Richmond, California
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Publius
28 October 2026.
The consent calendar has a sentence at the top that I have come to admire. All items placed under it, the agenda says, “are considered to be routine and noncontroversial,” and “will be enacted upon together with a motion and second, without discussion.” It is the most honest paragraph the City publishes. It says in advance what will not be talked about.
On Tuesday it worked as written. At about a quarter to nine, after the commendations and open forum, Councilmember Jamelia Brown moved the consent calendar, Councilmember Claudia Jiménez seconded it, and the clerk called the names. Nineteen items went through in less than a minute. Among them: a $3,674,258 state grant for a cannabis-prevention program run through the Office of Neighborhood Safety, with contracts for RYSE and Advance Peace; a $1,500,000 increase to a contract for outfitting emergency vehicles, which doubles it; an $890,492 street-design contract; and a $286,000 amendment to a software consulting contract whose ceiling had been $10,000. No item had been pulled. The motion passed with the Vice Mayor absent.
Then, after a first reading on refinery safety, the Council went on to discuss the things it was not voting on.
The study session on the Office of Neighborhood Safety ran more than an hour, long enough that the Council had to vote to keep going. It did. A Berkeley professor walked the Council through a synthetic Richmond, built from pieces of fifteen other cities, in which there was no Peacemaker Fellowship and things got worse. Councilmembers asked about Antioch, about gentrification, about whether the savings went to the City or to society at large, and about license plate readers. It was a serious discussion. It ended, as receive items do, with nothing to receive but the presentation.
The study deserves a paragraph. Bruno and colleagues, of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, published it August 31 in JAMA Network Open, funded by Arnold Ventures. Measured against a synthetic control of non-California cities, Richmond saw a roughly 61 percent sustained drop in quarterly firearm assaults after mid-2010: 61.47 percent over the full period, 55.78 percent before the pandemic. The authors choose their verb with care: the Fellowship is “associated with” the decline, and the estimates are “not solely attributable” to it. No California city made the comparison group, because many were dropped over the FBI’s 2021 reporting transition. Other strategies may have run at the same time. In the placebo test, Richmond ranked fourth of sixteen (P = .23). The data are city-level counts reported to the FBI. None of this makes the finding wrong. It makes it a finding with limits, which is what the paper says of itself. Councilmember Jiménez, one of the item’s two sponsors, told the presenter that she remembered him from her program at UC Berkeley, where he had been one of her professors, and added, unprompted, “it’s no conflict of interest.”
A caveat is easy to carry for an hour. The grant beside it needed only a motion and a second.
I do not object to the hour. A Council ought to argue about evidence. I note only the order of operations. The Office’s new grant was enacted together, without discussion, at 8:43. The argument about whether the Office works began at 9:01.
Earlier in the evening a different subject had the floor without being on the agenda at all. A proclamation honoring eight police officers for the night of September 3 drew about twenty speakers, most of them officers, nearly all asking for an armored rescue vehicle. An armored-vehicle grant item had been withdrawn from the October 20 agenda before anyone could discuss it. So the vehicle got its public hearing anyway, in the form of thanks.
The traffic items did not get even that. The 23rd Street measures have now been on three agendas, October 6, October 20 and October 27, and on the third they were moved again, to November 17, so that Public Works can present. A Community Police Review Commission appointment, pulled from consent on October 20 so that it could be discussed, was not reached. It has been discussed less since it was pulled than it would have been if it had stayed.
So here is a small theory of the place. Consent is where the money goes, because consent is fast. Study sessions are where the arguments go, because arguments are safe when nothing is being decided. Proclamations are where the requests go, because there is no other door. And the items that would actually require a vote on something contested, a crosswalk, a commissioner, a vehicle, go to a later date.
None of this is improper. The Brown Act allows it, the rules provide for it, and the agenda warns you in its first paragraph. Any member could have pulled any item, and none did. A calendar that is truly routine and noncontroversial is a mark of good staff work, and much of Tuesday’s was. But a $3.67 million program and a doubled vehicle contract are not routine in the ordinary sense of the word, only in the agenda’s sense.
What would it cost to read one of them aloud?
The traffic items were moved to November 17, according to the continuance. The date of the Council’s next meeting had not been posted on the City calendar at the time of writing.
— Publius
Sources: KCRT video, Council Oct. 27, 2026 · Council agenda, Oct. 27, 2026 · Council digest, Oct. 27 · Council digest, Oct. 20 · JAMA Network Open, The Peacemaker Fellowship and Urban Gun Violence in Richmond · Publius, No. 17