Cliff Notes: You have asked for it. Now Supervisor Desmond is granting your wish. He will be holding a community meeting about possible municipal incorporation. It will be at Howe Park on October 21st, 2024, starting at 5:30pm. Please plan to be there in numbers. Tell your friends. For more info, read on below and peruse our website.

In 2019 the Advocates for Arden Arcade held a series of public meetings about municipal incorporation: what it is, how it compares to annexation, how other communities have benefitted from it and what could be accomplished if Arden Arcade was a city. At the October 2019 meeting, participants were asked if they wanted cityhood for Arden Arcade - 99% of the attendees said yes. The final meeting in the series took place in December 2019. Not long after that, the pandemic happened. Covid changed everything.

Now, here we all are years later having emerged from Covid (sort of) and "normal" life has resumed (also sort of). During the transition period our Board of Supervisors has evolved. Two of the pre-Covid Supervisors retired and were replaced by newly-elected Board Members, including our own Supervisor, Rich Desmond. Along the way the County changed CEOs. And in 2024 Supervisor Frost announced her retirement; her replacement takes office in a matter of months. The Advocates for Arden Arcade transitioned as well. We tried online meetings, maintained our partnerships with other local community-based groups like the Greater Arden Chamber of Commerce, CCAN and Vintage Arden Arcade,  formed some new ones thanks to the City of Sacramento's insistence on a homeless shelter on Auburn Blvd. and its failure to look after Del Paso Park, and we have grown our social media presence.

Among the outcomes of our social media presence have been inquiries from neighboring communities asking if we could advocate for them, too. Well, yes. We have always felt a kinship with other communities in the County's vast unincorporated area. It seems to us that Census Designated Places like Arden Arcade, Carmichael, Foothill Farms, etc. are just data buckets for statisticians and - like zip codes - convenient ways for employers to apportion workload assignments. They are certainly not ways to define governance. Catchments for statistics are not substitutes for local control of municipal taxes. We support the concept of local control of municipal affairs, however it may play out. and we hope that one day it will. That concept is also a fundamental principle of our companion statewide organization, California (un)Incorporated, that wants the state Legislature to make the incorporation process easier and less costly.

Our Supervisor is very different from his predecessors. Their approach was that the County is always right and everyone else should just stay home and watch TV. Mr. Desmond has displayed a much more honest and transparent attitude. As he has explained things in his public meetings, his workload includes leadership for the municipal affairs of some 290,000 of his 315,000 constituents. He has pointed out that county government is just not structured to be responsive for that kind of workload. So when we asked him if he would be willing to help re-open the 2019 community discussions about possible municipal incorporation, he said he would, as long as communities across his District could be part of the conversation.

Supervisor Desmond has kindly arranged for a community meeting about municipal incorporation to be held on October 21st from 5:30pm to 7pm at the Conzelmann Center in Howe Park. Everyone should understand that nobody is seeking cityhood at this time. No one is trying to get certain groups of neighborhoods to incorporate. Becoming a city is a long, arduous process, as will be explained at the meetings. That process has not started. But essential to that process is a foundational understanding of community needs and desires. Please think about that: do you want local control of your municipal affairs and, if so, what will it take to make that happen? Our website is chock full of information you can evaluate as you ponder those questions. It has a pretty good search box feature to help you, too. Please feel free to surf through our posts and send us any questions you may have. We will do our best to respond promptly. We will also set up a series of posts about the forthcoming incorporation meeting and whatever comes after it. And we invite you to contribute as well.

The Fire Marshall says the room at Howe Park can hold 200 people. Wouldn't it be great if there could be a big turnout? Note: October 21st is a Monday night. If you are a fans of the NFL Ravens, Buccaneers, Chargers or Cardinals, or if your teams are playing in the NLCS or the ALCS, you can record their games that night on your cable or streaming service or on a DVR. Got it? Good. Please pass the word around.