The waning of City Council ethics.
Tuesday’s vote of the Stockton City Council to censure Councilmember Michele Padilla may be the last instance of self-policing by the council for years to come.
The Council voted 5-0, with Mayor Kevin Lincoln absent, to rebuke Padilla for allowing political candidates to take the stage and speak at a July get-together in her district on which she spent $10,000 of public money. Using public money to boost candidates violates the city’s municipal code.
Padilla’s violation was not the biggest of deals, and censure is a slap on the wrist. But it does show the current council majority respects its ethical obligations.
Except Padilla. She has been remarkably slow to grasp her mistake and accept responsibility. All she had to say was, “I screwed up. Sorry.” Instead, she whimpered tearfully in her defense that she’s a good person, the censure was a political hit job, and that an event at which numerous political candidates made political remarks was not political.
Before the vote, other council members bandied about the weight of “intent,” apparently pondering whether Padilla should be excused because she didn’t understand the law. Which is baloney. If you run a stop sign, neither your goodness nor your intent matters. You get a ticket.
All the candidates Padilla invited to speak — council hopefuls Jason Lee and Mario Enriquez, mayoral candidate Christina Fugazi, and San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors candidate Mario Gardea — won, or appear likely to win, by the way.
A changing of the guard is coming. Most of the current council is terming out or leaving. Some members of the incoming council make Padilla look like a Girl Scout. During the campaigns, several blatantly violated campaign laws, hid important things from the public, and associated with the 209 Times toxic disinformation site. Stockton may soon see a council majority that thinks rules are for suckers.
Voting rights and wrongs.
Which brings us to the heretical question: Is district voting serving the city well?
From 1986 to 2016, Stockton’s voting system was a hybrid of district primaries and at-large general elections. In the primary, each district chose its top two candidates; in the general, all city voters chose one City Council member from each district.
Under the 2001 California Voting Rights Act, minority groups gained greater legal power to challenge at-large elections in court if the system diluted their voting power. Anticipating a lawsuit, Stockton switched before being dragged into court.
To the extent this change bolstered minority voting rights, it is a good thing. But it also removed citywide voter scrutiny and candidate financing that screened out charlatans and tin-foil types at least some of the time and contributed to the election of council members with a citywide perspective.
I called Dean Andal, the activist who designed the hybrid voting system. “When you have the entire city voting on every council member, they get wide review, from a very diverse, citywide audience,” Andal said. “When you have district elections it tends to Balkanize,” and to produce council members interested only in their district, hence fractious.
“You just have fewer people evaluating the candidate and what they really stand for,” Andal said. “It’s primed for a low-information election.”
Of course, the other drivers of low-information elections — poverty, under-education, the decline of newspapers, and the rise of disinformation (these last two probably unforeseen by the authors of the voting rights act) — factor in, too.
Stockton’s recent election is a prime example. It seems clear that most voters in District 2 — to pick one example — read neither the Stockton Record nor Stocktonia. Both news outlets raised dire questions about the qualifications, agenda, and associates of Mariela Ponce, who won office with the novel strategy of hiding from the public (the TV stations that cover Stockton, as usual, were out to lunch). In a citywide election, Ponce likely would have lost. Not definitely, but probably.
The question is whether the current voting system, for all its plusses, and I wouldn’t want to go back, combine with Stockton’s demographics to create an Achilles heel vulnerable to big spenders and purveyors of disinformation.
Now you’re going to say that’s true of the whole country. I say yes, but it’s worse in Stockton.
Activist/former Councilmember Ralph Lee white says the problem is not the election system; it’s the years on which we hold elections. Aligning them with presidential and gubernatorial elections intensifies the partisanship of nominally nonpartisan council races, he said. It invites a deluge of Republican and Democratic money.
“What I think we should do is have an off-year elections, which will not make it Democrats versus Republicans,” White said.
Other San Joaquin County cities — White named Lodi, among others — hold off-year elections. Voters focusing on local candidates are less likely to blur them with party preferences, he said.
Michael Tubbs, Stockton’s mayor 2016-2020, pointed to problems in Stockton underlying the voting system.
“Until we deal with some of the structural issues of the city, particularly around the economy and the low educational attainment, we’ll continue to have voters who are frustrated, cynical, and who become nihilistic,” Tubbs said. “No matter what voting system you design, you’ll get the same results.”
Results such as the election of Tubbs’ predecessor in the Mayor’s Office, Anthony Silva, who created a circus, and a board majority in Stockton Unified whose shady dealings triggered an FBI investigation.
That investigation needs to produce results, Tubbs said.
He added criticism of the 209 Times disinformation site. “Until the leaders in the city do the hard things to call out the 209 Times and raise the standard of leadership, we’ll continue to have elections that go to the lowest common denominator.”
Not always. We’ll see.
Mass deportations.
President-elect Donald Trump isn’t pussyfooting around when it comes to immigration.
In addition to promising mass deportations of undocumented people, he picked Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff and Thomas Homan as his “border czar.”
Miller supports mass deportation, even “denaturalization,” stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens. Homan, former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), oversaw the atrocious family separations during Trump’s last term.
“That they are heartless and inhumane should give pause to everyone,” said Jose Rodriguez, president and CEO of El Concilio California, said when I called.
Latinos are Stockton’s biggest ethnic group, 45.2% of the population or approximately 145,000 people (2020 Census). Tens of thousands more migrate through the county seasonally to work on the harvest.
“And we know that the people who do that type of work are either immigrants or undocumented — canneries wineries, packing sheds, harvesting,” Rodriguez said.
Agriculture being the county’s leading industry, ICE raids on the fields or other worksites would disrupt the economy.
It would hurt school districts that receive funding based on the average daily attendance of students (schools would suffer not only from students deported but those who stay home in fear).
Since many Latino families are blended, counting both documented and undocumented members, deportation would have painful social costs as well, Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez acknowledged that nationwide a significant slice of mostly male Latino voters shifted red and voted Republican.
“I haven’t necessarily seen it locally, but I do know that in talking to people across the country, working people, that there is a concern from lots of working males of the lack of attention by the Democrat party to their needs,” Rodriguez said.
I believe it’s a local shift, too. That would explain the unexpectedly close contests between Democratic Congressman Josh Harder, Dem State Senate candidate Jerry McNerney, and their Republican rivals.
In conversation, Latino males say Dems would do better to focus on working issues, not cultural ones, Rodriguez said.
One man told him, “The trans conversation has nothing to do with me.”
It is hard to believe the Trump administration can achieve anything like the deportation of 10 million undocumented people. But it can cause havoc.
Locally, neither Stockton nor San Joaquin County are sanctuary jurisdictions. A lot depends on the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office and other law enforcement agencies. Sheriff Pat Withrow has not made a public statement on cooperation with ICE. His spokesperson did not return an email seeking one.
Damn sinking vessels
The council on Tuesday night told the city manager to pursue $921,550 reimbursement for money the city spent when an irresponsible river rat let his tugboat, the Mazapeta, sink in September 2023 in the Delta northwest of Stockton. It was the city’s problem because the Mazapeta carried 16,000 gallons of “petroleum product,” some of which spilled near the intake of the city water supply facility and threatened to pollute city water.
The tug had to be repaired, refloated, defueled, barged to a Mare Island drydock and dismantled.
A million bucks. And, of course, “State and federal agencies have had a hard time finding the tug’s owner …” reported the Maritime Executive.
Now imagine what the cost will be to do a similar operation on the MV Aurora, the cruise ship that sank in the same place in May. The Mazapeta was 95 feet long. The Aurora is 293 feet, a five-deck metal cruise ship weighing 2,496 gross tons. It is the sort of behemoth a tug like the Mazapeta pushed about harbors.
The city of Stockton is on the hook for now at least because the foolish scofflaw who brought the ship here, Chris Willson, never had the wherewithal to properly maintain it, let alone restore it. Willson ignored eviction orders. Instead he fobbed the vessel off on some poor slob and blew town.
The legal division of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Sector San Francisco is researching who is legally liable, said Lt. Commander Mark Leahey.
“Typically it takes several months,” Leahey said. But, “It can take years for that conclusion to be reached.”
The way I look at it, the owners of the Mazapeta and the Aurora have pulled off million-dollar heists from taxpayers. They should be held accountable. If they have no money, there’s always walking the plank.
Michael Fitzgerald’s column runs on Wednesdays. On Twitter and Instagram as Stocktonopolis. Email:mfitzgeraldstockton@gmail.com.