It’s election season, which means that once again, all sorts of stories and allegations get trotted out to advance candidates’ campaigns, some of which are just rehashes of old claims that simply aren’t true. The latest one is the trope that the City Council “pitted neighborhoods against one another” when selling the Raynor Activity Center. This points to the fact that the City Council ultimately decided to use the proceeds from the RAC sale to fund the new Lakewood Village branch library. This is a particularly nasty piece of revisionist history that simply distorts the city’s true stated intentions, and ignores its attempts to actually respond to community concerns. As one of the few people that was intimately involved in the decision process throughout, I’m apparently in the best position to provide the facts that contradict this nonsense.
Back when the RAC center sale was proposed and pursued, before any buyer was identified, the City Council designated the proceeds of the RAC sale to simply go to future unspecified capital improvements. This is reflected in multiple city budget documents over the period of discussion, where the estimated proceeds are listed in the capital budget but not designated for a specific usage. The initial plan was to resolve the sale, and only once the sale was completed would the City Council decide which specific capital project would be funded. And the city budgets during this period reflect that plan. The Council’s stated intention was simply that the proceeds should go towards some capital expenditure, and not to be used towards operating expenses. This reflected the general budget principle that “one-time proceeds should be used for one-time projects and not for ongoing expenses”. Using one-time funds for operating expenses is a highly problematic practice that has long been actively been discouraged, because once those funds are used up, the City is stuck with an operating deficit and no funds to resolve it. So the Council did its best to make sure that wouldn’t happen.
Unfortunately, some of the RAC neighbors (one in particular) seized on the fact that the City wasn’t specifying how the money would be used, to advance the rather ridiculous claim that the City was “selling off assets to pay off pensions”. And this claim was made repeatedly on the Birdland mailing list, to the consternation of those of us who had pushed for the funds to go to some future unspecified capital expenditure, knowing that resolving the money’s use later was the best practice. And every attempt to point to budget practices and actual budget documents was met with “yes, but you could use it towards pensions!” claims. I still have all of those emails, as well as my attempts to respond to them with actual facts and budget references, to no avail.
Flash forward a few months of these claims being circulated in rather irresponsible and baseless way, and the City Manager met with me for one of our regular chats. And in that meeting, he raised the possibility of the City Council specifying that the RAC proceeds would be dedicated to building a branch library. I suspect he picked me first in part to gauge community reaction, and in part because I’ve long been an opponent of building a branch library in Sunnyvale prior to resolving our problems with the main library (there are multiple fiscal reasons why dealing with the main library first is better). Anyway, I was the first one he mentioned it to. The argument he made to me was that the community could rest easier about the RAC sale if it saw that the proceeds were being used to improve city services in a meaningful way. The specific notion was to sell off a money pit that wasn’t serving Sunnyvale well, using the results for something that the city actually needed and wanted.
My initial reaction, after some thought, was that it was an interesting notion, although the branch library still gave me pause. It was open and transparent, it allowed for a public discussion about how the funds would be spent, and it would kill off the ridiculous rumors being circulated about the city selling off assets to pay off pension debts. I viewed all of these as good things that served the public interest, and I said as much.
So the City Manager brought forward the topic for consideration and public debate, and the City Council agreed with that approach in the end.
Next thing we know, the exact same people who had been accusing the city of secretly planning to sell off assets to pay off the city’s pension debt were now using the city’s transparency and public discussion to claim that we were “pitting neighborhood against neighborhood”, a claim that is once again being resurrected for whatever reason. This, despite the fact that the City didn’t even want to specify the use of the RAC proceeds, making every attempt to commit the money generally, and not specifically, until the sale was concluded. It was only in response to outlandish neighborhood claims that this was done in the first place. Sigh.
Sometimes you simply can’t win. And there’s always someone who benefits from telling tales. But that’s what happened, from someone who was actually there, and these are the actual motivations behind those decisions. So now you know.
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