Culinary v. city case: It’s about rights

By Jon Ralston

Friday, April 17, 2009 | 2:01 a.m.

Beyond jeopardizing the future of the city’s redevelopment efforts and beyond squelching the mayor’s obvious desire for a gleaming monument called Oscar B. Goodman City Hall, there is a much more serious issue for District Judge David Barker to consider when he rules (we hope) today:

If a ballot proposition has been qualified by thousands of voters, how can a government entity, out of self-interest because it opposes the question, peremptorily decide not to allow the electorate to consider it?

This issue has little to do with the Culinary Union’s obvious motivations in trying to force the questions before the electorate — Mayor Goodman is not all wrong when he uses terms such as “extortion” to describe the organization’s demand for a “labor peace” agreement with prospective downtown gaming developers linked to the city hall edifice. Special interests often have abused the initiative process as a way to circumvent government entities to push their own agendas, often armed with powerful sound bites. Doctors have done it. Unions have done it. Anti- and pro-smoking groups have done it.

But this is not about the union’s motives. In this case, whether by happenstance (likely) or sincerity (well ...), the union has illuminated a real issue — the city’s haphazard, illogical redevelopment non-plan — and its sound bite — that quarter-billion-dollar city hall — actually is reverberating because it has substance.

Credit where credit is due: Oscar Goodman has an unmatched skill in inventing ways to illuminate that he either was an accomplished liar in his past incarnation or is a brilliant poseur in his current re-imagining — or both. As a mob mouthpiece, barrister Goodman bellowed about constitutional rights, draping his horror show roster of clients in the country’s most sacred document to allow them to run free to commit crimes and him to become wealthy. It’s the American way!

As mayor, however, Goodman regularly has backed schemes to abridge the constitutional rights of his constituents, especially the homeless and Fremont Street pamphleteers, with his latest target the public’s right to petition the government to seek a voice in important matters.

This is the putative man of the people, who essentially has made the calculation that the public is so benighted that it would never support the city hall project were it on the ballot. The Teflon mayor is afraid that even he could not get the pro-city hall arguments to stick.

But this is not about the mayor, which may be news to him, despite his reverting to his thuggish nature by berating Culinary Research Director Chris Bohner and neighborhood activist Juanita Clark, or labeling the union leadership “evil.” You would think the man who represented some truly evil men would know how sparingly that word should be used.

As much as Goodman and his allies in the building trades, which have their own councilman (Steve Ross), too, want to make the issue about jobs, it is not. The substantive issue that is never debated is whether anyone has a right to question the redevelopment approach at Roundheels Central, where if you woo the mayor, you can have in tax breaks the equivalent of all the martinis you can drink. The city folks are veritably drunk on the idea that anyone who wants development favors, be it a fancy furniture complex, a jewelry mart or a sprawling gaming (now there’s an original idea!) complex combined with a city hall can have it.

These folks make Monty Hall look like an amateur. The only difference is, they are playing with taxpayer money and, despite what they claim, it is taking tax dollars away from other areas because they are diverted to the redevelopment area. And they don’t want any interference in their grand plans from a pesky public. (Goodman has said that he wouldn’t even benefit from the new city hall, which surely would bear his name. But he has been lobbying lawmakers on a bill to extend his term a year and a half.)

No matter what Barker decides, he won’t settle this. The city has tried, through its dilatory behavior, to run out the clock so the state Supreme Court, which already has punted the issue once, could not compel the questions to be placed on the ballot.

But even if Barker actually decides to listen to a constitutional principle that attorney Goodman once theoretically held dear, the high court must expeditiously rule on an issue that politician Goodman blithely has disregarded.

And if the Supremes do the right thing, the moral will be clear: Live by populist demagoguery, die by populist demagoguery.