A Better Oakland

So last night, I checked the early returns on my way out the door to Sean Sullivan’s party, and my heart sank. Even then, I really thought we’d make it to a run-off (which is still a possibility), but it was crushing nonetheless. Now, I usually cry at the drop of a hat, so I was incredibly proud of myself for holding it together and not bursting into tears during the party, or the after-party, or even the after-after-party. But when my last guest finally left early this morning and I closed my apartment door behind him, I just fell apart. It’s tough to take.

I really thought it would be different this time, but it wasn’t, and like I do after what seems like almost every single election day, I found myself thinking about my man Herodotus, specifically a section in Book 3 usually referred to as the debate on government. It’s this awesome story about a group of Persians, all excited over their successful coup against the ruling Magi, sitting around and having, like, the Greekest discussion ever about what kind of government they should adopt next. (more…)

So I don’t think I’m going to be getting to those school board debates after all, and I am sorry for that. I will be putting up an endorsements blog on Monday, so I’ll have a shorter overview of those races then. Right now, I’m completely spent on election stuff and exhausted and just wish Tuesday would be here already.

When you’re stressed and tired, humor becomes especially important for maintaining sanity. So I’d like to share with my readers the three things that made me laugh the most yesterday.

• On ABC7’s story about the District 1 Council race, Brunner mocked Patrick McCullough for being no Barack Obama. McCullough responded that she’s no Hillary Clinton. She certainly isn’t.
• I didn’t get to watch the budget meeting yesterday, but apparently Nancy Nadel asked at it if she could have the 12 extra unpaid days off, too.
• And the best comment I’ve heard yet on the mid-cycle budget, from a reader:
  

  It looks like the Mayor wants to de-fund the School for the Arts. And increase the non-sworn vacancy rates in OPD and OFD…I thought Republicans were supposed to be the ones who balanced the budget on the backs of children and public safety.

I met Nancy Nadel for the first time about a week after I moved to Oakland, to a beautiful and perfect downtown apartment, when I went to a meeting I had seen a notice for in the newspaper about retail revitalization in downtown Oakland. The meeting was really weird. It turned out to not be about retail revitalization at all, but a panel discussion about the Uptown development, with some representatives of Forest City, Nancy Nadel, Danny Wan, and a reporter from the Oakland Tribune (I kind of think it was Robert Gammon, but I’m not 100% on that). Jerry Brown came in about halfway through, clearly stopping by from running around the Lake, drenched in sweat, and stood in the back of the room, watching. The moderator kept asking him to weigh in, and he kept declining, saying he was just there to listen. At the end of the meeting, the moderator again asked Brown for a statement, and he went on this really weird thing about how he just returned from a trip to Florence, and he thought it was really pretty with their cute orange roofs, and he’d really support anything we could do to make Oakland look like Florence. Later he approached me and said he liked my bracelet. So bizarre.

Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to ask my question, so afterwards, I went up to my Councilmember, Nancy Nadel, to ask her. I introduced myself and said I’d just moved to Oakland, and wanted to ask about retail attraction in other parts of downtown. She asked me where I lived, and when I told her, she said that I wasn’t in her District, and should go talk to Danny. I said that was pretty sure I was, because I had looked it up on the City’s website, and could I ask her anyway since I was already talking to her. She said no, she was sure I wasn’t in District 3, that if I had questions, I really should talk to Danny, then turned and walked away. Things only went downhill from there.

Just in case anyone reading this hadn’t already picked up on this, I’m voting for Sean Sullivan on Tuesday. And tomorrow, I’ll tell you why you should, too. Today I want to talk about Nancy Nadel, and more specifically, why it’s time for her to go. So here you go: (more…)

Thanks to one of my wonderful readers, a great mystery has been solved! Turns out the reason the East Bay Young Democrats wouldn’t provide any justification for their endorsement of Nancy Nadel isn’t because, as I had theorized, they didn’t have one. They do, it’s just too embarrassing to publicize. She brings them chocolate! Seriously! The description of tonight’s “event” on Facebook:

Nancy consistently proves she is a good friend to the club: whether she makes us homemade chocolate; gets the City of Oakland to honor one of our own with a city proclamation; or protects the public’s health by advocating for access to health services and for a cleaner port! Let’s do what we can to turn out the vote for Nancy Nadel, Oakland City Council District 3. Join us for the 30 minutes or the full 3-hours before you head out for the evening! All are welcome.

And hilariously, the title of this post actually is what they’re calling their event.

So we’ve got what, 11 days before the election? I’m so nervous! Anyway, next week’s blogs are going to be all elections, all the time, and since I’m finally done with some big projects I’ve been working on, I’ll actually have the time to write them! Part of next week’s election coverage is going to be endorsements. I take this seriously, and have spent a great deal of time researching the candidates, especially in races that I’m not terribly familiar with, because I want to be able to stand behind what I say and feel like I’ve made a recommendation based on as much information as possible.

Apparently, not everyone takes the responsibility so seriously. dto510 wrote last week about the misplaced ideology behind the Central Labor Council/Sierra Club/Central Committee/Green Party/Bay Guardian slate, a post which generated a number of comments from endorsers of the “progressive” candidates. The commenters were unable to provide any justification of the logic behind their endorsements, or answer questions about Nadel’s troubling record, instead falling back on vague statements like “V Smoothe, I know it must be eminently gratifying to pretend that people who reject your analysis only do so because of ignorance, but you know some of us pay attention and still think you’re wrong.”

What a horrible thing to say! It isn’t gratifying in the least to see people making bad choices about their government because they’re uninformed! In fact, it’s incredibly depressing! It keeps me awake at night. Anyway, while some of these groups, such as the East Bay Young Democrats, continue to fail to offer any argument supporting their endorsements (making it impossible to then rebut said argument), other endorsers of this slate have done so, and, as expected, their choices are, well, completely uninformed.

Take, for example, the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s endorsement of Nancy Nadel: (more…)

I’m pretty sure this is your last chance to see all three candidates in action before the election. If you can’t make it, a recap with video will be provided here by the end of the week (and the Downtown Lake Merritt debate recap will be posted tomorrow, I promise!, along with District 1 School Board stuff). But everything’s better live, so if you can swing it, head down to Jack London Square tonight.

6 PM
Regatta Room at the Portobello Condominiums
11 Embarcadero West (entrance at corner of Oak and Embarcadero)

So the Trib’s story about Mario Juarez getting his windows smashed irritated me. One, why was there no mention of the security camera footage of the vandalism? Ignacio got 8 cameras installed on that stretch of International, including one on Mario’s office (because he’d had his windows smashed twice). What did it show? Two, why no mention of the fact that Ignacio’s office windows smashed in earlier in the campaign? The story was very one-sided.

Oh, and in case people missed it, Novometro had a story on Friday about a public ethics complaint filed against Nancy Nadel for violations of the Campaign Reform Act. Nadel’s donate page on her website solicits donations in excess of the maximum allowable contribution, and until the day after the ethics complaint was filed, did not include the legally required notice stating what the contribution limits are. Nice.

In other news, A Better Oakland turns one year old today.

So something I’ve really wanted to write about for a while and never got around to is to actual barriers to industrial business attraction in Oakland. I hope that at some point in the future, I will get a chance to write a longer post about this, full of all sorts of links and data and such, but this will have to do for now.

So as we keep being told, the whole idea behind the industrial preservation and the new industrial zoning is to create “certainty.” I don’t have a problem with this, and, as I’ve said before, I don’t have a conceptual problem with the industrial land use policy the city recently adopted, although I think there are some specific areas where the Council made some very bad decisions. I also don’t have a general problem with the new industrial zoning code, although I again have some problems with the details.

Anyway, I want to talk about this mostly because I’m hearing Nancy Nadel say over and over again things like “We’ve just completed industrial zoning, which means we can now begin working on business attraction.”

So when I was working as a market researcher at a commercial real estate brokerage, specifically in industrial real estate, there were two very clear barriers to locating businesses in Oakland, and I can tell you for a fact that the zoning was not one of them. Certain politicians and bureaucrats have really latched onto this claim and just say it over and over and over again until my ears bleed, and nobody ever seems to question them on it. I don’t know who they’re talking to, but this was just not a concern for our clients at all.

What was worrisome to our clients? Two things. The first one is, of course, crime. Our crime problem is an issue for business attraction for two reasons - personnel and material. If people are afraid to come to work where you’re located, your business suffers from a reduced labor pool and won’t be able to attract quality staff. The much, much bigger problem though is materials. When people complain about our crime problems, they mostly talk about violent crime, which is legitimate. But we also have a serious property crime problem, and when being in Oakland means that you’re significantly more likely to get your business broken into and your materials stolen, that’s a really good reason to locate in Emeryville instead. And this is why I want to laugh when I keep hearing about attracting green technology such as solar panel manufacturing to West Oakland. Look - businesses here can’t even keep their copper wire safe - do you honestly think anyone in their right mind is going to put a factory full of silicone in West Oakland? No way. If we’re serious about business attraction, we have to deal with the crime issue, and I think we all know that we aren’t going to accomplish that with the same Council that has been letting things deteriorate for years.

Issue #2? Infrastructure. So despite what Nancy Nadel seems to think, Oakland has some of the lowest average asking rates for industrial space in the entire Bay Area. Mostly, that’s because our property is so undesirable. The crumbling warehouses that exist in much of Oakland’s industrial areas aren’t suitable for most of the type of businesses we want to attract. Nancy Nadel keeps talking about bringing biotech - biotech companies want to locate in fancy new light industrial business parks that have all the nice modern amenities. There are, of course, other kinds of businesses that have fewer needs and could use some of our old warehouses just fine, if only they weren’t falling apart. It is not unusual that the cost of bringing the ancient industrial space in West Oakland into conformity with modern safety codes is greater than building an entirely new building. So the issue isn’t that the rent is too expensive (because the property owner wants to leave their property vacant in homes it will be converted for housing, as some people claim), but that the necessary infrastructure improvements that will make the property usable are too expensive. Nancy Nadel choose to blame property owners for this, saying that they are not paying for the improvements themselves because they’re “greedy.” Any Councilmember who was serious about industrial business attraction would, of course, be looking for ways to work with property owners to deal with the problem instead of deciding that they’re the enemy.

Anyway, if we want industrial business in Oakland, we need to provide appropriate space for them to operate. Sean Sullivan has proposed emulating models of successful downtown redevelopment efforts to create appropriate space in West Oakland. That is, the redevelopment agency could do something like we did with Forest City, identifying a developer willing to build an R&D/light industrial business park and assisting with parcel consolidation and perhaps providing some sort of subsidy for any necessary environmental remediation. The West Oakland redevelopment fund isn’t exactly flush with excess cash, so there are some limits on how much financial assistance we could provide, but we can take advantage of bonding capacity if we have a real shot at getting someone to build actual desirable business space. My understanding is that this is something the Oakland Partnership is hoping to work on, and I do hope we can get something moving relatively soon.

Nancy Nadel’s policy aide Marisa Arrona called me this morning about Tuesday’s post about the lies in Nancy Nadel’s campaign literature to tell me that the Jefferson Park skate park project has not been dropped, and that she has been working on identifying funding sources for the project for over a year. She says that the first funding source fell through, but that they’re looking at three different funding sources and that the project will be very expensive. When asked about the funding sources they’re exploring, she said they were confidential. This, of course, doesn’t change the fact that the campaign literature claims the project has been completed even though it hasn’t, with the line “transformed Jefferson Park into a skate park,” (as illustrated in the screen grab below), which was the entire point of my original post. But Arrona requested that the post be updated to reflect that she is working on the park, so I’ve updated as she asked.

Here’s a screen grab of the page on Nadel’s website I was referring to, taken Tuesday morning:

Here’s a screen grab of the page now, taken this morning

There’s still almost a month before the City Council elections, and I have to admit, I’m already sick of them. I’m tired of writing about them, I’m bored of watching the candidates all say the same things over and over again at forum after forum, and I’m tired of constantly having to watch Nancy Nadel tell voters things that are just not true over and over again. (Last night at the Old Oakland Neighbors forum, BTW, she once again told the audience that Mandela Foods is opening at the end of the month.)

If you look at Nancy Nadel’s campaign website, you’ll see a long list of all sorts of great things that she’s done for District 3. (Well, sort of. The list isn’t actually all that long, particularly for someone who’s been in office nearly 12 years.) Anyway, it frustrates to me to watch her take credit for this improvement or that project, when the people involved will tell you that she never provided any assistance. But being able to claim responsibility for every good thing that happens in your district appears to be just another one of the perks of being the incumbent, so I deal with it. And it’s frustrating to me to watch her make claims that aren’t true, like telling people she’s creating a new teen center in West Oakland, when the reality is that there is no teen center coming. (Nancy Nadel used $850,000 of city money (PDF!) to purchase a building last fall that she wants to turn into a teen center. But there is no actual funding available, so currently, the building is just sitting there, mothballed, and costing taxpayers something like $18,000/year for maintenance and graffiti removal).

Anyway, it’s one thing to claim that you made something happen in your district when you didn’t have anything to do with it, or to say that you’re working on something that isn’t going to happen, but it’s another thing entirely to advertise accomplishments that simply don’t exist. Look at her position paper on the environment (PDF!).

Included on her list of accomplishments is:

Established new dog parks at Mosswood and Lake Merritt.

Okay. There is no dog park at Lake Merritt. None. The Oakland Dog Owners Group has been trying to get a dog park at Lake Merritt for quite some time, but so far, their efforts have failed. Anyway, I find this amazing. Why does Nancy Nadel think it’s okay to lie like that in her campaign literature? Does she think that nobody’s going to notice? What a sad comment on Oakland’s electorate.

Also, this:

Transformed Jefferson Park into a skate park for youth.

This is just not true at all! Jefferson Park isn’t a skate park, nor is it on its way to becoming one. I went there on Saturday and took pictures for you:

Apparently, some people are tired of grocery store posts. I suggest those people scroll down and read my recaps of last week’s HarriOak All Candidates Forum and of last month’s District 5 League of Women Voters forum. I want to talk about Mandela Foods some more.

East Bay Conservative posted a photo showing the unimpressive state of the of the Mandela Foods store at the end of March. Since it’s been a while, I figured I’d stop by and check out their progress since I happened to be in the neighborhood yesterday. This is what I found:

Yes, that’s the same Mandela Foods that District 3 City Councilwomen Nancy Nadel claims on her re-election campaign website will be open in April, the same Mandela Foods that Nancy Nadel said would be open in April at the League of Women Voters Forum a month ago, and the same Mandela Foods that Nancy Nadel said at the All Candidates Forum a week ago would be opening in May. This is the same Mandela Foods that Nancy Nadel uses repeatedly in candidate forums as an example of how she has brought neighborhood serving retail to West Oakland. And they still haven’t even begun build-out. Folks, this store is not opening this month. At this point, I’m wondering if it’s going to open ever.

Remember, Nancy Nadel handed these people $100,000 of your money in October 2006, and the City Council voted to give them another $200,000 of tax money in September 2007. Meanwhile, we’ve limited the amount of produce a neighboring store is permitted to sell as a means of ensuring the success of Mandela Foods, and rejected another grocer who wanted to open up in the area next to a McDonalds and KFC because they didn’t pay enough. Our priorities are seriously out of whack.

Related posts:

• 05.01.08 Mandela Foods Cooperative: Subsidizing Failure
• 04.30.08 Fresh & Easy update in the Trib. Also, shame on you, Nancy Nadel!
• 04.28.08 Finally, a clear answer on Fresh & Easy
• 04.01.08 West Oakland is not getting a grocery store anything soon
• 02.01.08 Green jobs, Fresh & Easy
• 11.14.07 Look out Whole Foods, here comes Fresh & Easy

I’ve finally managed to upload all the video from the All Candidates Forum last week. Big thanks to Elise Ackerman for all her hard work organizing the event. District 3 candidates Nancy Nadel and Sean Sullivan were there, but the third candidate, Greg Hodge, was not. (His wife managed to make it.) Of the at-large candidates, Kerry Hammill was absent. The group questions lasted until about 8:20, and all the candidates (except Nancy Nadel) hung around for a while to talk to residents one on one. Anyway, recap, video, and response for all the group questions below. Enjoy! (more…)