Anti-prop 8, pro-equality rally at City Hall on Saturday

The passage of Proposition 8, which eliminated the right of same sex couples to marry in California, put a serious damper on what should have been an amazing election night for many of us. While 52.2% of California voters said yes, we can take maybe a little bit of comfort in the fact that bigotry isn’t quite so much in vogue in our neck of the woods - 62.2% of Alameda County voters said no. (Just for fun - our no vote was bested only by Marin, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma Counties, and we tied with Mendocino County.)

It was a banner day for intolerance, not just in California, but across the country. Read more

Things that annoy V Smoothe

There’s some stuff that I’ve been wanting to mention, but not worth writing an entire blog about. So enjoy this little round-up of stuff on my mind. Read more

OPD issuing tickets for violating non-existent outdoor smoking ban

So here I was, all excited to go on vacation and ready and eager to spend a few days without giving a thought it the world to Oakland, or the City Council, or the budget, or insane civil service rules, or Deborah Edgerly, or any of it.

So last night, I step off the plane in the Electric City, and check my voicemail, since my flight came in early and my hostess isn’t there yet to pick me up. I have one message, from a friend all frantic and irritated about the fact that he had just been ticketed for smoking outside a bar. Read more

Nancy Nadel fiddling with JLS mixed use parking permits

Nancy Nadel has requested some changes (PDF!) to the Jack London Square mixed use parking permit program which will come before the Finance & Management Commitee next week. Residents of the area who spent years trying to get the permits are, to put it mildly, not thrilled. More at Jack London News: Read more

By the way

In case not all of you read The Argus - Fremont was considering a plastic bag ban of their own, conducted a study of the impacts it would have, and decided not to ban them based on the study’s results.

Reinventing the wheel. Slowly.

I write today for Novometro about the Oakland Partnership.

I hope to find the time to write more about last Friday’s Economic Summit soon, although I am, as usual, behind on my blogging schedule. Anyway, I wanted to comment on something Dan Lindheim talked about in one of the panels, and was also quoted in the newspaper about:

Dan Lindheim, the director of the Community and Economic Development Agency, said finding spots for business to locate is not as easy as finding spots for housing opportunities, in part because many businesses are content to stay where they are even if they are only making a low-level profit.

He did say the city continued its work on a data base on what parcels are available for different types of commercial opportunities.

“We’ll certainly be able to (operate the data base) with staff,” he said. “What we want to ultimately be able to do is to get it so that it’s available online so people can really have individual access. We’re not quite there yet.”

I just don’t understand why Oakland’s city government feels the need to constantly reinvent the wheel. In case you don’t know much about commercial real estate, let me give you the rundown. There are these things called commercial real estate brokerages. When you see those big signs on the buildings or vacant lots saying things like “For lease. Call so and so,” that’s the number for the broker representing that property. Of course, most properties don’t get leased simply by having someone drive by and seeing a sign and thinking a building looks pretty. Most properties get leased when someone calls up a broker and says something like “Hi Jake, I want to move my business to Oakland and I need at least 10,000 square feet near a freeway with at least 2 grade level loading doors.” Then the broker sends an e-mail to one of their market researchers and says “all the spaces in Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, and Berkeley half mile from freeway, 10k-12k sf 2 grade doors, asap.” It’s the same with office space, although needs there tends to be more generic.

Then the researcher will look that up in their database of available properties. Large brokerage houses usually maintain their own databases, based on the monthly listings released by all the other brokerages and marketing flyers sent out and a variety of other sources. Smaller companies usually can’t afford their own researcher on staff, so they just buy a subscription to two existing databases, CoStar and LoopNet. Both are up to date and comprehensive. A LoopNet searching subscription costs less than $40/month if you pay for a year upfront.

Anyway, I realize that what Lindheim is describing isn’t the exact same thing, but it’s close enough to be totally pointless and wasteful. I mean, do the taxpayers of Oakland really need to be paying someone to make and maintain a list of available properties when we could instead just be like “You want to space for your biotech company, here’s a broker’s number?” (Although in that case, the answer would be more like “We don’t have any. Go to Emeryville.”) Opportunity maps made sense for housing development, but with business attraction, especially industrial business attraction where the needs are complicated and unique to each company, there’s just no point in replicating work that other people are already doing, and are doing a better job of it that the government ever will.

Plastic bag ban injuction granted; Nancy Nadel won’t let go

So we finally have a ruling on the plastic bag lawsuit, and unsurprisingly, Judge Roesch agreed with the Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling that the City needs to prepare an Environmental Impact Report before adopting the ban.

The Council passed the plastic bag ban in July, and it was set to take effect in January. In August, we got sued, and Judge Roesch heard arguments on the suit in January. The Coalition to Support Plastic Bag Recycling’s argument is essentially that the ban will be harmful to the environment (an argument I made before the ban passed) because it will lead to increased use of paper bags, which are more environmentally unfriendly than plastic bags, and compostable plastic bags, which are no more environmentally friendly than regular plastic bags.

The Coalition’s argument is based on the following facts:

• Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic bags. The require nearly five times as much energy to produce as plastic bags, generate 70% more air pollutants and 50% more water pollutants than plastic bags, and require 84 times as much energy to recycle than plastic bags.
• Compostable plastic bags, which are allowed under the ordinance, require no less energy to produce than regular plastic bags, contaminate batches of regular plastic bags if combined with them so as to make them unrecyclable, and photodegrade, rather than biodegrade, breaking down into tiny pieces that contaminate soil and water.

Nadel’s response to their argument is that we have no way of knowing if the ban will have negative environmental impacts, because “it would be impossible to predict” whether shoppers will switch to paper bags or reusable canvas bags. If you want a good indicator of whether people, without the option of plastic, will use paper or canvas bags, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods for a while, where they don’t have plastic bags, and look at what people are carrying their groceries out in. I hung out for a while and counted one day, and the ratio was something like 30 to 1 using paper bags.

To prepare an Environmental Impact Report studying the ban will cost the city roughly $100,000. With the forthcoming budget shortfall, the decision should be a no-brainer. This is not a good use of the City’s resources. So what does Nancy Nadel think? From the Chronicle:

Councilwoman Nancy Nadel, a co-author of the oil-based plastic bag ordinance, said she hoped the council would order up a full environmental report so the ban can be enacted.

“Of course I’m disappointed, but we’ll proceed with the EIR and get it done,” Nadel said. “I think we can prove that it will be an improvement to the environment to ban plastic bags. Every time I walk down my street, there are at least three plastic bags stuck in the bushes. It’s really awful.”

You know, I was feeling fairly charitable the other day when I wrote about Nancy Nadel and Jean Quan voting in favor of the ill-advised parking ticket community service plan, mostly, I guess, because it didn’t pass, and I sympathized with the desire to do something good. But this is ridiculous. There is more to environmental responsibility and a commitment to sustainability than meaning well. You have to think about how things are actually going to work. Look, nobody likes reusable bags more than me. I carry a bunched up canvas bag in my purse basically all the time, in case I feel the need for an impulse purchase. I bring reusable nylon produce bags with me to the farmer’s market. When I arrived at the drugstore the other day, planning to pick up some necessities, and I realized I had forgotten my canvas bag, I put my things back and went home to get it rather than accept a paper bag. But most people do not do this. And they aren’t going to start simply because you take away one of several options for disposable bags. Being bothered by seeing them on the street is not a logical reason to ban the least environmentally harmful disposable bag option.

This City will never progress as long as the Council refuses to think about implementation. When we consider an ordinance or approve a funding request, we need to be asking serious questions about how it will work and what the real consequences will be. Nancy Nadel’s heart may be in the right place, but a City doesn’t run on good intentions, and her consistent refusal to think about practicality has held District 3 and Oakland back for far too long. Oakland needs fiscally responsible Councilmembers who understand the difference between reality and fantasy. Vote Sean Sullivan!

Lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy, sloppy, irresponsible, careless research from OPD!!!

So I was reading the report (PDF!) on OPD’s pilot Consent to Search program last night (requested by Councilmembers Pat Kernighan and Desley Brooks), and something seemed off. The main thing was that the report was only three pages long, which seemed kind of short for a brand-new and controversial program. But it wasn’t just that. Everything I was reading sounded eerily familiar. I tried to shrug it off, but it kept bothering me. Finally I decided to look back at the place I had first heard of consent to search, a Justice Department report (PDF!) about innovative approaches to reducing gun violence. Read more

Let’s play a game

You know, every time I think that I’ve witnessed a level of dimness that simply can’t be surpassed, something new manages to come out of City Hall and shock me even more. Check out Nancy Nadel staffer Marisa Arrona’s blog about the plastic bag ban:

However, even if our proposed ordinance were considered a “project” under CEQA, an EIR would be wholly speculative because they are asking us to essentially predict consumer behavior. In other words, the plastic bag industry is claiming that if we ban plastic bags, then consumers will use paper bags or compostable plastic bags instead, and that will have an adverse environmental impact. But, says who? Who says that’s what consumers will do?

My God. Is there something in the water at this office? Nancy Nadel told the Trib the same thing:

In Oakland’s case, Nadel said an EIR would be inconclusive anyway, because it would be impossible to predict whether shoppers would use paper bags or reusable bags if plastic were not an option.

I made the same argument as the evil plastic bag manufacturers are making repeatedly on this blog before the ban passed, so obviously I agree that the Council should engage in environmental review before they make stupid decisions like this. And while I consider myself rather clever, I don’t think I’m clever enough to sit here and come up with a good argument why the City shouldn’t have to do an EIR. Maybe if I was being paid I could. Or maybe not. But I like to hope that the City is employing people significantly more clever than me, so you’d assume that someone over there would be able to come up with a good argument in their defense. Instead, this is what we get: we shouldn’t have to study the environmental impacts of our decision because nobody can predict the future. I will give five Linden dollars to the first person who tells me the logical conclusion of that sentiment.

Random Monday thoughts and links

I’m keeping things short today, on account of the holiday.

• I was going to write a post about how deplorable it is that Mandela Foods Cooperative actively tried to limit the amount of fresh produce, meat, and dairy available to West Oakland residents in order to force people to buy their more expensive, organic produce. Seriously, I am so disgusted with these people I have no words. The height of bourgeois hypocrisy. Anyway, now I don’t have to, because a plucky new blog called East Bay Conservative beat me to it. Mandela Foods, by the way, continues to push back their opening date, leading some (and by “some,” I mean “me”) to question whether this black hole of taxpayer money is ever going to get off the ground. Back in September, the Council gave them yet another $200,000. At that time, they said that with the money, they’d be open in November. Their ETA is now April.

Read more

Filed Under: Nancy Nadel, Sean Sullivan, brain-dead policy, elections, food, oakland, public transit, west oakland, worth reading
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Sorry, you’re going to have to keep dealing with those ugly plastic bags for a while now

January 11, 2008 by V Smoothe · Leave a Comment 

I’m discovering a lot of people lately who seem sort of irrationally upset about the fact that Safeway is still handing out plastic bags. These people, I think, would be well served by attending a yoga class or engaging in some similarly stress relieving activity. On Tuesday, I sat behind two irate women on the 15 who were having a long discussion about how worthless OPD is, because when one of them called to report that their local Lucky was still using plastic, the police refused to come out and do anything about it. She had made the call from her cell phone in the store, and I swear, it really sounded like she expected 10 police cars with sirens blaring and maybe a SWAT team or something to rush immediately to the store and confiscate every last plastic bag in sight. Of course, not everyone wondering about the status of the plastic bag ban is mentally unstable, so for the benefit of the curious, here’s what’s going on and why you’re still seeing them around. Read more

Filed Under: brain-dead policy, environment, oakland
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Well, that was boring.

January 8, 2008 by V Smoothe · 2 Comments 

I have to admit, I’m a little bummed. Usually during meetings with anything even related to inclusionary zoning on the agenda, somebody at least says something absurd that I can make fun of. This time, I didn’t even get that. Instead, a bunch of people stood up and thanked Jane Brunner for raising the issue of affordable housing, and the discussion wasn’t so much of a discussion in the sense that anyone actually talked about anything, suggested anything concrete, or made an argument for or against anything, but more of a little rah-rah pep rally about how important it is that we do something about housing affordability, like, now. Which, duh, we already all knew and I thought the point of this extra hour of the CED meeting was that we would talk about what we were going to do. Apparently I was misinformed. Read more

Filed Under: Ignacio De La Fuente, Jane Brunner, affordable housing, brain-dead policy, inclusionary zoning, oakland
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