Suburbs prosper at Sacramento’s expense

Opinion: March 10, 2008 at 12:20a.m.

HOW HE SEES IT

Twenty-plus years ago, in a series of articles for the Sacramento Bee that later became a book about California’s economic and social megatrends, I described Sacramento as the “gawky adolescent of California cities — unsure of its identity, a bit afraid of adulthood and prone to making mistakes.”

Unfortunately, the description still fits. Although the six-county Sacramento region now is home to 2.3 million people, the city contains scarcely a fifth of the total and has lost its position as the hub of commercial activity and employment to fast-growing, development-minded suburban communities.

Sacramento’s downtown business district has deteriorated over the last couple of decades despite having thousands of state employees in nearby offices and despite the city’s spending untold millions of dollars on “redevelopment.” And its Keystone Kops efforts to build a new arena for the Sacramento Kings basketball team are a textbook example of how to fail.

It wasn’t always so. Sacramento was one of the West’s largest and most important cities in the late 19th century, the center of the Gold Rush, home to high-flying financial figures and, of course, the state capital. But as San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities displaced Sacramento later in the century, the city slipped into a comfortable, if unexciting, niche as the home to federal- and state-government agencies and their civil-service employees.

Blame it on ‘gentry’

Even when the region was hit by a spurt of growth after World War II, the city’s leaders — later described by one observer as the “civic gentry” — consciously blocked it from annexing surrounding farmlands, not wanting the city to grow and, implicitly, not wanting to lose their control of local political and commercial life. The label was applied by Glen Sparrow, who had directed a commission that tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade local voters to combine the city with the increasingly urbanized portions of Sacramento County in the 1970s.

By the time city leaders realized that its commercial life was being sucked away by the suburbs, it was too late. It was hemmed in by the suburban communities, which then began incorpobrating, one by one, into cities themselves. Sacramento mounted a last gasp a few years ago with legislation to force suburban communities to cede some of their sales taxes to the city, but its failure merely underscored its plight.

Isolated status

Sacramento’s politics have reflected its increasingly isolated status. While Democratic factions squabble among themselves over City Council seats and fine points of political correctness, the surrounding communities are mostly Republican. And while Sacramento’s mayor has a full-time salary, the real power to hire, fire and make development deals rests with a city manager — even though the hallmark of a truly mature city is having an elected head of government with authority and accountability, as do San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and even Oakland, which is smaller than Sacramento in population.

So here is Sacramento in 2008: The Kings’ arena situation is as confused as ever; the city’s much-vaunted development of its historic rail yards is moving with glacial speed, if at all; the downtown district is still struggling; the city has a whopping budget deficit; and the current mayor, Heather Fargo, is unpopular and under criticism for spending much of her time on globe-trotting and global warming.

Fargo, a one-time midlevel state bureaucrat, is running for re-election but faces a very stiff challenge from Kevin Johnson, a Sacramentan who became a basketball star in other cities and returned to devote himself to improvement of his Oak Park neighborhood, albeit with very uneven results to date.

Sacramento may or may not get a new mayor; it certainly needs a civic makeover because whatever it’s been doing isn’t working.

Scripps Howard News Service