Amend City Charter to Provide for Election of Council Members from Districts

By Tom Pereira

In order to return power to the voters of Santa Clara, Tom proposes that we amend the City Charter to provide for election of Council Members from districts.

Tom believes that changing the way we elect our Council Members is the key to campaign reform and that the dialogue should begin with district elections. If Council Members were chosen from small geographical districts, neighborhood concerns would command attention since each Members tenure in office would depend upon those voters in the district. Meaningful campaigns would be run in our neighborhoods, where they belong, and not the private offices of the political elite.

By amending the City Charter, candidates for district seats would be able to personally walk their district and meet each and every voter, discussing the issues that concern them. Campaign expenditures would be dramatically reduced since literature, mailings, signs and other such activities would become obsolete or be limited to your district and not citywide as is now required. This would open up the political process to all willing citizens, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, not just the rich or those connected to the political elite.

This long overdue change would return power to the voters and restore true representative democracy to the City of Santa Clara. This kind of city government would truly be, in Lincoln's famous words, "of the people, by the people and for the people."

This bold proposal should be the beginning point of any serious dialogue about campaign reform. No longer will we settle for the excuses that the political elite have given us for so many years whenever campaign reform is seriously discussed:

"The Supreme Court has ruled it unconstitutional to limit contributions to one's own campaign." "If we provide taxpayer matching funds, it only means that the rich will have their own dollars matched by tax dollars." "We cannot ask citizens to subsidize our election process."

Tom's campaign is about ideas not excuses, involving the collective strength of all of our citizens, and turning it into positive change. It has been said that "when you're through changing, you're through." Let us choose the growth that change promotes and make Santa Clara's political system fair to all.