The general political climate in Oakland at the beginning of the summer was best summed up by the Trib in their Council race endorsements, which they introduced by saying “If there were ever a city crying out for leadership, it’s Oakland,” then proceeded to endorse the re-election of every single incumbent. Oakland voters followed suit at the polls in early June, and sent Nancy Nadel, Jane Brunner, Ignacio De La Fuente, and Larry Reid back for four more years.

Mid-June news of a large-scale gang bust by the Oakland Police Department was almost immediately eclipsed by allegations that Oakland City Administrator Deborah Edgerly had interfered with the 2-month investigation by tipping off her nephew, a member of the Acorn gang and City of Oakland employee, that his phone was tapped.

Faced with widespread citizen outrage, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums took the opportunity to demonstrate his unique ability to find the absolute worst possible way to handle a municipal crisis, first giving her until Monday, June 23rd to either resign or be fired, then pre-empting his own deadline by sending out an e-mail on Friday, June 20th directing all department heads to report directly to him. Nevertheless, Edgerly remained at the helm at the beginning of the following week.

Then on Tuesday, June 24th, Dellums held a press conference announcing that Edgerly would retire from her post, at the end of July (although she would continue to work for the city for as long as six months while selecting her own replacement) but claimed that the announcement was unrelated to the brewing scandal, saying her retirement plans had been in place since January. When pressed for details on the search for Edgerly’s replacement by Chip Johnson on KQED Forum, Dellums Chief of Staff David Chai remained insistent that the plan had been in place since January, but refused (or was unable) to answer follow-up questions about when the search for a replacement had begun.

By Friday, June 27th, Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente and Pat Kernighan were calling publicly for her to be placed on administrative leave until her retirement date, and Dellums finally did so that night, naming his interim CEDA director Dan Lindheim acting City Administrator. Edgerly fired back the next Monday, claiming that Dellums didn’t have the authority to appoint her replacement, in response to which, the Mayor finally fired her on July 1st, then told reporters the following day that claims he had behaved indecisively were “absurd.” Ultimate fallout of the Edgerly scandal is yet to be determined, awaiting the results of an FBI investigation, for which subpoenas were issued in late August.

Reaction to the Edgerly mess from the rest of City Hall varied widely. Oakland City Attorney John Russo, Oakland City Auditor Courtney Ruby, and Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente stepped in with government reform packages, offering proposals ranging from a new anti-nepotism law to an audit of hiring practices to records reform, while District 3 City Councilmember Nancy Nadel called such actions “opportunistic power grabbing (PDF)” and warned that we should wait for all the facts before “rushing to judgement.” Calls to eliminate waste in Oakland’s government were met with derision by District 4 Councilmember and wanna-be Mayor Jean Quan, who announced in a newsletter that she believes the worst case scenario is that the City has less than a million dollars in waste that could be cut.

The administrative crisis was compounded by a financial one. The Council passed a mid-cycle budget with $15 million in cuts in June, but got two bits of unpleasant news the next month. First, in response to findings of vote counting irregularities with LLAD from activist David Mix and ORPN founder Charles Pine, the Council admitted defeat and agreed not to collect the tax, putting them another $12 million in the hole. Then Dellums acknowledged that the revenue estimates he had presented in his (late) budget proposal were inaccurate by millions of dollars and announced he was bringing in former City Manager Robert Bobb to sort out the mess and find a replacement for Edgerly. Bobb announced two weeks ago that the actual deficit was somewhere between forty and sixty million dollars. Matier and Ross later reported that Oakland’s fund reserve dropped from over $60 million last year to $22 million currently. Although the City is unable to account for where the money went, Finance and Management Committee Chair Jean Quan tried to put a rest to concerns, saying “It’s not like the money was stolen.”

Things just got worse in August, when the City experienced a spree of local business robberies that appeared to have no rhyme or reason, with targets ranging from a pizzeria on Skyline to a nail salon in Temescal to a monument to mediocre cuisine in Rockridge. Dellums responded by blaming the economy, informing the citizens that the apparent crime rise is perception, not reality, and calling in the volunteer Guardian Angels to patrol our streets. The spate of high profile crime wasn’t limited to restaurant robberies – Oakland residents also got to deal with arsons in West Oakland, a four year old boy getting hit by a stray bullet, and this weekend, the second murder this year of a pregnant teenager. A Labor Day shooting in East Oakland brought the year’s homicide tally to 95, up from 88 this time last year.

In response to rising concerns about crime, the Council agreed to place a parcel tax on the November ballot that would hire 105 additional police officers and 75 additional police service technicians over the next three years, at a cost of $275/year for Oakland homeowners. Dellums named former County Health Department director Arnold Perkins as his temporary Public Safety Director. Although the public will have to wait until September 11th to see the Mayor’s full public safety program, residents got a preview of Perkins’s answers for the Oakland crime problem in a Trib editorial this weekend, where Perkins suggests to Martin Reynolds that citizens combat the crime problem on their own by bringing fried chicken to the groups of young men loitering on their streetcorners.

You know, following this stuff day to day, you’re always angry, of course, but as with anything, after a while you just sort of get used to it. There’s outrage, sure, but somehow it just gets dulled over time. I had a wake-up call this weekend, watching the way people not from Oakland reacted to my telling them, in this kind of jaded, matter-of-fact way, about the restaurant robberies and the statements in response from Dellums and Tucker. Their response, which was just complete disbelief that anyone would tolerate living in such a place, made me realize just how totally, totally fucked-up the situation is in this town. (I am sorry for the language. Although I may have a few sailor-like tendencies in person, I do try to restrain myself on the blog, but sometimes there are no other words.) The people of Oakland deserve better, and there is absolutely no reason we should tolerate the status quo even a day longer. Immediate action is needed from City Hall. As for what that action should be, well, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow on my thoughts there. Today is just about reveling in completely justifiable outrage.

Since it became independently owned, the East Bay Express, a paper I used to look forward to reading every week, has lost all their good writers, gone from healthy to anorexic, and is increasingly becoming a vehicle for nothing more than the half-baked, ill-informed screeds of crazy people. I give it four more months before it has all the relevancy of the Berkeley Daily Planet. For the most part I just ignore it. But I cannot overlook or forgive this week’s insane cover story which appears to be an attempt to turn the whining of a handful of Van Hool haters into yet another bullshit excuse to bitch about BRT.

The essence of the story’s argument hinges on the assertion that AC transit ridership is has plunged under the leadership of BRT proponent Rick Fernandez. This is not true by any metric. Ridership is growing. Read through for the numbers.

First, let me say that I like the Van Hools. I like the stop request buttons, I love the multiple rear exits and easy open doors, I love the low floors. I love that it seems so much faster for wheelchairs to board and exit. I love that they just have more room in general and are much easier to stand in when crowded. Few things frustrate me more than waiting for the bus at what I know is a busy time and seeing one of the old buses pull up to the stop. Having said that, I could care less if AC Transit went out and decided to buy a different bus. I don’t have mobility problems, so I’ve never had a problem climbing up to the seats. Apparently some people do. Perhaps I will when I’m older. VTA has some nice, American-made (I believe) low-floor buses, and I’d be just as happy with those.

So Gammon takes what may or may not be legitimate complaints about the Van Hool buses and then spends 4000 words weaving them into some broad condemnation of AC Transit’s performance in the last decade, coupled with multiple completely random swipes at BRT. Too bad he’s completely wrong about everything. Now, whether he knows he’s lying or is simply too dim to grasp some pretty basic figures in the course of his three-month investigation, I can’t say. But check this out:

In fact, since Fernandez took control of the agency in the late 1990s, its fortunes have worsened in almost every measurable category. Ridership has plummeted, costs have skyrocketed, and the agency has slashed service.

and

And as the agency continued to pursue its dream of a European-style transit system, its fortunes worsened and it lost millions of riders. For critics, that raises questions about whether it’s even capable of making BRT work.

and

None of these remedies have cured the agency’s financial woes. Fewer buses and bus lines predictably resulted in fewer riders. According to statistics compiled by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a state agency that oversees state and federal transportation funds, AC Transit lost about 9 percent of its annual passengers from 2000-1 through 2005-6 — a staggering 6.1 million people, or more than twice the total population of Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

Predictably, my ass. Not only is Gammon’s example of losing twice the population of Alameda and CoCo counties retarded, it’s also insanely misleading.

The document Gammon is referring to (PDF!) here does indeed note a 9% decline in annual boardings for AC Transit between 2000-2001 and 2004-2005. It also notes an an 8% decline in boardings on Muni over the same period, a 20% decline in boardings on SamTrans, a 19% decline in boardings on Golden Gate Transit, and a whopping 34% decline in boardings on VTA. The average percent change in boardings on all Bay Area transit systems over the period was an 11% decline. That’s right – AC Transit outperformed the Bay Area transit system average during this period.

Okay, now remember that the first Van Hools were delivered in the Spring of 2003.

The same report shows that between 2003-2004 and 2004-2005, AC Transit experienced a slight gain in boardings (less than 1%, the average of all agencies sampled). It also ranks that AC Transit’s 40/40L/43 and 51 lines, both of which use the Van Hools almost exclusively, as the 9th and 10th busiest bus routes in the Bay Area by boardings for 2004-2005. Neither of these lines had made it into the top ten in any of the previous 4 years.

In fact, boardings began declining before the Van Hool buses were purchased. Boardings declined 3% between 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 (PDF!) and 10% between 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 (PDF!). They finally began rising again the next year, with a 3% gain between 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 (PDF!).

Okay. Boardings are only one way to measure transit traffic. Let’s look at some figures – hard numbers instead of percentages. Here’s AC Transit ridership data from 1997 (PDF!), when it was that “no-frills workhorse” run by Gammon’s hero, Sharon Banks, and from 2006 (PDF!), under the Devil’s henchman, Rick Fernandez.

Thousands of annual boardings: (This figure is from the MTC reports. All the rest come from the reports linked in the above paragraph.)
1997-1998: 63,877
2004-2005: 65,076

Annual Passenger Miles Traveled
1997: 190,544,197
2006: 209,399,847

Annual Unlinked Trips:
1997: 63,054,878
2006: 66,926,680

Average Weekday Unlinked Trips:
1997: 215,459
2006: 226,732

Average Saturday Unlinked Trips:
1997: 90,245
2006: 104,301

Average Sunday Unlinked Trips:
1997: 64,172
2006: 69,009

I’m neither a mathematician nor a lexicographer, but I’m having a really hard time looking at those numbers and coming to the conclusion that anything besides Gammon’s brain cell count “plummeted.”

Gammon also tries to blame the agency’s financial woes on the new buses:

Fernandez defends AC Transit’s financial record and said there were many reasons why its fare box recovery nose-dived. “It’s hard to take a look at it in isolation,” he said. “Our costs have skyrocketed. The cost of medical has gone up dramatically. Fuel costs are up dramatically.”

But it’s also the case that buying expensive European buses has cost the agency several million dollars in the past half decade. And the costs for riders are likely to keep rising.

Ooh! Several million dollars! Well, that must be the problem. But just to make sure, let’s compare numbers again.

Operating Expense – Wages, Salaries, and Benefits
1997: $112,221,053
2006: $198,852,158

This paper is dead to me.

She was bruised, but otherwise physically uninjured. Mentally was another story. She was shaking and sobbing and hysterical, as people tend to be when this sort of thing happens to them. (At this point I see a purse snatching as little more than an inconvenience, but I remember the first time I got mugged I reacted exactly like she did. Probably worse, actually.)

It wasn’t the middle of the night. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood. And it wasn’t a deserted street.There were four people within a block of her when it happened. In the 15 minutes we were waiting for the police to arrive, over a dozen people walked passed us.

I had planned on using my evening to write some blogs for today – one about the BRC’s stupid non-recommendations and another about this idiotic smoking ordinance. But I found myself too restless and frustrated to write. I was frustrated at myself for not being able to comfort this terribly upset woman or think of better things to say to her. I was frustrated over knowing that this kid would never be caught, and even if he was, nothing would happen to him, since this isn’t a “serious” crime.

But mostly I was frustrated with the Council for wasting time with feel-good, do-nothing policies while they ignore the real problems facing the people who live here. I look at these agendas and watch these meetings week after week after week, and I wonder if anyone on the Council even cares about the people who live in this city. Do they ever stop for a second to think about whether what they’re doing will actually make people safer, or provide more affordable housing, or whatever the goal of the week is?

It really doesn’t feel like it. Banning carryout plastic bags from grocery stores is not going to help the environment. Inclusionary zoning is not going to provide housing to poor people. Banning smoking near bus stops is not going to reduce asthma and lung cancer risks for people who live next to the Port and have diesel trucks whizzing past them all day and night. Paying teenagers to stand around BART stations with maps for a couple of hours in the afternoon is not going to reduce crime.

Everyone on the Council knows all of this. (And if they don’t, they’re stupid. But I don’t think they’re stupid.) They know and they don’t care. None of it is about change – it’s about “making a statement.”

Oaklanders don’t need statements. They need safer streets. They need places to live. They need jobs. They need mind-numbingly boring results-oriented legislation with well thought out implementation plans and clear metrics for determining success.

In my story for Novometro yesterday, I wrote about an ordinance that hasn’t been implemented in the six years since the Council passed it, another ordinance that was passed amid great controversy and is now being repealed after it achieved nothing and the State Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, a State law that we asked to have passed that lapsed because we failed to provide the required statistics about how we were using it, and another law that the Council will consider tonight that they have repeatedly admitted they can’t enforce. It’s pathetic. It makes me angry. And embarrassed for this city.

I get that crafting legislation that will make a difference is not fun. It takes a long time to research. It’s slow to write. By the time you see results, people have forgotten you passed it. It doesn’t sound sexy in the newspaper. But Oakland’s City Council owes their constituents far more than what they are giving them.

I can’t stop thinking about that poor woman last night. She was just so visibily overwrought over this horrible thing that had happened to her, and the fact that far worse things happen to people in Oakalnd every day was no consolation. She was around my mom’s age, kind of hippiesh looking, and wasn’t a smoker. But I’m pretty damn sure that she doesn’t think banning smoking near bus stops should be her government’s priority. When the Council votes tonight over whether they want to devote police time to ticketing smokers at golf courses or not, I hope they think about her instead of the sound bite they might get on KTVU.