To the Editor:
Tonight the Stamford Board of Representatives will vote on a proposed ordinance intended to address the yearslong use of held-over land use board members without submitting their names for reconfirmation. For example, one planning board member was confirmed only in 2001.
Some are suggesting that the purpose behind this proposed ordinance is that there is “an agenda” as a reason not to consider it a viable improvement. Everyone has an agenda — the mayor, the various members of the BOR, and both the proponents of the ordinance as well as its detractors. Agendas are not a new revelation. Are we willing to subject our agendas to rules and procedures, ordinances and charter provision? Or do we opt out of those procedures when they risk not producing the result we want?
We keep civil society alive by sticking to the agreement to play by the rules. While you may be worried that presenters of this ordinance proposal “have an agenda,” the use of expired-term boards are also to promote an agenda. Refusing to improve governance by regarding this proposal as a tactic is a tactic in and of itself.
Bend the rules too far and the risk is that the voting public will no longer respect the rule of law as a guiding principle. We can point to instances at the federal level of executive legal counsel providing opinions that support the policy aims of the person in office. Some of the opinions are agreed to be well argued, and some not so much, but with a straight face they are claimed to be “the law.”
We are watching the appointment process and transition play out in Washington as we have this vote on the process locally. Just as with some federal presidents’ counsel decisions, some City of Stamford law department decisions have raised questions locally. In the Riverbend apartment complex case, the law department’s last-minute opinion that a citizen’s group did not have enough signatures for a petition to be validated because they should have obtained signatures from Darien residents demonstrated to me the lengths a department may go to try to provide a “legal” underpinning for the agenda of the mayor. Plausible arguments that the bases for that opinion are not solid have been raised. (Ralph Blessing, whose department’s job it was to count and validate the petition signatures, was not provided such an opinion as advance guidance, nor were the petitioners.) The law department opinion only emerged when it appeared the citizen’s group might have enough signatures to challenge the decision rendered by expired-term members of a board.
For this reason, I reserve judgement on the suggestion that the repeated holdover of commission members without subjecting them to the approval process is by definition legal. The legal opinion that years can go by without ever subjecting a holdover to reappointment confirmation in fact serves an agenda. If it were the Trump Administration doing the same, I suspect the Democrats defending this process would be alarmed and concerned. “Ok for me but not for thee”?
Our system allows for legal opinions to be debated and their merits weighed. A declaration that something is “legal” can be challenged and debated, since, as Jeff Lebowski would say, “That’s just your opinion, man.” Not clarifying a process because you are afraid of what will happen if it is clarified is confirmation that the broken process as it is — allowing people to never be subjected to a confirmation vote and decide the future of the city — serves the mayor’s agenda, an agenda that those who say “it’s legal” support. Allowing a broken process to sustain has benefits for those it serves, but at a time when respect for government is at very low levels, a failure to engage in the process of clarifying rules and agreeing to work within them strengthens the public’s skepticism that government is fair and can work, and strengthens their long held belief in Stamford that “the fix is in.”
Civil society depends upon having a system with “rules of the road” everyone can agree on. The proposal is a solid one and deserves serious consideration. At this moment in history, we cannot afford to dismiss any efforts to work inside the system to make it better
Christine Reid
Stamford, CT