The decision to designate Santa Clara as a “Sanctuary City” is a major one and deserves more input to our Council than can be provided by a few advocates speaking at meetings, especially as Trump has now threatened to cut all Federal assistance to Sanctuary cities. Potentially, we could lose millions of dollars in assistance.
An excellent “Sense of the City” could be easily and quite accurately determined by instituting a system where each payer of their Municipal Utilities bill could indicate a yes/no checked answer to questions from Council. A single page insert with each bill would not increase the postage cost each way and adding a provision to tabulate the choice when paying electronically should be a small programming task.
If implemented, Council decisions would then be at least guided by the wishes of their constituents. That should be considered a definite win for the democratic process!