What Is A City Councils Responsibility To Its Residents?

As I write more political pieces, especially about the TCA, I'm having a large number of concerned residents and whistle blowers contact me from neighboring cities such as Mission Viejo, Lake Forest, San Clemente and Dana Point and they all have something common; their city councils and city staff ignore them. While researching this article, I found out several things about my own city and confirmed it is the same or similar in neighboring cities, they are:

1. No formal way to file a complaint
2. No formal way to get the city to consider a proposal
3. No requirement by the city council or staff to respond to your emails or phone calls
4. No obvious time commitment to respond to FOIA or PRA requests

In any normal business or organization, there is a response policy and it is clearly noted, like "24-48 hours". The response from some of the more arrogant city council members, if you can get a response, is that if you don't like them, then vote them out at the next election. All too often when you vote someone in, it is kind of like marrying someone on a blind date. You really don't know what you are going to get until they are in place, and city staff is even harder, because you have to get a majority on the city council so that you can deal with obstinate staff, especially at the City Manager and City Clerk level.

Outside of election, your other option is recall and in recent years cities like Lake Forest, San Juan Capistrano with current efforts in Westminster and Rancho Santa Margarita to name a few. A recall is a difficult, time consuming and expensive process and oftentimes the city staff will try and throw up roadblocks to slow walk it or cause it to fail if they are supporting the person that is being recalled. There should be some method in between that fosters appropriate citizen engagement where they are heard and responded to, I wrote about that last year. So, the points to consider are:

1. Is there a responsibility on the part of a city council to respond to residents?
2. Is there a responsibility for city staff/manager to respond to residents?
3. If the city staff refuses to respond or answer questions and the city council also refuses to respond, then what is the recourse short of recall or general election?

What do you think? Sound off in the comments and let's get some ideas, maybe it is time to file complaints with the state.