Amongst the arguments in favor of Curiously-Strong Mayor is one which attempts to dismiss various criticisms of the proposal as little more than Chicken Little Syndrome. The third of these criticisms is stated as follows: “The Mayor can sell or lease public property without council oversight”. I’ve beaten this one to death already, but since voters now are receiving the Voters’ Pamphlet, many people are being exposed to Team Potter’s lies on this point for the first time.
Presented as the “facts” which dispute the criticism is the following statement from City Attorney Linda Meng:
I believe it would be a reasonable interpretation of the Charter to say that the Council could set the criteria or standards for what City property could be sold, including requiring that the Council make the determine of whether property is surplus.
We can dismiss the second part of that statement because the power of Council to “determine whether property is surplus” is a power explicitly granted to Council under both the current Charter and the proposed revision, and it is irrelevant to the question of any actual sale.
So it’s the first part that needs dissecting. Is it, in fact, “reasonable interpretation of the Charter to say that the Council could set the criteria or standards for what City property could be sold”?
With all due respect to the City Attorney, no. It’s not a reasonable interpretation, because the proposed Charter revision provides no room for interpretation.
Under the Curiously-Strong Mayor proposal, as I detailed previously, here’s the law on the sale of surplus property:
The City may sell, dispose of or exchange any buildings, structures or property, real or personal, which it owns or may acquire not needed for public use, by negotiation, bid, auction or any other method the Mayor finds appropriate. The City may sell property on contract for such term as the Mayor finds appropriate, notwithstanding any term limit elsewhere prescribed in the Charter.
Let’s remove some extraneous words to make the central point as clear as possible.
The City may sell … any … property … which it owns … not needed for public use, by negotiation, bid, auction or any other method the Mayor finds appropriate.
There’s only one criteria for what property can be sold: That it is not needed for public use. While both the current Charter and the proposed revision grants Council the power to declare City property to be no longer needed for public use, that’s the only power it grants to Council when it comes to this process.
While the City Attorney asserts that “the Council could set the criteria or standards for what City property could be sold, including requiring that the Council make the determine of whether property is surplus”, the plain language of the Charter revision says otherwise.
A truthful statement would have been to say that “the Council could set the criteria or standards for what City property could be sold, as long as by ‘criteria or standards’ you mean only making the general determination that property is surplus”.
Meng’s statement suggests that under the proposal Council could set criteria or standards beyond the simple determination that a piece of property is surplus. But that’s simply not what the Charter revision says.
Read it again.
The City may sell … any … property … which it owns … not needed for public use, by negotiation, bid, auction or any other method the Mayor finds appropriate.
It’s very clear that there is only one criteria for the sale of City property: That it not be needed for public use. It says so right there. Any property not needed for public use (in other words, any surplus property), under the revision, can be sold “by negotiation, bid, auction or any other method the Mayor finds appropriate”.
The word “any” is the key there. If any surplus property can be sold by the Mayor, then the only thing required for a sale is that the property be surplus. The language of the Charter forbids any other criteria or standard.
While it’s clear that Team Potter assumes that using the words of the City Attorney will give weight to their counter-argument, that assumption falls apart when the City Attorney either simply tells Major Tom what he wants to hear without regard to whether it’s right or wrong, or simply doesn’t know how to write a sentence that properly describes the plain facts.
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