We outnumber them 30 to 1. We speak in complete sentences. We own Santa Monica, and they work for us. And yet they seem to run the show, “They” are the City staff, of course.

The staff has doubled in the last decade, though, according to the U.S. Census, the town’s population has wavered between 85,000 to 90,000 for decades. The annual budget topped half-a-billion dollars two years ago. City employees, on average, make more money than residents. The median wage of City employees is about $70,000, while residents’ median pay is less than $50,000.

The ballooning of City staff, its wages and City revenue has not improved the town or its services. In fact, in the view of an increasing number of residents, this gloriously idiosyncratic beach town has been diminished by too much commercial development, chronic gridlock and a sharp decline in affordable housing.

During a budget discussion last year, City Manager Rob Gould claimed that City Hall was in “the service business,” because 70 percent of the general fund was spent on staff salaries and the staff serves the residents. Well, no.

We elect the seven Council members, but they don’t serve us, they serve the staff, and the main thing on their minds is money. Five of the seven Council members regularly take campaign contributions from developers. Like City staff, they’re in the growth and development business, and they’re doing very well, thank you — 9 million square feet of new commercial development in the last couple of decades, another 2 million-plus square feet in the pipeline now, three mediocre new hotels in downtown Santa Monica recently approved, and, in the tradition, another round of hopelessly mundane mixed use projects is taking shape. City staff tells us the projects, are laden with “public benefits.” but, more often than not, they are paltry additions that benefit no one but the developers.

And now even as City staff pushes projects it favors forward, over the objections of residents — such as the Village Trailer Park LLC that would wipe out a lovely, historically significant and authentic vintage trailer park that has that has been home to some older residents, hawks and other exotic birds for decades, and the Miramar expansion that will wreak havoc in a serene neighborhood, and an absolutely unnecessary $47 million park, it suddenly speaks of putting the Pico Library project, which has been in the works since 1983, on hold a day before its ground-breaking, and shutting down the Civic auditorium – as part of its brand-new “contingency plan.”

We may outnumber the staff, 90,000 to 3,000, but we’re mere extras in this civic drama. Some time ago, the American bureaucracy became the fourth and most powerful branch of government, and, with few checks and a built-in imbalance, the antithesis of democracy. Unlike the executive, legislative and judicial branches, whose powers and limits are precisely limned in the Constitution, the bureaucracy’s powers and limits have never been clearly defined. Cobbled together by legislative fiat, it’s a patchwork job that by now has grown beyond anyone’s reach or comprehension.

To the extent that the burgeoning bureaucracy has a model, it’s business. There’s a certain dour logic to it, as by the mid-nineteenth century the imperatives of the Industrial Revolution had overtaken the promises of the American Revolution, and the dominant agrarian culture was rapidly being replaced by a business culture.

Like corporations, bureaucracies are self-contained, closed systems. But, unlike corporations, they need a host body on which to grow, and from which they can draw sustenance. By now, bureaucracies at all levels have outgrown their host bodies, and, in some cases, subsumed them, and become the main thing. But, of course, Calvin Coolidge notwithstanding, towns, counties, states and the nation are not businesses, so it’s a basically berserk arrangement.

Adopted in 1946, the Santa Monica City Charter formally, if unwittingly, codified the madness. Under the Charter, the Council sets policy and the City Manager administers it. Theoretically, the Council has the last word, but the appointed staff has more specific powers than the elected Council. The Council hires the City Manager, the City Attorney and the City Clerk, but the City Manager hires and oversees everyone else – from the Planning Director to the Police Chief to the maintenance crews.

The City Attorney represents the Council. No one represents the people.

The Santa Monica bureaucracy, like its federal, state and other municipal counterparts, has a life of its own, and priorities and an agenda to match. There is no place in it for the people it was designed to serve. Its primary aims are putting on a good show and increasing its revenues to ensure its own well-being. It operates in a perpetual present — uninterested in the past and unmindful of the future.

But all is not lost. There are about 56,000 registered voters in Santa Monica. For the first time in years, there are two open seats on the Council. Some 20 people have announced their plans to run for chairs on the dias. We could actually elect a new majority – by filling the two open seats and replacing incumbents Gleam Davis and Terry O’Day with four new Council members who understand and love this beach town, know that less is MORE, and are capable of saying NO to the dozens of projects, plans and mindless policies that are piling up around us and threaten to bury the town.