It is time to stop electing a Town Clerk and a Town Treasurer in Los Gatos, the Town Council was told at its Oct. 15 meeting by two highly respected Los Gatans--former Mayor Joanne Benjamin and former Councilmember and Deputy Town Clerk MarLyn Rasmussen. The two women urged the council to take action at its Nov. 5 meeting that would place the issue on the Feb. 5, 2008 ballot.
"Of 478 California cities, 370 of them have appointed city clerks," the women said, urging that the council ask the voters to ammend the town code.
An appointed clerk or treasurer would have proven skills in their role, but would lack the independence of an elected official. The idea is enthusiastically supported by the current appointed Clerk Administrator and elected Town Treasurer.
"We should never have had an elected Town Treasurer, if you ask me," said elected Town Treasurer Linda Lubeck Speicher. Her second 4-year term ends in 2008, and she would consider being appointed to the role after that.
"You don't know who's going to run for the elected position," Speicher said. "We've had a good string of treasurers, but you just don't know. Just because someone is a CPA doesn't mean that they know investments...but they sure know cash flow." Former Mayor Speicher is a local CPA.
Speicher--who was once labeled a Town Treasure due to a typo--says that her duties amount to a couple of hours of work a week. She manages the town's investments, following "very strict parameters set down by State law," and signs checks. The portfolio hovers around $70 million, of which more than half takes advantage of professional investment advisors. Another $20 million or so is stashed in a Local Agency Investment Fund (LAIF).
Jackie Rose has been the town's appointed Clerk Administrator since 2001. The elected Town Clerk, Marian V. Cosgrove, has been involved with a simmering disagreement with the town since 2004.
Cosgrove served as both the elected and the appointed Town Clerk throughout the 1990s and was re-elected to the position with 100% of the vote in Nov. 2000. In 2001, she pre-announced her retirement in 2004, but changed her mind in June 2004 when then-Town Manager Deb Figone proposed changes that Cosgrove thought rendered the role of the elected clerk a mere figurehead.
Cosgrove won re-election as Town Clerk in Nov. 2004, but stopped visiting Town Hall and took the town's seal home in 2005. Town Attorney Orry Korb demanded that she return it, but Cosgrove responded that she was the duly elected keeper of the seal. The matter was resolved with an uneasy truce.
"It's confusing," admits Clerk Administrator Rose. "The elected position has become ceremonial."
The Town Council could not respond to Benjamin and Rasmussen's ballot suggestion until it is on a published agenda, but they seemed receptive to the idea. They will have to act on Nov. 5 in order to put the measure on the Feb. ballot.
"You, your brother, or your next door neighbor could run, and if you got the most votes, you're the elected official," Councilmember Mike Wasserman told the Weekly Times' Grant Skellen in 2004. "So you could certainly have somebody who chooses to be the elected clerk with no clerk knowledge or experience. We've had the benefit of having Marian Cosgrove in there."
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