When You Skip the Process, the Process Comes for You

San Rafael's city manager has been shown the door, and the catalyst appears to be a homeless shelter project that was rammed through with all the transparency of a back-alley poker game.

Here's the short version: the city pushed forward on a controversial homeless shelter with a speed and secrecy that made residents, and apparently some city officials, deeply uncomfortable. The lack of public input and transparency wasn't just a bad look — it triggered a lawsuit and sent the city government into full-blown internal turmoil. The end result? The city manager is out.

Let's be clear about something: wanting to address homelessness isn't the problem. Every Bay Area city is grappling with it, and the human toll is real. But how you address it matters enormously. When government officials treat public input as an inconvenience to be bypassed rather than a feature of democratic governance, they're not being bold leaders — they're being autocrats with good PR.

This is the playbook we've seen over and over in California: officials declare a crisis, use the urgency to skip community engagement, fast-track a project with questionable planning, and then act shocked when citizens revolt. The crisis is real. The shortcuts are not justified.

Taxpayers deserve to know where their money is going. Residents deserve a seat at the table when major projects land in their neighborhoods. And city employees deserve leadership that follows the rules rather than inventing new ones on the fly.

San Rafael's ouster should be a warning shot to city managers across the Bay Area — including a few in San Francisco who have their own transparency allergies. You can move quickly and move transparently. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Governance isn't just about outcomes. It's about process. Skip the process, and eventually, the people will skip you.