The A's Are Leaving Oakland

 So - the A's have signed up to buy land for a stadium in Las Vegas.  Many people in Oakland are furious - many of my friends are.  I sympathise with them; but I'm not furious. This is going to annoy them, but I want to speak my mind.

I can't deny that the Coliseum is a mess, although it's easier to get to than the proposed stadium at Howard Terminal would have been.  Coliseum even has a BART station, with a pedestrian walkway to the stadium, and lots of parking.  The proposed stadium near the Port of Oakland is at least half a mile from BART and is not served by any major bus lines.  At one point the A's were suggesting an overhead tram arrangement to get to the stadium, but I haven't heard that in quite a while.  (For those who don't know, Howard Terminal is the name of a part of the Port of Oakland facility that the A's wanted do buy.)

I've been in Jack London Square, and I know the area around the port.  It hasn't got parking.  It isn't set up to manage heavy traffic.  The main traffic street along the waterfront has an active railroad line, for God's sake, which I know carries Amtrak passengers and I'm fairly sure also carries freight to and from the port.  How would that fit in with 35,000 people on game day??  I know that both the Port and the railroad people opposed the site.s

The housing they propose would be nice, we can always use more housing; I don't recall hearing how much of it would be affordable.  But they're also suggesting 270,000 square feet of retail space (along with 1.5 million of "commercial space").  If you don't live in Oakland you may not know how much of the existing retail space has "For Rent" signs, but it's a lot.  Who do they think will rent all that retail space??  

I've never heard an A's person admit to this, but I've been convinced since it was first proposed that they A's want a baseball stadium on a waterfront - because the Giants have one.  That's all this is about.  They thought they could con Oakland into paying for a lot of the infrastructure upgrades this would need.  But they forgot one thing:  Port of Oakland is a working port, a major container ship facility.  There is water traffic (BIG ships!) in and out of there all the time.  The Giants' nice waterside stadium went in long after the Port of San Francisco stopped being a working port, now it's mostly cruise ships, and they're farther north.  Everyone thinks the people who hang out in canoes in McCovey Cove, trying to catch foul balls, are really cute.  You couldn't have that outside a Howard Terminal stadium; not with container ships going back and forth in a relatively narrow estuary.  McCovey Cove backs onto the Bay.

So they're going to Las Vegas to play ball, they say, in a stadium they say will have a retractable roof.  Have fun playing there in the summer, boys.  I thought that about the Raiders, too, but they usually play in the fall and winter.  Still, they start in September.  I used to visit Vegas regularly to see my sister, and summer is not fun.  I've seen 117 in the shade (and no shade!) in September.  Better keep that retractable roof closed, and turn on the A/C.

Tracking the Money

The city of Oakland is facing the loss of $28,000,000 from its general fund, caused by two outside events:  One, Governor Brown eliminated redevelopment agencies in this year's state budget, and Two, the state Supreme Court ruled that the "give-back" the Legislature crafted, which would have let cities and states "buy" their redevelopment agencies back, was unconstitutional.  So - there goes the Redevelopment Agency money.

Why is this causing such consternation in Oakland??  Because they were using the Redevelopment Agency money  for general operating funds, that's why.  In addition to the 159 people who actually work for the Redevelopment Agency, the city was using those funds to pay, or partly pay, for positions all over the city, including (this one staggers me) half the mayor's salary!  What??

Why do they do this?  I've seen this before.  In the early '70s, I worked for the San Jose Public Library.  At that time, Lockheed-Martin was a major employer (pre-Silicon Valley), the economy was booming, the bucks were rolling in.  (Also pre-oil shock.)  And the city of San Jose, having found that citizens were always happy to pass bond issues, had developed the habit of funding basic operations (among other things, the library) out of those bond issues - so as not to have to engage in ungentlemanly conversations about, you know, taxes.

Then Lockheed-Martin lost a big contract.  In the intervening 40-odd years, the details of the disaster have escaped me; but I distinctly remember that they laid off what seemed like half the Santa Clara Valley, and the next bond issue that came up for a vote died like a skunk on the freeway.  And suddenly the city had payroll obligations that it didn't have enough general fund money to meet.  And citizens who were even less likely to vote for new taxes than they had been when they were approving bonds.  I forget what gyrations they used to solve their problem; I didn't lose my job, the city of San Jose still has a library.  But this all came back to me when I heard that the city of Oakland was paying half the mayor's salary with redevelopment funds.  (If I keep repeating that, it's because I still can't believe they did that.)

The cases in the two cities are identical.  They couldn't get the taxpayers to raise taxes enough to pay for what they wanted to spend (and the San Jose case was before Proposition 13, they only needed a majority), there was this other money "lying around," so they used it.  They ignored the fact that, technically, the other money had another purpose they were legally required to use it for.  I would love to hear the justification for paying half the Oakland mayor's salary out of redevelopment funds.

The minimal good news out of all this, for Oakland today, is that the new City Administrator has devised a plan to consolidate services and remove duplications, including eliminating a number of "jobs" that weren't actually being performed by anyone, and will be able to correct the situation by laying off no more than 105 people (out of just over 3,000) and not closing any libraries or senior centers.

This is the first glimmer of fiscal responsibility I've seen in Oakland since before we elected Ron Dellums.  God bless Deanna Santana.  The mayor (and previous city council member) has tried multiple times to get citizens to vote for property tax increases, without success; and she didn't succeed because none of us trusted the city to spend the money in a responsible and prudent way. We all suspected the city government was full of duplicated services and overstaffed departments, and if we gave them more tax money they would just continue to throw it away.

The new budget is responsible and prudent.  I'm still not ready to vote for a property tax increase.  But if Ms. Santana stays around and continues to talk turkey about consolidation and simplification, some day I might consider it.

On the other hand, the city council hasn't accepted the new budget yet.  Maybe it's too soon to relax.

Mayors

Oakland has had quite a string of mayors, the last few years.  We had Jerry Brown, who wanted to be in charge so bad he pushed through a change to the city charter to give us a Strong Mayor.  Then we had Ron Dellums, who almost never exercised the powers of the mayor at all (and who rarely even appeared in public).  Now we have Jean Quan, who seems - scattered.

The good news about Quan, after Dellums, is that she goes out and about, she talks to people - there's even some evidence that she can listen to people.  But she doesn't seem to understand what being the mayor entails, and I don't think I've ever seen a public figure so blind to how her actions look to other people.

So this has me thinking - what does being a mayor entail?  What should a mayor do??  If we wrote a job description for the mayor (not a bad idea, come to think of it), what would it say?  In fact, I was going to do a whole blog post on what is a mayor - and then in today's Sunday S.F. Chronicle, the inimitable Willie Brown said it all for me, and better than I could:

Jean Quan, frustrating everyone, must take charge

(Note:  this is the column from October 30, 2011, so if the link takes you to a different column on a later date, look for it in the archives.)

Looking at the Occupation

My curiosity got the better of me today, and I rode the bus to downtown Oakland to take a personal look at the Occupy Oakland encampment.  It was a nice day and I wanted to see it for myself.  I just missed the parade, with shouting and signs, by (I think) the SEIU. 

The camp looks about the way the photos look.  Lots of tents all over the lawn, pitched elbow to elbow, on a base layer of straw.  People asleep in tents, and on the ground in front of them; people sitting and standing around talking.  Dogs, with and without leashes.  A plastic bucket full of cigarette butts.  A group down in the little arena, arguing.  A man with a sign, shouting.  A tent labeled Acupuncture.  Of course, it was two in the afternoon, so there wasn't a general assembly or anything in particular going on. 

Then two men walked up to me, and one said, "Can I talk to you?"  I looked at him and asked, "What about?" and he said, "You know why we're here?"  I said I had a pretty good idea.  He asked me to tell him, and I said there were probably as many reasons as people there; at which point he said, "Tell me one reason."

At no point had this guy introduced himself, explained what he was doing or said what he wanted; and he had this cocky little I-know-better-than-you-do grin.  I told him I'd changed my mind, and I didn't want to talk to him, because I didn't like being attacked.  He claimed he wasn't attacking me and I told him he was, and walked away.  I had the feeling he was trying to goad me into taking a position, or at least stating one, so he could jump at me (metaphorically) and prove how wrong I was.  I call that an attack, if not a physical one.  Nobody stopped me leaving. I went back to wait for the bus home.

My problem with protests is that they're all based on confrontation (like my confrontational acquaintance) and they all involve crowds, both of which make me very uncomfortable.  I avoid confrontation when I can; I much prefer to negotiate and try to build consensus.  And crowds just make me nervous; it's way too easy for a crowd to turn into a mob.

The crazy thing is, I agree with them:  income inequality is bad, we need more jobs, the banks and the "top 1%" are totally out of line.  But am I going to go down there and carry a sign around?  No, I'm not.  And the newspapers have quoted some of the more extreme sorts (I'm sure) saying that violence is necessary and nothing will get done unless they break things.  It's clear this is a minority viewpoint, but I haven't heard that wording from any of the other Occupy movements, which is why this whole Oakland phenomenon just feels different to me.

This post isn't meant to be any kind of definitive analysis; it's just my take on the situation.  I don't know what the answer to our situation is.  But I'm not convinced the protestors do, either.

Redeveloping Our Ideas

When Jerry Brown produced his first budget for the State of Calilfornia, I figured he'd gotten it about right:  enough cuts to annoy the Democrats, enough tax increases to fry the Republicans, and no hallucinations of money from the Feds that wasn't going to come.  He managed to gore almost everyone's ox, and that's good.  But apparently the most painfully gored ox belonged to the Redevelopment Agencies.

He released the budget on January 10.  It didn't take 24 hours for articles to start appearing (they're still coming, see Google) with the general theme, "Redevelopment money?  You can't take away our redevelopment money!  How can we live without redevelopment money??"  Other groups have since chimed in on the general chorus of "how can you take away our money?", some of them with more justice than the redevelopment agencies.  The argument about in-home care support is particularly poignant, because some of these people will have to stop living at home if the state support stops.  Everyone says, "but it's cheaper for the state to keep them at home than put them in a nursing home," which is true; but they miss the point that the state probably won't have to pay for the nursing home - the families will, or Medicare will. 

But I digress - back to Redevelopment Agencies.  In a print exclusive in the Sunday S.F. Chronicle (look for it online on Tuesday 2/1), Willie Brown floats a rumor that Jerry and the California mayors are privately cutting a deal on the Redevelopment Agencies, details to be revealed later.  If this is true, I think it's a mistake.  Everyone is screaming, "How can we live without Redevelopment Agencies?"  This is a rhetorical question.  The real question they ought to be asking is, "How can we live without Redevelopment Agencies?"  How can we do what we need to do, in a new way?

Albert Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".  Redevelopment Agencies are part of doing the same thing over and over again.  We've been doing the same thing over and over again in this state for 40 years, and the result is that the state is bankrupt, the cities and counties are bankrupt, and everybody is screaming that their ox is being gored.

I'm not the first person to say this but it's still true:  We have to start asking ourselves the hard questions.  What services should the state provide, and how should we pay for them?  Ditto counties and cities - what services should they pay for, and where do they get the money?  I think most people would agree that repairing the streets is a service that cities should provide, but there are streets in Oakland in such bad shape that your car's shocks are at risk.  You'd think you were in a third world country.  Oakland has committed to paying employee salaries and benefit packages well above the local market; and they can't afford to pave the major streets; the street I'm talking about is Broadway, hardly a side street.  We used a stretch on Broadway to test the all-wheel-drive on a new SUV we just bought.  I question these priorities.  We have a new mayor in Oakland; I hope she's capable of asking these hard questions; but since she has been part of the problem for the last 5 years (as head of the City Council finance committee), I'm not optimistic.

City, county, and state:  we all have to stop and ask:  what are we doing?  What should we be doing?  Where do we get the money to do that?  What are we doing that we really should find someone else to do on a contract basis?  If we don't ask these questions, we're insane by Einstein's definition.

"Tape on, brother"

I needed a laugh after the last few days, and I got it this morning with a letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Since the Chron doesn't let you link individual letters, just the letters page, I'm taking the liberty of pasting the whole thing here, with full credit and thanks to the paper and Mr. Mark Knego of San Francisco:

Recording is reality

Get it on tape, man.
We live in a world filled with knuckleheads, on a planet called Earth. Knuckleheads like to enjoy other people's suffering.
Somebody gets shot on a BART platform, get it on tape.
Knuckleheads destroy public property, get it on tape.
Somebody beats up somebody else, get it on tape. Put it on the Net.
In an entirely related topic, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says that aliens are coming to colonize us.
No way, baby, not after they see the tapes.
We are safe.
Tape on, brother, tape on.
Mark Knego, San Francisco

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/10/ED481EBV7I.DTL#ixzz0tIXK1Q2o

Waiting for Mehserle

Oakland, California isn't a very comfortable place right now.  The city government is broke, or close to it, because of some Really Stupid decisions made by the City Council in previous years (most of them by the current elected council members).   They've just laid off 80 police officers, from a force that was already grossly understaffed.  Everyone (with the possible exception of Mayor Dellums, whose grasp of reality doesn't impress me) is convinced that more budget cuts are coming.  No one, starting with the Council, is making any attempt to estimate how much money might actually be coming in next year, and to budget the city government to live within that amount.  (They can't, actually; due to some of those Stupid Decisions, they've already committed to spend more than they can possibly take in, in this economy.)  The council wants to pass two property tax measures on the November ballot, to avoid laying off something like a quarter of the police force; I don't think they realize the extent to which their constituents wouldn't trust them with the contents of a child's piggy bank.

And on top of all that, the Mehserle trial went to the jury, the day before the July 4 weekend.

I'm not going to go over the whole mess again.  If you've been living in a cave for the last 18 months, open up a Google search and type in "Mehserle."  Or read this article from Wikipedia.

The good news is that the jury didn't rule before the long weekend.  The bad news is that they had to start deliberations over again, today, because somebody went on vacation and they had to put in an alternate. 

The really bad news is that a group of people here in Oakland have already decided that the verdict won't bring "justice for Oscar Grant" (Google the phrase if you want to see their call to arms; I won't dignify it by linking it), and are planning a "gathering" in front of city hall whenever the verdict is published. 

For gathering read:  riot.  We had two days of riots after the incident, even though the Oakland Police weren't involved in the Mehserle incident.  They're going to be involved in this, though - Chief Batts is appealing for calm (see his video at www.oaklandpolice.com) and bracing for the opposite.  The general feeling is that downtown Oakland is a bad place to be over the next few days.  I bet the merchants love that.

It escapes me how tearing up downtown Oakland will provide Oscar Grant with justice, or anything resembling it.  I understand that young black people feel anger toward the police.  But as others have asked, I have to ask:  where is all this anger, where is all this urge for justice, when young black people are killed by other young black people??  Is that OK? 

I volunteer downtown.  I know that at least some of the small businesses around Frank Ogawa Plaza are black-owned - and they'll be right in the middle of the violence.  Is it OK for a small business owned by an African-American to be torn up and maybe looted, as long as the rioters are black??

For that matter, it escapes me why people think violence ever solves anything.  All violence does is breed more violence.  The first thing we should always do is try to think of a non-violent way to handle a situation; Gandhi understood that, the civil rights demonstrators in the '60s understood that, and they changed their worlds with nonviolence.  Violence seems to make the rioters feel that they've "done something" to "show people" that "they won't put up with this."  But when the riot is over, nothing has changed, except that a lot of people who had nothing to do with Oscar Grant have a mess to clean up.

I wonder how they'll justify the riot if the jury actually convicts Mehserle of manslaughter (the worst verdict I personally would vote for) and he does some time.  But then, they're tearing the place up in a noble cause.  Aren't they?

It's Being Dealt With

It's now all over the San Francisco Bay Area that Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and his wife have some problems with the IRS.  The IRS has slapped a tax lien on some property they own, for $239,000 in back taxes covering 2005-2007, during most of which period Mr. Dellums has been Mayor of Oakland. 

The Mayor has recently told the Montclarion newspaper that "it's being dealt with."  I can't link this statement because, although some of the Montclarion is online, this article isn't; and a quick Google search for "Dellums tax" doesn't produce any online published response from the mayor.  But I have the paper in my hand.

There you go again:  the passive exonerative (sometimes called the passive evasive), so favored of politicians .  Heaven forbid that Hizzoner should say exactly who is doing what, or anything as direct as, "We're going to pay the money."  I've blogged about this practice before (Hiding behind the passive, March 2007).  What's really clear from the article is that Mr. Dellums doesn't want to talk about this:

"I told you that it's being dealt with," he said Monday night.  "We owe taxes.  It's now being dealt with, and it will be dealt with expeditiously.  Period ... P-E-R-I-O-D."

Well, I wouldn't want to talk about it either, but - I'm not the mayor.  This is unfortunately typical of Mr. Dellums' entire tenure as mayor - he doesn't want to tell people what he's doing, ever, about anything at all.  In this case, the situation he doesn't want to talk about could theoretically (if something goes wrong in those expeditious dealings) end up with the mayor of Oakland in tax court.

This is not the behavior that voters expect from the mayor of a large city.  I didn't vote for him, and I've only seen him do one thing in office that made me consider I might have been wrong - the negotiations over the garbage contract in his first year in office.  I recently read a speculation that he may be considering a run for a second term.  I think he should reconsider.  Based on the comments on his lifestyle in all the articles about this mess, I don't think he can afford this job.

Islam in Oakland

It doesn't surprise me to see Muslim women in Oakland; I see the standard wrapped headscarf all the time.  It did startle me, the other day, to see a woman walking along Telegraph Avenue wearing the full niqaab.  This isn't the full-coverage Afghan burqa, but you've probably seen photos of Saudi women wearing something similar - full black, head to toe, except for a narrow slit over her eyes.  She was pushing a double stroller and accompanied by a small boy, about 4 or 5 years old.  Since I was driving a car, I didn't get a photo, but I did think about taking one.

On one level, it's her religion, and I defend her right to practice it.  But on another level, the niqaab really gets to me.  Islam as a religion imposes a great deal of physical modesty - men and women are both expected to keep themselves covered except in the presence of spouses.  But you'll never see a Muslim man who covers his entire body except for his eyes; only women are expected to do that.

I don't know enough about Islam to evaluate the differences among the various requirements to cover the hair, or more; and I've read interviews in which Muslim women explain that covering themselves makes them comfortable, and if so, more power to them.  But it bothers me.  It disturbs me in a way I can't quite define, that has to do with personal empowerment, and equality, and the absence of choice.

It also disturbs me in a way I can define:  concealment of identity and purpose.  I don't really know whether that was a woman pushing that stroller.  It was a human being wearing an all-enveloping black robe that revealed only the eyes.  (I don't recall whether I could see the hands or not.)  I assumed it was a woman because men don't wear the niqaab.  But there've been cases in Afghanistan when male suicide bombers disguised themselves in burqas to get past checkpoints.

Rest In Peace

Over the last few years, from my work on a Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, I've gotten to know a number of Oakland cops. They're solid professionals: intelligent, polite, competent, dedicated. I'm absolutely appalled at the events of this weekend, in which two police officers died in a hail of bullets from a young man they pulled over on a routine traffic stop, and two more died later when he shot at them from a closet with an AK-47. I have several comments on this:

To the members of the Oakland Police Department: my heart breaks for you. You have my deepest sympathy and my unqualified support.

To the people who feel the police are rude to them when they pull them over for a traffic violation: if they seem a little harsh, they're wondering whether you might possibly be another Lovelle Mixon. These aren't the first police officers to be killed during a routine traffic stop, and they won't (unfortunately) be the last. If you get pulled over, be polite to the officer, and the officer will (probably) be polite to you. And yes, I do know about D.W.B. (driving while black) - but I firmly believe that's a minority of officers.

To the NRA: You've had your Supreme Court decision. You definitely have the right to own guns and keep them in your house. Can we now have a conversation about what weapons you can own? There's probably nothing we can do about the semi-automatic pistol that killed the two traffic officers; but the SWAT team died in a hail of bullets from an AK-47. An AK-47 - that's a military weapon. Why can civilians even buy this damn thing? What are you going to do with it - hunt deer? You'd cut the deer in half. At one point, in this country, civilians couldn't buy these weapons, then we elected the neocons and that was repealed; can we please discuss, again, restricting civilian access to guns normally used on the battlefield? Two good officers are dead because a civilian - no, a paroled felon - had access to a military assault rifle. Frankly, members of the NRA, I hold you at least partially responsible because of your mindless insistence that anybody, anywhere, any time, should be able to own any weapon.

Oscar Grant III

I don't blog much about Oakland; plenty of bright people already cover that beat, and frankly I get tired of spitting into the wind. With the Bush administration, bad as it was, we all knew it couldn't last past Jan. 20. With Oakland, who knows??

Since it made the national press, you've probably read the accounts of the death of Oscar Grant III, a supermarket worker who found himself in the wrong company on New Year's Eve and was shot to death by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer. While lying face down on the platform with his hands behind his back, waiting to be handcuffed. The officer refused to answer questions and, in a first, has been arrested for murder, based on the videos captured by the BART riders' ever-present cellphones. (Do people actually not realize that their every public action could end up on YouTube??)

What I want to talk about here is the reaction of the local citizenry. We're all appalled, of course, without regard to skin color; but the local black community is especially outraged, seeing this as one more example of "the police" treating black people "as if we're nothing." (Oakland PD wasn't involved in the incident, and in fact has behaved extremely well during the resulting protests; but I guess one uniform looks like another.) As a result of this outrage, 2 successive peaceful (by intent) protests have expanded into violence and vandalism against downtown Oakland businesses. Most of which are owned by black and Asian businesspeople.

Here's my question, both for the peaceful protesters (the majority) and for the minority of thugs who smashed up businesses, bus shelters and cars: I understand your outrage over Oscar Grant's death, but where the hell were you all last year, when 124 people were murdered in Oakland?? Most of whom were young black men? Is the death of a "young black brother" only worth a protest in front of city hall when he's killed by a police officer?? I guess it's a closed shop: only young black men are allowed to kill young black men.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson published an excellent analysis in last week's Daily Voice, Obama Alone Can't Halt the Black Murder Surge, which is worth your attention. Criminologists (and the boys in the 'hood) have known for years that the majority of murdered young black men are killed by other young black men, and that there aren't any consequences when it happens.

The situation in Oakland isn't simple. The police department has internal problems, the mayor is missing in action, the city council is dysfunctional, the city has massive budget deficits which are going to cut what services we have, and there's an active antipathy to the police in the roughest neighborhoods which means that when something happens, nobody will speak up for fear of being labeled a "snitch" - a label which does carry consequences. The result is that armed gangs hold the city and the neighborhoods hostage.

OK, I don't live in those neighborhoods; I'm a middle-aged white woman living in the hills. Why do I care? Because, dammit, I hate to see the bad guys win; and they're winning here. I'm outraged when a "young black brother" is shot to death. I just don't see what I can do about it. None of these kids is going to listen to me. Marching on city hall and smashing cop cars does nothing except sell newspapers and get on the evening news. We've built an entire generation of young urban black men who don't think life is worth anything, theirs or anyone else's; these guys are dangerous, and I don't see anything concrete standing between me and them except that they haven't gotten over here yet.

I know there are plenty of good people in Oakland organized and working to fight this culture, but so far I don't see any widespread success. Mr. Hutchinson closes his article with this comment:

Obama has a role to play in the fight to reduce black homicides. But so do many others.

It's going to take everyone.