What can the Brown Act do for you?

Considering that Don Roberts is such a stickler for the following the Brown Act to the letter, I’m shocked that he is not all over this.   Yesterday, the Action Alameda “News” Blog posted this tidbit:

The other night there was a Special City Council meeting with an agenda item to discuss in closed session:

Adjournment to Closed Session to consider:
3-A. PUBLIC EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
Title: City Manager

Yet, somehow the next day after a closed session meeting “rumors” “flooded” the Action Alameda “news desk” about the termination of Debra Kurita, our City Manager.    A closed session meeting that would only have a few folks sitting in on.   A closed session meeting that would involve the City Council (Beverly Johnson, Doug deHaan, Marie Gilmore, Frank Matarrese, and Lena Tam), the City Manager Debra Kurita, the City Attorney Teresa Highsmith, possibly the Assistant City Manager David Brandt, and possibly the City Clerk Lara Weisiger.    At most probably nine people were at the actual closed session, yet somehow the Action Alameda “news desk” was “flooded” with the news of Debra Kurita’s termination.

So either one or multiple people in that meeting violated the Brown Act.

Now who, out of all of those people listed, would be most likely to pass on information to Action Alameda?

Farm Bay Farm

So here are the results of the very informal poll about what to do about Mif Albright.   You all only voted once, right?   And abided by the honor system that we all learned in grade school right?

1. Keep it a Par 3 golf course 37%
2. Open Space 29%
3. All weather Athletic field 14%
4. Dog Park 6%
5. Other: 6%
6. BMX Bike Park 3%
7. Passive Park (trails, picnic and play areas) 3%
8. Land swap with Ron Cowan 3%
9. Turf Athletic field (soccer and football) 0%

Deal or no deal

According to the SF Chronicle, the SF Chronicle is going to need to find a buyer right away or close the paper altogether if there aren’t some serious cuts made.   Perhaps this is all to play hard ball with the local unions, but it’s a rather sobering realization about the state of our regional newspaper.    While, the SF Chronicle (and other non-Alameda based publications) have not done the best job lately (cougheastbayexpresscoughalltvnewsstationscough) of appropriately covering Alameda issues that are either (1) relevant, (2) a large marjority of people care about, or (3) factual… the demise of a local paper like the Chronicle is something to lament.

Journalism has gotten to a place where it has been redefined into what it will be for the next few decades.   Whereas journalism used to be about doing due diligence, talking to all sides, and then presenting the “truth” as best as one trained individual could present that truth.   Now journalism has turned into this bastion of requiring “unbiased” and unfiltered information to be presented out to the masses in order to please as many people as possible, but with the result that no one is really informed.

The butler did it

The Alameda Free Library’s Community Reads event is here again!    The program: Across the Pages, is designed to encourage Alamedans to all read the same book and participate in discussions around that book.   Last year I believe the book was Bee Season and this year the library folks are going with a theme rather than an actual book: Mystery.  

The Library has scheduled film showings, book discussions, and mystery author meets and greets all around this larger theme.   And even more fun, it sounds like there will be a “dinner theatre” type murder myster game for the kiddies.  

Surveying the field

Next year, Mayor Beverly Johnson will be termed out and there will be an open seat for Alameda Mayor, here are my guesses as to who might be running for her seat.   The issues will be the same as they always are: traffic and development.   The only thing that will change (and not by an incredible margin) will be the faces.    A exercise that should bring out more than the typical faces will be predicting who will run for the Council seat that will be vacated by Frank Matarrese, who is termed out.

Because if anyone is deciding to run for Mayor, they’ve already started the political calculations right now.   Splitting the vote, voter turnout, political fallout…these are all things to consider when the decision is ultimately made.  In a perfect world, we would have ranked choice voting in order to have the greatest amount of choice without fear of “wasting” our vote.   But I don’t know if the political will is there to get RCV implemented before 2010.

How do you solve a problem like Mif Albright?

First things first, WordPress just made threaded comments available, so if you haven’t noticed already, you will see a little hyperlinked “reply” under each individual comment, you can hit that reply to respond directly to someone’s comment.   If you want to make a standalone comment you can scroll to the bottom and comment as usual.   But now there shouldn’t been a need to number which comment you are responding to.   The threads only go 10 deep so after all you’ll have to start a new standalone one.  Hope folks find this useful.

On Tuesday, the Council reviewed and took comments on a staff report detailing the different options for the Mif Albright course, which was closed in order to save money (and water.)  Brief background, Mif Albright is the only course at Chuck Corica that uses potable water as opposed to recycled making the cost to run it pretty high. 

Anonymously yours

Last Friday, Mark Morford, a columnist for SFgate, wrote a piece about how anonymous commenters have “destroyed” meaningful dialogue on the Internet.   And that was just in the title!  I found the reasoning that Morford gave to be…less than thoughtful.   It appears that Morford laments the decrease in his email more than anything else.

Much like everything on the Internet, the good outweighs the bad even sometimes when the bad is so bad it makes you want to close up virtual shop for good, the alternative is so much more stifling to meaningful dialogue than any amount of anonymous commenting.

Personally, and no offense to Morford or the folks out there that hate anonymous commenting, but the notion that anonymity has made folks/commenters less thoughtful and more likely to be abusive is simplistic.   I think there are examples of the hit and run anonymous commenters that does nothing to add to the conversation, but on balance I think that anonymous comments and commenters add to the dialogue a great deal.  I think it was someone in the comments section of the Morford piece that opined (I’m not going to go find it so I am paraphasing there) that there is nothing that guarantees that just because someone puts their real name behind their comment that it’s going to be any more intelligent or respectful.

Shoveling the *bleep*

Everyone’s got an opinion on the different lists being generated by cities and counties to submit for stimulus ducats.  From Randy Shandobil to Sandy Rhandobil, everyone has their own idea of what is worthy for funding or should be funded right here and right now.

To that I say, cool.

But, lest we want to be characterized — as in Randy Shandobil’s report — as “sugar buzzed children scrambling for candy when the pinata breaks” throwing all of our own personal pet projects ideas at the stimulus bill to see what sticks, let’s back up a minute.  

First, the projects must be —shudder — “shovel ready” as in ready to begin construction within 90 days of funding.    Second, the projects must fit somewhere within the stimulus bill categories.  You can’t just say, I want a big statute of Chuck Corica to be erected in the middle of the Seaplane Lagoon like the Statue of Liberty and expect it to be funded under the stimulus bill.   It has to fit somewhere.   However, point number two is a whole other ball of wax though with the latest “press release”* to come out of the Save Our City Alameda who basically repackages the Shandobil “report” and again quotes the only person who is ever quoted when dealing with anything Action Alameda or Save Our City Alameda related.    But I’ll get to that a little bit later.

An open letter to Tesla

Dear Mr. Musk: (Elon Musk is the Chairman of the Tesla Board of Directors)

I remember reading a while ago when Tesla Motors abandoned plans to locate its factory to New Mexico, opting rather to look for a site in California.   I remember thinking to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be a great boon to Alameda to be able to have a large employer such as Tesla in Alameda?”    And right before I could write this open letter to Tesla back then, your company up and went and decided that you wanted a nice shiny brand new factory in a greenfield development in San Jose.   But then realized that it made sense for Tesla to want to locate to San Jose, after all, they would have the ability to tap into an already exisiting population of very technically capable folks both blue and white collar.

Coming to fruition

Happy tail end of a long weekend to those who are getting today off. 

Two new blogs to talk about who are doing some “green” good works on our fair isle.   The first was a group who heeded the call of President Obama and started a new program to help “green” Chipman Middle School by creating and improving on the green space at Chipman Middle School.   The group has created a blog to memorialize its efforts as well as disseminate information to the general public who may want to lend a hand.  They have a good number of volunteers ready to jump in and do the work and could always use more hands.    If you want to read up on what they have done, check it out!

And this is right up the alley of a suggestion made, I believe, by Jack B. on an earlier thread (I can’t find it and am too lazy to go search for it) about the ability to do vegetable and fruit exchanges in Alameda.    Based loosely on the Forage Oakland model the Alameda Fruit Exchange was born.   However, it’s still in its nascent stage right now, the details on how it will work will probably need to be figured out, but many thanks to Stefani Leto for starting this project.   I hope it will become a roaring success and I would imagine that more than fruit will be able to be exchanged.   And hopefully maybe a labor and fruit swap could be possible as well, as in, you give me your excess apples, I makes applesauce and we split the bounty.