A Modest Proposal For Sonomans Who Deserve Better
Introducing Eastside Park
We are thrilled to announce the founding of Eastside Park, a bold new town being built within our existing city limits. Using innovative public-private partnerships and leveraging taxpayer resources from the existing city and county infrastructure, Eastside Park will offer residents a fresh alternative to the tired, bureaucratic systems that have dominated urban planning for far too long.
Traditional cities, burdened by outdated approaches, serve everyone who lives within their borders, regardless of whether they're easy to serve. They spend enormous amounts of resources on complex problems like homelessness, crumbling infrastructure (in poor neighborhoods), and expensive special services for residents with disabilities. Meanwhile, hardworking residents who simply want clean streets, good parks, and minimal hassle have been forced to subsidize these inefficiencies.
Eastside Park will be different. We believe in innovation, excellence, and choice. Our revolutionary model will allow us to receive a proportional share of all tax revenue from residents who choose to live here—money that would have gone to the old city. But unlike that bloated municipal bureaucracy, we won't be weighed down by expensive obligations.
The existing city and county will continue maintaining the regional water treatment plant, electrical grid, and sewage systems. The old city's fire department and hospitals will still respond to Eastside Park addresses. Eastside Park will simply connect to these systems for a nominal fee.
The city and county will continue to operate the homeless shelter, the addiction treatment center, and the facilities for residents with complex needs. To be clear, Eastside Park's residential selection process is open to everyone. (Our application is available now if you know where to look.)
Some critics might claim this creates a two-tiered system at the taxpayer’s expense. But the truth is, we're simply offering choice. It’s not our fault that the city and county can’t compete with our model because they are burdened with infrastructure, complex needs and regulations that we don’t have to worry about.
And if you should exercise your choice and take up residence in Eastside Park, we can promise an experience nothing short of miraculous. You can find all of the details in our application for special permission to establish our town. We promise: lower crime rates, better property values, higher satisfaction scores, cleaner streets and an unsurpassed quality of life. True, now that we have received permission to create Eastside Park, we don’t ever have to prove that we have achieved any of those goals, but we really do promise to try!
To address some of the common concerns we’ve heard:
Won't this drain resources from the old city?
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The old city will actually have fewer residents to serve! Yes, they'll also have less money and a higher concentration of expensive-to-serve residents, but think of it as an opportunity for them to innovate within constraint.
What happens when an Eastside Park resident develops a chronic illness, becomes disabled, or falls into poverty?
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We are required to develop services for residents such as these, but we're a small, nimble organization without the bloated infrastructure to handle complex cases efficiently. Fortunately, the old city has already made those investments, so there's really no need for duplication of services. Residents are free to move back–the old city is required to take them at any point.
Isn't this fragmenting an already shrinking system?
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Yes, our local population is in decline, just like the population across the entire region. But where others see cities shedding unnecessary infrastructure in an effort to consolidate and reduce fixed costs, we see opportunity! Now the residents of Eastside Park don’t have to move to be near the city’s remaining services, we can keep our services for ourselves.
Will Eastside Park just serve the residents of the Eastside?
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Of course not! Eastside Park is open to anyone who has a passion for innovation, a desire to be part of an upwardly mobile community, and can provide their own transportation. While there are no income requirements or selective criteria, our community culture prioritizes residents who are able to attend weekday meetings, navigate complex application processes, and supplement our baseline services with private resources. Strangely, this profile matches people who already live in the Eastside, but we assure you, anyone who matches that profile is welcome.
Yes and no. Our meetings are open to the public and we have to post agendas in advance. But our council members are not elected, they are appointed, and our records are not available to the public. Occasionally we submit our finances and overall performance indicators for review, but nobody ever scrutinizes cities like ours when there are so many problems in the old cities.
We're exploring cutting-edge ideas that are not ready to be described in detail yet, but we will be aiming for the best of the best.
Are you subject to the same laws around transparency and public access
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What innovative municipal practices will you implement?
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Let’s face it: cities were designed in an era when people believed in collective responsibility and economies of scale. But why should successful and mobile residents be held back by a system designed to serve everyone?
Eastside Park represents the future: a carefully curated community that gets to claim the benefits of public funding without the messy obligations that come with actually being public. We get to celebrate our successes while the old city handles the hard stuff. We get to innovate within a system that's only able to function because someone else is doing the unglamorous work of holding things together for everyone.