If you’ve got 1-2 hours to spare,I captured and spliced the inbound video stream for both the WhistleBlower/Hiring Practices audit, and the Planning Commish discussion and put them up on rockridgeresidents.org. 1 file is 100MB, the other is 135MB. Sounds large, but it’s ~10mins on DSL. The WhistleBlower is up now, the Ada link will work in about an hour; takes a long time to transfer the file up to the site given I have a slow uplink connection.

Due to my desire to keep this away from all the mega-search-robots that constantly crawl the site, sucking up my bandwidth, it’s registered & logged in users only.

Yikes. The speeches aren’t over, but…I just don’t see the council approving this person.

Whatever, at least the council heard me. Some woman even came over and wrote down my info about my name, my email, and my support for it. I couldn’t have stayed until 10pm anyhow…

the guy after me spoke against it, felt that the public ethics commission was more appropriate. the next guy spoke for it, but pointed out that it was tothless and had the public ethics commission done its job perhaps we would not be in this place.

then sanjiv handa spoke for 4 mins. no idea what he said, sounded like he was accusing the council of being corrupt. not sure as it was difficult to follow. then council chatted for a bit about something. then sanjiv talked again about the corruptness of the council again.

dunno if this helped at all, time will tell.

Maybe this should be a regular feature of the blog whenever there’s a City Council meeting — organize people to go and speak. It seems like something we can do that will at least get on the official record….

Oh, and one other thing. Dress nicely! I’m not saying you need to put on a suit or anything, but please, do try to make yourself presentable. You’re going to be on TV! Wear shoes. Wandering around Chambers barefoot is kind of gross. Also, take off your hat when you get up to talk.

I would love to see something along the lines of what Justin suggests for Commission appointments.

If at all possible, try to speak in front of the Committee that heard the item instead of waiting until the Council meeting. Councilmembers are far more likely to consider your points in that setting and the likelihood that a deal to secure votes has already been made is much lower. This is not possible with Commission appointments, but with other policy matters, it’s fine.

Say the neighborhood or Council District you live in. That way, you know that at least one Councilmember will stop what they’re doing and listen to you. Also, if you happen to live in a more active and/or affluent community, chances are that others will listen as well.

If you’ve lived in Oakland for fifteen years, but this is the first time you’ve spoken in front of Council, say so. New faces at public comment are always the most compelling. The usual suspects become just the usual suspects.

As far as Ada Chan goes, I can’t comment on her merits. What I would suggest, however, is that the Council will not handle the situation well. What the council can and should do is actually have some sort of confirmation process so the Mayor’s appointees have to answer questions on the record from Council. I never understood why Council abdicated its role in this way. Maybe confirmation is mandatory for the “big” Commissions (Planning and Port) and optional (with vote of Rules Committee) for others.

This way, we can actually hear from the candidates themselves, instead of basing everything on the associations of supporters and detractors, which is happening here. All these questions and suspicions are reasonable and the discussion should be open.