Presentation and follow up of agendized reconsideration of Peak Democracy contract

I made gave following comments during at meeting of  3/19/2014:
   

Members of the Council,  Mayor Barth

Normally, once a contract is signed and approved by the city council it is not reviewed. Knowing this, I request that such a review of the the Peak Democracy program be placed on the next agenda. 

Time prevents my describing more than the broad areas of concern, which include: Value provided relative to other options,  Alienation of voters,  and potential lawsuits for breach of the Ralph M. Brown Act that carry sizable financial penalties.   The problems and pitfalls are complex, but for now I will illustrate the risk by analogy with another popular movement, Capital Appreciation Bonds

Many remember the outrage by the public when they learned how these worked--- with interest payment deferred, requiring an unfunded balloon payment at a future date. While Poway got the most heat,  there were several hundred issued in California.  The business of selling these now discredited bonds had many similarities with marketing virtual city hall programs such as Peak Democracy.  The top executives were professional, persuasive, and now very wealthy entrepreneurs.  

As more districts purchased these financial instruments, the fad built on itself, as any objection such as the one I am making for this product was  dismissed by simply pointing to the many other California districts that had bought into it. Now there are laws restricting their sale, but the damage was done, as school districts throughout the state now face massive payments with no ability to meet them--but those who saddled the current citizens with this burden are long gone from the scene. 

Based on my research, Peak Democracy could cause different, but equally severe adverse effects. On the other hand such a review that I request could be valuable in allowing re-negotiaton and elimination of some identified objectionable elements of this service.  

A few weeks delay of implementation is a small price to pay to consider these risks. 

I sent this email a  few days later to members of the city council and the city clerk as a follow up:

My proposal was that we hold this discussion, as a pre-requisite to implementation of the Peak Democracy contract- at which time approval to proceed will be either be affirmed or negated.  This was the position that council person Muir adopted in his agenda request, and was seconded by council person Gaspar. 

Could you please verify that this is what is understood by the City Manager?

I would also like to call to the attention of the extended readers of this email the following means of communication now available to citizens.  It can be reached by this link to the Encinitas servers, which in this case the data is held by the citizen sponsors.  But as an alternative, such a survey could be done right now under initiation by council or its designee, with none of the adverse elements that I have Identified with Peak Democracy.  In this case it was a joint effort of an individual citizen group as augmented by our city, with nominal city IT cost  The city itself could sponsor such messages that would be directed to those who have chosen to be included in our data base of citizen emails that they could or could not join based only on their desire to be included.  This, in contrast to the Peak Democracy package,  would not be in breech of the Brown act Code section 54950 et seq.as they could still comment with no illegal "preconditions."

While this came to my attention adventitiously, the structure of this communication example allows comparison to what could be achieved by the Peak Democracy suite of programs with what is now available in house.  The other discussion would be the issue of how this will shift the nature of the communication between citizens and decision makers, along with the larger question of  the effect on trust in government that would result. Even in the unlikely event that we would be required to forfeit the contractual payment to Peak Democracy, this should be a minor consideration for the decision whether to implement their program.