Will the real Clay Pollard please stand up?

Like most people I think that the candidates for School Board are a much harder group to understand fully.   Unless someone is an incumbent, there is much less of a record of service for most of the candidates who decide to run for School Board than, for example, the City Council.   Most of the candidates are a big mystery and it’s not until they are on the School Board that you really start understanding what their agenda is, because everyone dresses up their campaign materials in doing it “for the kids.”   It’s all about kids, as it should be.

I think a lot of people end up voting for candidates that don’t necessarily represent their interests because they look good on paper or sound good in one minute sound-bytes at candidate forums, where a good speaker can master the art of not saying anything of substance, but offering up feel good platitudes that people want to hear, not what people need to hear.   One of those candidates is definitely Clay Pollard, running for School Board.

Going soft in my old age

One of my most favorite non-Alameda blogs is V Smoothe’s A Better Oakland.   She has that delicious blend of snarky and factual down to a science and it’s what makes her blog special.   Plus she has this pink and brown theme right now that is adorable.   Anyway, reading her latest posts about the Oakland Mayoral election makes me realized how soft I’ve gotten.    That’s right, soft.

Maybe it’s because there has been so much negativity from external sources — and I don’t mean external as in outside Alameda, but external as in outside of the candidates’ campaigns themselves — that I just didn’t want to add to it.    Or maybe it’s because I was sort of tired of the whole “Who’s paying Lauren now” game that arises every election year.   So yes, I’ve pulled punches that I would normally have let flying, because being accused of being on SunCal’s payroll, being a shill for Candidate X, Y, or Z, or “personally attacking” people when I critique their own actions or issues just gets really old after a while.   So yes, soft, I’ve been smushy this campaign season.

Make it Rain, the prequel

After I looked at the list yesterday, I did notice that it seemed like there were some contributions missing.   And the only reason I remembered was that in the back of my head I recalled that Bill Schaff had made some early contributions to some candidates and I didn’t recall typing his name down for yesterday’s list.

But first, Tracy Jensen had a few additions to her expenditure list, which was uploaded yesterday.

Tracy Jensen

• Non itemized contributions (less than $100): $359
• Contributions less than $250
  1. Chris Jensen
  2. Nate Miley for Supe

Then there were a whole lot of contributions made to Frank Matarrese and Rob Bonta before the first “official” expenditure reports for the November election were due, so they were reported in the summer.   Marie Gilmore and Lena Tam were others than had more modest contributions during this period.

And in other campaign finance news, John Knox White over on In Alameda has posted a table that details the percentage of contributions that were over the $250 limit.   Much in the same vein that I changed my itemization breakdown from $300 to $250, JKW tracked the percentage that exceeded that limit as that was the arbitrarily selected amount that was going to go toward campaign finance reform.

Make it Rain

I didn’t do this for the last campaign disclosure set, but since we have a new set, I thought I would play catch up this time.   Normally I do a round up of campaign expenditures so that you can get a quick and dirty look at who has raised what and how much is being spent.   I used to itemize contributions less than $300, but have lowered it to $250 because that is what is being considered for the the “campaign finance reform” as a cap per individual and PAC to contribute to each candidate.

Some notable contributions, given the baseball fever is a $500 contribution to Rob Bonta from Theo Eptsein, General Manager of the Boston Red Sox.   Owner of Perforce Software, Christopher Seiwald, spread $17,500 amongst three candidates Marie Gilmore, Marilyn Ezzy-Ashcraft, and Rob Bonta.   Everyone who cashed an Argent Management check made a big point on their disclosures to point out that they had returned the money.

So this post is very very long, most will just skim it, the takeaway is that there has been a lot of money raised for this election.   I’ve been hearing how the one industry that has not been affected by the economic downturn is the business of campaigning and using Alameda as a tiny gauge, clearly that is the case.

Terminal development

Tonight, if anyone is up for a field trip, the Planning Board is going to be taking a tour of the Del Monte Building in preparation to hear what is next for the property owned by Peter Wang.  Longtime readers will recall that Peter Wang has had, over the years, many different iterations of plans for this land.   Hotel, shopping center, lofts, asian market, homes, etc.. and so forth.   Nothing really took off and — according to reports — the downturn in the economy has scuttled plans for development.

But now, it’s back and it appears that Mr. Wang is hoping that this one will be the one.   And perhaps he is right, even though Mr. Wang used renowned architecture firm Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill (SOM) to design one version of his development plan (SOM has designed fairly extensive and architecturally interesting projects) those have never taken off.   But now, he is using City of Alameda approved contract vendor: Urban Design Associates out of Pittsburgh, that’s Pennsylvania, to design the latest version of that part of the Waterfront.

Yoshii’s Island

On a lighter note to start the weekend, on Tuesday night, while others were focusing on public speakers attempting to connect certain candidates to SunCal/DE Shaw and to a Chinese banking company, which I am still unsure why that information is significant.     Unfortunately the commenter that posted that information has yet to connect all the dots for us and tell us why we should be fearful of this Mingsheng Banking and how that differs from the City’s attempts to create a Foreign Trade Zone in Alameda (Alameda Point or elsewhere) to allow Chinese companies to skirt customs and tax laws, but I digress.

Anyway, one of the public speakers was Reverend Michael Yoshii, who I’m sure that most people are familiar with.  He is the pastor at Buena Vista United Methodist Church and is involved with a lot of great groups around the City.   He has also well know for his work on human rights issues both locally and nationally.    Essentially, he is one of the good guys.   So he came to speak to the Council about the whole issue of, what we shall now term Colantuno-gate, after the hired gun lawyer City Attorney Teresa Highsmith and Interim City Manager Ann Marie Gallant contracted with.

Here’s what he had to say Tuesday night:

Going for par

Tuesday night was supposed to be the night for watchers of the Mif Albright saga.  The Mif finally found a champion on the City Council in the form of Vice Mayor Doug deHaan willing to move forward with some decisive action in the form of a Council Referral which stated, without hesitation, that the Interim City Manager would have to finalize negotiations with the Alameda Junior Golf Association and that $100,000 from the Golf Enterprise Fund would be earmarked to provide a match to the $250,000 Wadsworth Foundation grant.

But then Vice Mayor deHaan decided to continue the item after allowing the numerous speakers to weigh in on the matter.   Apparently, Tuesday night, both Councilmembers Lena Tam and Marie Gilmore were both out ill (bronchitis for one and I imagine something equally icky for the other) and so Doug deHaan didn’t want to move forward with taking a vote on the issue even though there was a quorum of the Council available with three of the five Councilpeople present.   Even though individual speakers urged the Council to move forward and not delay the issue even further, it appears that the AJG will have to wait until the next City Council meeting in two weeks before they get a final determination on this.

ALS, EMS, BLS, fun with alphabet stew!

Agendized for last night’s City Council meeting — which I haven’t watched yet — but since it was filed under “City Manager Communications” means that the most the City Council could have done was to provide direction to staff on this issue were information items about the Advanced Life Support (ALS) transport issue.   Apparently there is another informational item that could help inform the decision for the City Council, but has not been included in any packet.   The legal counsel for Alameda County submitted a letter to our City Attorney, Teresa Highsmith, providing a legal opinion that directly contradicts the opinion provided by our own legal expert.

When this issue first came up as a result of a letter sent from Alameda County to our City Management saying that if a contract was not signed by the beginning of next year that the City of Alameda would lose its designation as the exclusive EMS provider for the City of Alameda.   Our City Attorney opined that even if the City of Alameda didn’t work out a contract by the deadline, the County was mandated to provide the ALS service and that they couldn’t try to collect payment from the City, which the County Counsel disagrees with:

I saw the sign

Yesterday on In Alameda, I posted an item about parodied campaign signs.  Before I get too far into this, credit is due to Dan Wood at A Progressive Alamedan who posted about the signs posted in the Kung Fu studio’s  window, then found the Flickr feed with all the signs.

Dan W. also posted a photo of the house that commenter nemo posted about which has all four candidate signs for Mayor proudly displayed.   The house at the corner of Central and 8th has a less obvious display of indecision, displaying both Doug deHaan and Tony Daysog’s signs in their front yard.

So anyway, this awesome Alamedan took the campaign signs of almost all the City Council candidates and all the Mayoral candidates and transformed them into Halloween appropriate candidates vying for the role of “Slayor”, “Undercity Council” or “Dark Lord.”   The detail that went into signs is amazing, if you look at Marie Gilmore..um…I mean Marie Ghoulmore the designer swapped out the silhouettes of at the bottom of her sign and inserted more appropriately themed clipart.  Although, I would have swapped out the star in Doug deHaan…I mean… Doug beHead with a pentagram to make it spookier.

Fore real

After much waiting and stalling, someone has finally gotten off the fence to actually do something about the Mif Albright situation.   To nutshell, yet again, City staff declares the that Mif Albright Par-3 course is a money sink.   Mif is shut down, Mif is reopened, Alameda Junior Golf Association develops a way to operate the Mif as a non profit entity, everyone thinks that is a great idea, and then, nothing from the City.

AJG finds a donor to give $250K toward upgrades to the course, and only asks for a $100K matching grant from the City and then stalling from the City.  And then more stalling.

The item was supposed to come back to the Council, placed there by staff in “early Fall” even though this has been on everyone’s plates since March of this year.   Well, we are well into Fall now, and it took a Council Referral item to bring this back to the Council’s agenda.   Thanks to Vice Mayor Doug deHaan — big props to him for doing this — there is clear direction for City staff to move forward.   In fact, given the detail in this Council Referral, the City Council could take a vote on Tuesday night because there is enough detail there to inform the public what the topic of the discussion is.   Here’s the referral: