In our representative democracy, we elect leaders who we believe will broadly support our wishes and values, and then let those elected representatives make the multitude of individual choices on our behalf.
Approving projects, changing zoning and making updates to the City of Santa Cruz’s general plan can only work effectively when done through regular order. We need to ensure that staff, commissions and the city council have the ability to adapt their decision-making with changing needs, new state laws, unique situations and public sentiment.
Measure M would hamstring our elected leaders by making it nearly impossible to adequately plan for the future of our city. Poorly written ballot measures with conditions set in stone, a plethora of unintended consequences, and expensive citywide elections for individual projects large and small, are no way to run a thriving city. We either need to retain the flexibility our city needs to control our own future, or recent laws out of Sacramento will let the state do it for us when we miss our housing targets – and then we’ll really lose our voice.
All our voices are already part of the current process – we don’t need to clog all progress with endless elections to be heard.
Jacob Knobel
Santa Cruz