women and people of color are often passed over for leadership opportunities both in the private and public sectors. She also noted that Tanaka had served on the council for longer than Stone and had received more votes in 2020, when they were both were on the ballot.
“Such choices may have had nothing to do with gender or race,” Lythcott-Haims said. “It may just be that council members Cormack and Tanaka have been on the wrong side of the majority on various issues, but the fact remains that the residents of the city have voted for council members Tanaka and Cormack in large numbers and by passing them over for leadership we’re effectively discounting those voters’ opinions.”
The council majority was not swayed. Council member Pat Burt, who last year served as mayor for the third time, said Monday that believes the current policy is the correct one and that he would not support returning for a prolonged discussion. And Stone rejected the idea that having council members elect their own mayor and vice mayor somehow discounts voters. He observed that voters only get to weigh in on who gets to serve on the council and that they voted in the current members under the “presumption of our current rules.”
“Voters didn’t elect us to be mayor, they did not elect us to be vice mayor. They elected us to be council members,” Stone said. “I think the skill of a council member is very different from the skill of leadership, of being mayor or vice mayor.”
Time served, he argued, shouldn’t be the main factor in determining leadership positions. Barack Obama, he noted, was a freshman senator when he ran for U.S. president. Palo Alto’s current practice allows members to elect mayor and vice mayor based on merit, not just seniority.
“Our residents expect more from us than organizing us like a kindergarten class might pick a team captain for a game of softball,” Stone said. “This isn’t about elevating our own political ambitions for self-serving purposes, it’s about picking the best candidate for the job.”
Kou and council member Ed Lauing joined Burt and Stone in rejecting a proposal to hold another discussion of this topic, effectively ensuring that the current practice will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
The council was more united when it came to revising other procedures, including ones governing remote participation. After a long debate, council members agreed by a 6-1 vote, with Kou dissenting, to allow members to participate remotely up to five times per year (Kou had suggested that the number should be three).
They also adopted a policy that encourages a member to declare themselves absent if they disconnect from the meeting and fail to reconnect on five attempts — a rule meant to ensure that meetings won’t be unduly delayed. And they backed a policy that directs council members who are submitting “colleagues memos” that propose new policies to consider the timing of their submissions to make sure their terms don’t end before the item is taken up.
Interesting how only the staunchly pro-density crew who got / get the biggest campaign contributions from organized groups OUTSIDE of Palo Alto keep pushing for the change to a rotation system so they can push their agenda.
To paraphrase Mitt Romney extolling the virtues of unlimited political contributions by lobbyists, unidentified PACS, corporations etc, when pushing through the Citizens United law, “Corporations are people, my friend.”
At the same time they also want to limit campaign contributions from people / individuals only but not from groups / businesses / lobbyists.
See also their repeated calls to end Prop 13 from “greedy homeowners” but never ever from corporations who of course are so much more entitled than those horrible senior citizens and grandmothers who are only politically useful when pitching ADUs,
I wish the paper would use less disparaging language when referring to the “residentialist” council members. With 3-4 of 7, it sure seems voters have chosen to have a majority of voices speaking to residents’ priorities on the council and THAT should be a major indicator of what Palo Alto voters want in a mayor, too.
I hope Ms. Lythcott-Haims’ is enthusiastic about the election of current mayor Kou who is a woman of color and who also was elected to CC and as Mayor based on her leadership and track record.
Agree with not rotating based on seniority. It’s politics! Building consensus shows leadership and good governance. Tanaka has not demonstrated as much skill in this department as his colleagues.
This article implies that Tanaka and Cormack were not elected to leadership positions because they were on the wrong side of a majority. One of these council members consistently is the least prepared at Council meetings and unnecessarily delays Council discoussions with off topic and ill-timed comments. The other, while well prepared, consistently showed a divisive tendency and both a willingness to support business interests at the expense of residents. Thank goodness the Council as a whole recognized that they would not be good for the leadership positions. We lived through the reign of Mr. Fine which was a disaster in terms of a well functioning Council. Indeed, as Council Member Stone suggests, a rotation system in which, which is appropriate for AYSO soccer where everyone gets to play, is not the right way to choose a leader.
I watched the council meeting last week and could see that the new members were dragging the meeting with offering opinions which were not thought out – they were making it up as they sat there wasting time. We will put people in charge who can present their ideas in a well thought out manner with a clear statement of the desired outcome.
If people got voted onto the council then razing the race card seems to be a pot stirrer. If you are there then participate with well thought out positions that do not waste time. If people want to gain political clout then it has to be based on good, solid solutions to the current problems of this city.
We vote for good management – not serving up the “image” of the city. Some of the comments from the call-ins were disturbing. Some call-ins seem to think that they were directing a image building TV show – not running a city. Running a city is a business and the taxpayers know that. Run this business for the best outcomes for the residents.
Connecting the dots of the various news stories about system failures, flooding, outages, crime, housing, the erosion of retail, etc., it is painfully clear that what Palo Alto badly needs is more leadership and less politics.