I love the Layover. It’s been great to watch downtown transform over the past several years, and have all this wonderful new nightlife. But it has always bothered me a little bit that every new place that opens is so fancy. Penelope is very nice, and their spicy cocktails are delicious, but I’ve always just felt more comfortable hanging out somewhere a little more low key. The Layover is exactly the type of place I’ve been wishing would open downtown for years, and if you haven’t been yet, I strongly encourage you to go check it out. (It’s at 15th and Franklin. There is also a very flattering article in today’s Trib about it.)

Anyway, the reason I mention the Layover not just because I love it, but because this picture I snapped last night provides a nice example of a very common style of bar these days, where a DJ provides background music, but there is no dance floor.

This sort of bar currently exists in a legal grey area. The issue is whether or not such an establishment should be required to obtain a cabaret license if they are going to have DJs. Some do, others don’t. Some apply for one, only to find themselves sucked into an expensive and seemingly endless bureaucratic nightmare. Others send the City letters quoting the code governing cabarets and arguing that they should be exempt, and just cross their fingers that nobody will try to bother them about it. Others are simply told straight up by the City that they don’t need one. Still others do nothing and hope to fly under the radar. (I have not asked the owners of the Layover what route they choose, so I don’t know if they have a cabaret license or not, although I don’t remember seeing anything about a hearing.)

For the most part, the City has agreed that if all you’re doing is letting DJs play background music without a dance floor, then you don’t need a cabaret license. After all, the City already has regulatory power over bars through permitting alcohol sales, so there’s really no need to add another layer of hassle. But as we all know, the City can be infuriatingly inconsistent, and every so often, the fun police will do a little run around town issuing warnings (and sometimes tickets) to such businesses for acting as an unlicensed cabaret. (In one case last year, a bartender was threatened with a cabaret ticket after an office saw him changing a CD behind the bar.)

DJ bars are not the only type of business unfairly impacted by the City’s confusing cabaret law. Coffee shops that want to offer low key live entertainment may also find themselves subject to the annoying and expensive cabaret permitting process. Requiring a cabaret permit for any live music leads to ridiculous situations like the one Piedmont Avenue’s Caffe Trieste found themselves in a few years ago, where they wanted to have people occasionally sing opera music, but didn’t qualify for a permit because they were located too close to the library. The situation was eventually resolved by an amendment to the law (PDF) that allows the City Administrator’s office to overrule the 300 feet from a school or library requirement at their discretion, but the underlying absurdity of the law remained unchanged.

Anyway, the good news is that the City Council is finally talking about cabaret reform. A revision to the cabaret ordinance (PDF) proposed by Councilmembers Nancy Nadel and Rebecca Kaplan will be discussed by the Council’s Public Safety Committee on Tuesday. The bad news is that the proposed reforms are stupid.

Here is our current definition of a cabaret:

A cabaret shall be construed to include any place where the general public is admitted where entertainment is furnished by or for any patron or guest present upon the premises including but not limited to singing vaudeville and dancing and where liquid refreshments or foods are sold, provided however that any place where entertainment is furnished by the mechanical or electronic reproduction or pre-recorded music or radio broadcasts or by motion picture shall not be construed to be a cabaret within the meaning of this section unless dancing privileges are afforded in connection therewith.

Clearly, the law is antiquated. You might think that now that we’re finally getting around to revising the ordinance, it might be a good opportunity to strike references to, oh, I don’t know, vaudeville from our municipal code. As if.

What is need is a fairly simple revision of the law to clarify what is and what is not a cabaret. Special cabaret restrictions and regulation makes sense for the City, since the large crowds generated by live entertainment can lead to special problems. The easiest way to address the inconsistent enforcement of cabaret rules would to amend the definition so that it only applies to large venues with dance floors or amplified live music.

Nadel and Kaplan’s recommendation is twofold. One, that businesses with an occupancy rate of 50 people or fewer and whose primary zoning is not “entertainment,” will not have to get a cabaret permit. That part makes sense.

The second half doesn’t. Instead, these businesses will now have to obtain something called a “small cabaret exemption.” The proposed cost to apply for the exemption is $600, with an annual $250 renewal fee.

So basically, this proposal takes a group of businesses that were not required to get a cabaret license under most interpretations of existing law, and imposes on them a brand new regulation and annual cost. The staff report estimates that between 50 and 100 businesses would be forced to apply for the new “exemption.”

Cabaret reform should be an opportunity to make it easier for nightlife businesses to operate. Instead, we are talking about making it even more difficult. I just don’t get it. The Council is always talking about how they want to make Oakland more friendly to small businesses. Any small business owner will tell you that the best thing the City can do to make life better for them is to just leave them alone. I doubt you could find a single one willing to say that the City can help them by demanding a couple hundred extra dollars per year.

Will the Public Safety Committee care? I don’t know, probably not. After all, the last time cabaret licenses came up, when there was a proposal to double the permit fee from $300 to $600, Committee member Jean Quan’s response was:

They can afford it. Cabarets make a lot of money.

The Public Safety Committee meets at 4 PM on Tuesday (PDF). At the same time, they will discuss a proposal to allow certain cabarets to obtain permits that would allow them to stay open past two (read about it in the Oakbook). That idea also came up a few years ago, and back then, the Committee wasn’t having it. Jean Quan said then that she would rather see the law changed to force them to close earlier. Sigh.

I know what you’re thinking. Good luck with that, right? Well, the report came back to the Finance & Management Committee last week, and, unsurprisingly, it found (PDF) that we can’t issue secure cards with existing equipment owned by the City after all, and that the equipment we’d need to issue them would cost somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 to buy the technology, or $75,000-$133,000 a year to rent it. And then, of course, there’s staffing costs for the program.

The report suggests a few different options for paying for and staffing the program, ranging from a first-year cost of $713,000 and annual costs thereafter of $156,000 if we were to buy expensive equipment and staff the program with permanent, benefitted employees, to a first year cost of $162,000 and annual costs of $143,000 if we were going to lease cheaper equipment and staff the program with temporary, non-benefitted employees.

On the revenue side of things, the report estimates that a municipal ID card program could generate between $30,000 and $140,000 annually, depending on how many cards get issued (they’re guessing 2,000-4,000) and how much the City charges for the card (estimates are between $15 and $35).

The unpromising figures were not really discussed much at last week’s Committee. Instead, the Committee basically agreed that we should issue an RFP to provide the services, and that the time to discuss costs will be when the RFP responses come back. Fair enough, I suppose, but it does make you wonder why they didn’t just issue the RFP in the first place instead of wasting four months preparing a report that doesn’t seem, to me anyway, particularly optimistic about this ever being a cost-covered program.

The biggest issue during public comment was that the report did not specify that the cards would offer a debit function, a feature that municipal ID card advocates deem essential to a successful program. Their concerns are three-fold. One, that without a debit function, the ID cards will not appeal to anyone other than undocumented immigrants or people who have no other valid forms of identification, which will stigmatize the card and therefore limit its utility to the undocumented immigrants who need it. Two, undocumented immigrants have limited or no access to banking, and therefore often end up wasting a lot of money on check-cashing. They see the inclusion of a debit function on the card as a way to avoid that problem. Three, they think that if the card offered a debit function, the City could take a small charge for each transaction, which would yield enough revenue to pay for the entire program, plus enough revenue to subsidize other city services.

On the first point, I’m moderately sympathetic. Obviously, if you’re going to create this whole new card to help undocumented immigrants, then you want the card to be useful to them. However, it seems like people aren’t really thinking this whole thing through. Under any scenario, Oakland will have limited capacity to issue the cards. It seems, therefore, logical, that if we were to move forward with this, we would want to prioritize getting cards out to those the program was created to serve – people without other valid forms of ID. But then only people without other ID have the cards, and the card is stigmatized, and you’re kind of back right where you started. But if you let just anyone sign up for the cards right away, then the people who need them most may not be able to get them in a reasonable time frame. (This is, of course, assuming that anyone who has normal ID will event want this damn card, which seems unlikely to me.)

Any way I try to look at it, I just can’t see how a municipal ID card program can get around this dilemma. There is, very simply, a serious scalability issue. 425,000 people live in Oakland. Let’s assume an absolute rosiest case scenario and say that we had the capacity to issue the same number of cards as San Francisco, roughly 8,000 a year (SF’s program, like ours will be, is currently limited by card issuance capacity, not interest). There is just no way we can issue enough cards to have widespread enough use that we escape the stigmatization problem. It just can’t happen.

I am less sympathetic to the second concern, about banking. Isn’t part of the point of making the ID cards that people without ID will then be able to use their IDs to get accounts at banks? I mean, seriously. Just find some local banks that will agree to accept the cards as ID to open an account and call it a freaking day. One of the girls from the Oakland City ID Card Coalition spoke at Committee about how the debit component was essential, and described the New Haven card’s debit function as a model, which she said allows people to load up to $150, and is accepted at “over 40 stores.”

Even if I had previously thought we should include a debit component, then that right there would have been the end of it for me. If the best the card advocates can come up with as an example is a limit of $150 and 40 stores in New Haven allowing people to use the card, then it’s just clearly not worth it. I mean, how many retail outlets are there in New Haven? They have 124,000 people. I am quite sure that there are a lot more than 40. And of course, if the debit function is maxed out at $150, then again, we’re not doing anything to solve the problem of people without bank accounts having to carry with them enormous sums of cash all the time.

And on the third point, about the City making money off the debit function, all I have to say is hahahahahahaha. Seriously, get real.

There’s also this whole issue of local currency tied into this debate, which is just so far divorced from reality that it isn’t really worth getting into that much, except to say that former City Councilmember Wilson Riles, a strong advocate of the ID cards, wants us to pay City employees in something called ACORNs:

Um. So, I work for the City. I am also a member of SEIU 1021. Let me say right now that I do not want to be paid in ACORNS ever, for a furlough day or any other day. My landlord does not accept ACORNS, Sallie Mae does not accept ACORNS, and I’m pretty damn sure that Verizon Wireless is not going to accept ACORNs.

Anyway, the Committee ended up directing staff to issue an RFP that solicited requests for issuing cards that include a debit component, but also allowed for responses without a debit component, a basically agreed that they’d figure out which they wanted to do once the responses came in.

The Committee’s recommendation will come to the City Council for approval tonight, accompanied by a fun letter from the City Attorney’s office. As you might imagine, they does not seem particularly thrilled (PDF) about the idea of the City getting into the debit card business:

We are writing to advise that this Office will retain a banking law expert to provide advice and recommendations regarding the legal issues and ramifications of the debit component if the Council approves the Committee’s recommendation. Adding a debit feature on the municipal identification card raises a number of legal issues under complex and dynamic state and federal banking laws and regulations, including but not limited to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Bank Secrecy Act, money service licensing regulations and anti-money laundering laws. Neither this Office nor any other municipal law office or practice has expertise in-house to address banking law issues as they are not typically at issue in municipal law practice.

The memo goes on to say that the City can expect to spend between $25,000 and $60,000 on outside legal advice if they decide to go this route.

Sigh. I am not at all unsympathetic to the problem immigrant communities face with respect to the unavailability of identification. There are problems with respect to access to social services. There are problems with respect to driving. There are problems with respect to interaction with the police. There are problems with respect to banking. If the City could do something about these problems, then I think they should. But we simply do not have the capacity, financial or even just functional, to solve these problems. This program does not solve these problems. It just costs money. And money is something that the City just doesn’t have right now.

Forest City, developer of the Uptown Apartments, has a Disposition and Development Agreement (DDA) (PDF) with the City that says the City is supposed to sell them the big lot at the corner of 19th and Telegraph for $6.9 million so they can build 220 units of housing and some commercial space on it. According to the DDA, this was supposed to happen by July of 2008. Forest City, for a variety of reasons, couldn’t get it together to buy the lot by that deadline, so now the City is moving the date back three years, to July 2011 (PDF). The new schedule includes performance milestones such as a building permit being issued by June of 2011 and construction beginning in October of 2011.

Nobody wants to look at ugly green construction fencing for the next two years, so the question becomes, what do we do with that big empty space sitting there on Telegraph? The City has decided that the best thing we can do with a large parcel on Telegraph Avenue across the street from the Fox Theater and Flora is to turn it into a surface parking lot that will hold 120 cars.

Here is how that would play out. We would lease the parcel (PDF) to Forest City, who would then be responsible for paying to turn it into a surface parking lot (probably $400,000-$500,000). Then, Forest City would get to keep the revenue generated from the parking fees to help cover the cost of building the parking lot. The City estimates that the parking lot could generate $125,000-$150,000 per year. After Forest City earns $300,000 from the parking lot, the rest of the revenue would go to the City. If the Community and Economic Development Committee approves the lease for the parking lot at their meeting on Tuesday (PDF), the proposal will then move on for approval by the full City Council at their next meeting. If they approve it, then Forest City will have to go get building permits and apply for a conditional use permit to turn the parcel into a parking lot, which will have to be approved by the Planning Commission (a body which, just last week, voted to prohibit all new surface parking downtown, BTW).

So, the staff report (PDF) on this item suggests that this will generate around $100,000 for the City. Maybe one of you can explain to me how the math on that one works, because I can’t figure how this parking lot could feasibly get approved, constructed, and opened before October, at which point there are only two years left before the lot will have to be closed because construction on the new building is starting, and according to staff’s numbers, Forest City will not have earned over $300,000 by then.

I live less than 500 feet from this intersection, and I can walk out my door and identify open street parking within my immediate sight lines pretty much any night of the week no matter who is playing at the Fox. (I tried to take photos to document all this parking, but, idiot that I am, I managed to lose my camera battery charger and therefore now cannot use my camera, so I just fell back on taking pictures with my cell phone, none of which, I discovered this morning as I was preparing this blog, came out visible at all. Alas.) Anyway, if the City really believes there is a parking shortage in Uptown, they should change the street sweeping hours to free up spaces.

Or, hey, they could keep their garages open later! It’s really hard for me to stomach the idea that the City is claiming we need more car storage in this area at night when there are already floors of parking spaces like a block away that they control and choose to shut down at night. (At last month’s meeting, we were told that not enough people use the garages at night to make it financially feasible to keep open. How that supports the argument that the area desperately needs more parking is completely beyond me.)

I’m always saying that the biggest thing standing in the way of Oakland’s success is the City of Oakland, and this is just a perfect example. After years of everyone talking about how downtown is going to take off soon and how nightlife and vibrancy and restaurants and bars and crowds are coming just around the corner, it is all finally happening. We managed to get ourselves one successful, crowded, busy street downtown and how does the City respond? By trying to stick a giant parking lot right smack in the middle of it all.

I got really sad thinking about this on Tuesday night, when I was enjoying a drink at The Den. I was sitting by the window, and had ample opportunity to observe the behavior of the post concert crowd, since my date had to abandon me right as that night’s show was letting out, to go move his car, which he had left in a City parking garage that was about to close. It was sooo exciting to watch all the people just filling up all the sidewalks, lingering outside in the neighborhood after the show, and I just could not help but wonder how that behavior would change if a field of cars, constantly reminding you of driving away, suddenly became the dominant feature of the street. It was so disheartening.

The staff report (PDF) argues that we should go ahead with the parking lot because we can’t afford to do anything else with the property. Pat Kernighan was really worked up over this the last time the Committee discussed the parking lot, saying that if people don’t want it, then they have to come up with some other way to use the parcel because nobody wants to look at ugly construction fencing for two years. Which is, frankly, ridiculous. If there’s no economically viable short-term use for the lot, then why do we have to do anything with it? Just put up a nice looking fence and call it a day. Do you guys remember that fence they put up by the new Uptown park while it was being built, where they had the kids from the School for the Arts decorate it?

Just do that. It sure as hell can’t cost as much to build a pretty fence as it would to build and operate a parking lot, and I doubt it would require a Planning Commission hearing. Also, unlike a parking lot, it would visually enhance the intersection and make the pedestrian experience more interesting, rather than more horrifying.

It was a banner day for intolerance, not just in California, but across the country. Arizona voters approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage 56.3% to 43.7%. Florida did the same thing, voting 61.9% to 38.1% to “protect marriage.” Even sicker, 56.95% of Arkansas voters decided they don’t think gay couples should even be able to adopt children. WTF?

This Saturday, equality advocates across the nation will come together to protest this widespread show of intolerance and rally for an end to discrimination and equal rights for all citizens. Protests are being organized in more cities than I can count, and Oakland, of course, will have one of its own at 10:30 tomorrow morning in front of City Hall. Lucky for us, local organizers have lined up some truly excellent speakers, including newly-elected at-large City Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan and Equality California development director Sean Sullivan. So if you can, please try to make it down to City Hall on Saturday morning and show your support.

• Remember the plastic bag ban? In case you forgot, here’s the story so far. In June of 2007, Councilmembers Nancy Nadel and Jean Quan introduced an ordinance (PDF) banning plastic bags in Oakland. I was opposed to the plastic bag ban for a number of reasons.

  The Council did not agree with my objections, and passed the ban, but implementation of the ordinance was delayed by a lawsuit. A group called the Coalition for Plastic Bag Recycling argued that the City was required by the California Environmental Quality Act to study the impact of the ban on the environment before adopting the ordinance (the idea being that since paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic bags, banning plastic bags would have a negative environmental impact because it would just cause people to use more paper bags). Nancy Nadel said there was no point to conducting an Environmental Impact Report (EIR), because it was impossible to predict whether people, when not given the option of plastic bags, would switch to paper bags or start bringing their own reusable bags instead.

  In April, the court ruled in favor of the Coalition for Plastic Bag Recycling and granted an injunction against the plastic bag ban, saying the City would indeed have to conduct an EIR if it wanted to proceed with the ban. Despite the budget shortfall, Nancy Nadel said that we would not back down and that we would do the EIR. In July, the Council passed a resolution (PDF) supporting an Assembly bill that would impose a tax on plastic bags. Now, when the Council resumes session next Tuesday, they’re going to rescind the ban (PDF). What a good use of time and money all that was!

• Downtown residents (and maybe those in other parts of the city, too – I wouldn’t know) got an unmistakable reminder that we’re back in election season this weekend in the form of enormous hideous signs promoting Kerry Hamill’s candidacy for the At-Large City Council seat plastered over basically every possible post or fence. The signs read “SAFE neighborhoods NOW” in huge yellow letters, next to a kind of bizarre photo of Hamill.

  Opinions on the signs from Oakland residents varied widely. One wondered whether the image was intended to remind people of those Obama posters you see everywhere, while another questioned whether the picture might be evidence of inappropriate coordination between the Hamill campaign and the PAC that put up the signs. Yet another wasn’t sure if the photo was of Hamill at all, suggesting that it more closely resembled “some neglected 17 year old from Walnut Creek.” One simply offered “Those posters give me the CREEPS.”

  
  

  And who do we have to thank for this new influx of visual stimulation? Why, the Oakland Jobs PAC, of course, the same crack team who brought you the “homocide” mailer this Spring.

• I really wanted to see the new Kaiser Hospital discussion at the Planning Commission meeting on Wednesday, so I totally rushed to get out of work and to City Hall as quickly as I possibly could. I even made it in time to catch the tail end of public comment on the Creekside EIR. Fun.

  Anyway, the meeting was in the Council Chambers instead of the usual Hearing Room 1, and it had been a long night at work, so I was a little disoriented when I got there. They weren’t broadcasting the meeting video on the big overhead screen like they usually do, and there was all this stuff blocking my view, so I kept switching seats and moving around the room so that I’d be able to actually see what was going on. It took me like a good half hour to figure out that the reason I was could only see four Commissioners up on the dais no matter where I sat was because only four of them were there.

  Despite the Mayor’s incessant boasting of making it one of his priorities to fully staff all the Boards and Commissions, Dellums has let Planning Commissioner Suzie Lee’s seat sit vacant for months, ever since her term expired (PDF) on May 5th. And much like the man who put them there, both of Dellums’s appointees to the Commission were absent. I probably shouldn’t complain too much, since I don’t like Galvez or Huntsman very much and it always bothered me that Lee and I have the same hairstyle, so the half a Commission we were left with was the better half. But still…half a Planning Commission! That’s no good!

• My favorite San Francisco blogger loves Ron Dellums! I feel betrayed!

• And finally, a plea for help from my readers. At the Montclair Jazz and Wine Festival on Sunday, one of the vendors was selling a black t-shirt that said “Oakland” in white gothic looking letters, and then beneath that, also in white, was an image of two container cranes inside an outline of a kind of shield-like shape. I thought about buying one, but then decided not to, then once I got home, I decided that I really wanted it after all, and was totally kicking myself for not getting it. Does anyone know were I can find these? A store that stocks them, or a website I can buy them from? Another upcoming event they might be at?

• And here’s something that doesn’t annoy me at all. I have an awesome new guest post from Sean Sullivan, about La Esperanza, a new grocery story in West Oakland. Go read 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.

I didn’t have nearly so much traffic back then as I do now, so most of my current readers probably missed out on the saga of the smoking ban as it played out here on ABO. Please forgive the lack of links in this post – the internet connection I have here barely exists. I’ll add them when I return home, though. Anyway, this all started back in December 2006, when the Public Safety Committee considered a proposed new ordinance banning smoking pretty much everywhere in Oakland except detached, single-family homes. (The American Lung Association is basically just shopping this exact same law around the every city in the Bay Area.) The Committee rationally responded that the law was was to strict, and gave staff a list of like five places they’d like to see smoking banned. The issue evaporated for a few months, then staff returned months later with an ordinance identical to the one the Committee had previously rejected. Pointing out to the Committee that they had already said no to this made no impact, but eventually they got rid of the ban on smoking in apartments and condos and moved the rest of the issue onto Council.

So when it became clear that the Council was going to pass the idiotic smoking law no matter what, we decided to drop wholesale opposition to ordinance and focus on trying to get rid of one of the worst parts, which would have banned smoking within 25 feet of bars. This would have been a problem particularly for a number of establishments where the owners had, at considerable expense, gone out of their way to install outdoor smoking patios for their patrons. Smoking patios are nice because you get to sit down, smoke while enjoying your drink, and most of all, because they provide a shield between the smoker and the streets, where you can almost assuredly expect to be subject to harassment from vagrants and panhandlers, and risk exposure to more serious offenses, like robbery and assault.

Oakland’s previously existing outdoor smoking law had exempted bars from the section prohibiting smoking within 25 feet of buildings, but for reasons that no one was ever able to explain, it was decided that this needed to be changed. A number of people attended meeting after meeting to ask the Council to retain the exemption for the area outside bars, for the physical safety of smokers as well as to respect the investment of small business owners in their patios.

For a while our requests were ignored, but finally, on October 17, 2007, the City Council amended the proposal after much begging and pleading and public testimony, to say that smoking would be allowed within a reasonable distance of a bar, the intention, as explained at the meeting, being that smoke should not be blowing into the door of a bar. Fair enough.

So now Oakland Municipal Code Sec 8.30.060 reads:

Smoking outside of any enclosed place where smoking is prohibited shall occur at a minimum distance of twenty-five (25) feet from any building entrance, exit, window and air intake vent of the building, except that bars are exempted from the outside smoking requirements of this section, provided the smoke does not enter adjacent areas in which smoking is prohibited by law or by the owner, lessee, or licensee of the adjacent property.

So then, yesterday afternoon, my friend was standing outside a local bar, smoking a cigarette. He says that he was at a minimum of 10 feet away from the door at the time. He was observing the spectacle of two very shaken up young women standing outside of their car, which had just been broken into, giving their statements to the police. He wasn’t 100%, but said that his understanding of the situation was that their car window had been smashed and purse stolen from the backseat while they were inside it. A few moments earlier, a man had been urinating on the sidewalk, only a few feet away from the girls giving the report and the police officers on the scene.

As he’s watching this all unfold, he’s approached by another police officer, who tells him “There’s a law against smoking 25 feet from bars.” My friend, having spent months dealing with the saga and having been sitting in Council chammbers to witness our winning the long sought-after exemption, knew exactly what the law was, and informed the officer that Oakland, indeed, does not have a law forbidden smoking within 25 feet of a bar. He tried to explain to the officer, part of the Alcohol and Beverage Action Team, who, with a partner, was on a Citywide smoking sweep, that bars were exempted from the 25 foot rule. The officer showed my friend his printed instruction paper (although declined to provide him with a copy to keep) which clearly stated that he was to ticket people smoking within 25 feet of every door. Then he wrote my friend a ticket. The officer then went inside the bar, and issued them a smoking abatement warning (basically, threatening penalty if they are caught again allowing people to smoke within 25 feet of their door). The entire process took somewhere between one and one and a half hours.

You know, the entire time we were lobbying for this exemption, all we kept hearing, over and over and over again, from Councilmembers, from Council staff, from City staff, from random people we would talk to about it is that we should just shut up and stop complaining because the law would never be enforced (or, as Barbara Killey explained, it would be “self enforcing”). I cannot tell you how many times I got told “[V Smoothe], relax. Nobody is actually going to be ticketed for having a cigarette outside of a bar.” Barbara Killey stood up there and told the Council, in response to public comment from me and others, that our protests about poor use of resources should be dismissed, because we would never send police officers out just to ticket people for smoking outdoors. The law would only be enforced through peer pressure, and it would work. Over and over and over!

And now this. This is exactly what we said would happen, and incredibly, it’s happening even though we got the damn law amended anyway! So not only are we having our police spending time enforcing ridiculous outdoor smoking laws, we’re having them enforce outdoor smoking laws that don’t exist. Unfuckingbelievable.

This, my neighbors, is CRAP.

First off, the program has been in existence for all of six weeks and only enforced for four weeks. Why are we changing it before even getting settled?! The concern of the City is that they have not sold enough permits. Of course they haven’t! It’s the very beginning of something new. Never mind, they say, that the City has collected a huge amount of revenue from parking tickets. (no amount was available from the City) One parking enforcement person said that he had been writing between 20-30 tickets a day. At $70 per ticket that’s $1400-2100 per day that the City wasn’t getting prior to this permit plan.

Secondly, the businesses that this District has lost over the last 5-10 years because of parking woes are not going to be replaced overnight. It may take years to replace these businesses. How can you expect immediate turnaround for parking to be full with permit holders? Never mind the improvement existing businesses are experiencing because they can finally have clients, customers, and visitors to their businesses. That’s what the plan was all about in the first place – getting Chinatown, train, and BART users to park elsewhere so that the parking in this neighborhood could be used by this neighborhood. It was the goal of this plan that businesses would have a better chance of survival and interest in the area if there was a parking permit plan.

Third, that the City – and especially Nancy Nadel’s office – failed to contact the Jack London District Association prior to requesting this change is REDICULOUS. It affects the District, so the District Association should have been included in the discussions leading up to this prospective change in legislation.

]]> http://www.abetteroakland.com/nancy-nadel-fiddling-with-jls-mixed-use-parking-permits/2008-06-17/feed 17 http://www.abetteroakland.com/by-the-way/2008-05-08 http://www.abetteroakland.com/by-the-way/2008-05-08#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 22:00:47 +0000 V Smoothe http://www.abetteroakland.com/by-the-way/2008-05-08 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.

]]> http://www.abetteroakland.com/by-the-way/2008-05-08/feed 0 http://www.abetteroakland.com/reinventing-the-wheel-slowly/2008-05-08 http://www.abetteroakland.com/reinventing-the-wheel-slowly/2008-05-08#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 20:22:54 +0000 V Smoothe http://www.abetteroakland.com/reinventing-the-wheel-slowly/2008-05-08 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.

]]> http://www.abetteroakland.com/reinventing-the-wheel-slowly/2008-05-08/feed 6 http://www.abetteroakland.com/plastic-bag-ban-injuction-granted-nancy-nadel-wont-let-go/2008-04-18 http://www.abetteroakland.com/plastic-bag-ban-injuction-granted-nancy-nadel-wont-let-go/2008-04-18#comments Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:16:27 +0000 V Smoothe http://www.abetteroakland.com/plastic-bag-ban-injuction-granted-nancy-nadel-wont-let-go/2008-04-18 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!

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