What would you do differently than Rachel?

I’ve been sitting in the public seats at council meetings since 2020. What I’ve watched, over and over, is a staff recommendation, one question, and a vote. I’d ask the second question. Then the third one.

That’s the difference, and it has nothing to do with caring about Ojai. It’s about what happens between the recommendation and the vote. What are we actually getting? What’s behind the numbers, and what happens if those assumptions are wrong? I want an answer that holds up, not an answer for the sake of having asked one.

I spent forty years in commercial real estate and I have an MBA. You learn quickly that an attractive proposal and a good deal aren’t the same thing, and the only way to tell them apart is to do the homework and keep going until the justification stands up on its own.

A lot of this is just arithmetic. Every dollar we put behind one priority is a dollar that isn’t there for another one, and somebody has to say that out loud before the vote instead of after.

And when we try something, we ought to be able to say what it was for and whether it worked. Home hardening is the easy example: how many houses got ember-resistant vents that didn’t have them? At the end of the year that either happened or it didn’t. Approving something is the start of the job, not the end of it, and nobody should have to accept “staff recommended it, the council approved it” as the whole explanation.

None of this is exciting. A resident told me they’d like the council to be boring. I knew exactly what they meant.