Happy New Year!

Starting the celebrating early today, our family has a traditional New Year’s Eve pig-out which seems to start earlier and earlier every year on New Year’s Eve.   The basic premise is that each individual family member gets to pick whatever food items (plural is key) that they want to eat and have free reign to pig out on that food all day long.  Sharing is, of course, encouraged and recommended.

We try to stay as local as possible but exceptions are made for Zachary’s Pizza and Bakesale Betty’s Fried Chicken Sandwich.   I’ll be putting in my annual New Year Pig Out order at Katsu as usual, but the deep fried chicken wings are still a toss up between a few places.

I have to say though, this New Year is starting off pretty auspiciously so far and I’m hopeful that it will continue to be a great year for Alameda in general.

Happy New Year everyone!

Onward and upward

Old news, but definitely worthy of its own post, on Tuesday night after what was predicted to be a marathon meeting was indeed a marathon meeting, clocking in at a five hour long closed session, according to the first report out by John Knox White over on In Alameda last night.   In the end the City Council went above and beyond I had guessed that they would.

While I thought there was a pretty good chance that they would be giving notice to Interim City Manager Ann Marie Gallant that her contract would definitely be ending on in March 2011, I didn’t even guess that the next step would be to place her on paid administrative leave.   But in retrospect, it does make sense.   Someone mentioned that it wouldn’t be fair to expect Ann Marie Gallant to work as a “lame duck” so to speak in these next three months.   The City is under contract to pay her anyway for those three months and parting ways now will give Ann Marie Gallant the opportunity to search for a new job without needing to worry about her current job. 

Trading spaces

Michele Ellson tweeted on Christmas day:

Report: ProLogis sells Alameda Landing developer Catellus for $505 million http://bit.ly/flqlv9 #theislandofalameda—
Michele Ellson (@IslandMichele) December 26, 2010

Which probably means that the infinitely delayed Alameda Landing project will be further delayed as the new owners of the Catellus brand and Catellus projects decide what they want to do with the project itself.   ProLogis, the company the bought Catellus a while ago, has sold off that asset to TPG Capital (as in Texas Pacific Group).

According to this article:

TPG points out that “real estate-intensive businesses constitute a core area of investment focus and expertise,” including ST Residential, Harrah’s Entertainment, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International, Neiman Marcus and ParkwayLife REIT.

Closed session call

Tonight, the newly constituted City Council is meeting in a specially called meeting to specifically address three closed session items.   What is nice about this agenda is that it is a lot more explicit about what is going to be discussed in the closed session.

So this is the agenda:

3-A. PUBLIC EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE EVALUATION (Gov. Code Section 54957(b))
Title: City Clerk

3-B. CONFERENCE WITH LEGAL COUNSEL – ANTICIPATED LITIGATION
Significant exposure to litigation pursuant to Gov. Code Section 54956.9 (b)
Number of cases: One

3-C. PUBLIC EMPLOYEE DISCIPLINE/DISMISSAL/RELEASE (Gov. Code Section 54957 (b))

Barstow brouhaha

The saga of City Attorney Teresa (Terri) Highsmith continues folks.   According to reports, she was supposed to start work on Christmas Eve in Barstow, but the reporter at the Barstow Desert Dispatch could not reach her at Alameda City Hall or at the Colantuono & Levin offices for comment.   In an additionally interesting twist, Karen Jonas, the Barstow Desert Dispatch reporter elicited these comments from the Barstow City Council about the drama that has surrounded their Interim City Attorney:

Members of the Barstow City Council said Thursday that they were unaware of the controversy surrounding the new interim city attorney.

Mayor Pro-Tem Julie Hackbarth-McIntyre said that the City Council approved the temporary hiring of Highsmith based on her resume in the closed session meeting on Monday.

Mayor Joe Gomez said that the City Council hired Highsmith on a temporary basis because the city has a contract with the law firm she works for. He said the City Council may decide next month if they will keep the same law firm or if they will look for new representation because of the departure of Abich-Garcia.

Happy Festivus!

and other holidays…

Festivus starts today folks and then a deluge of other fun holidays, so I’m taking the next few days off to enjoy the holidays with the family and wish you all the best during this holiday season.

Air your grievances here.

As for me, I’ll be busy making a ton of yummy food for the holidays.   I’ll be channeling Anthony Bourdain, Giada deLaurentis, Elise from Simply Recipes, and Martha Stewart this year, but I’ll be most looking forward to my family’s relatively new tradition of Christmas morning homemade pho after Santa’s visit.  Pho is one of those dishes that every family has a recipe for and everyone has a different method of preparation.   I have my own recipe, but I’ll take that one to the grave with me.

Happy Holidays!

Notice me

All right folks, last night I received a hot tip from a reader to check out the City of Barstow’s last meeting on Monday night.   Now, I generally enjoy watching meetings, so I said, what the hey and gave it a whirl.   It started off innocously enough until I got to the City Attorney farewell address and then as soon as I stopped saying “Ohmigod,  ohmigod” outloud, I tweeted this:

OMG….OMG…Alameda City Attorney Teresa Highsmith appointed as Interim City Attorney for City of Barstow. #theislandofalameda—
Lauren Do (@laurendo) December 22, 2010

Changing of the guard

Tonight’s City Council meeting marks the first meeting for the new City Council, which looks very similar to the old City Council with the exception of the addition of Rob Bonta and now Marie Gilmore will be running the meetings as opposed to Beverly Johnson.

Interestingly enough, on the agenda before the ceremonial thanking of the outgoing Councilmembers and swearing in of the new Councilmembers is a whole packed agenda for the old City Council to take care of business before the new Council is sworn in.    Nothing too exciting other than the extension of MOUs between the City and a few bargaining units.

Mirror mirror on the wall, what is the fairest of them all

Unsurprisingly the group that was against Measure E: Alamedans for Fair Taxation, have come out against the next Parcel Tax that will come up on the ballot in March of 2011.  I mean, did anyone really think that regardless of the format that Alamedans for Fair Taxation was going to support any Parcel Tax for schools?

And with any campaign that has any connection to “Action Alameda” and its social media reliant head you get, that’s right, Facebook pages (and websites) galore!   The newest campaign slogan plays up on the “unfairness” of the tax and goes with the tagline “32 to 1 Ain’t Fair.”  For those who have not been tracking comments on this topic, this is the argument that has been shopped around by anti-Parcel Tax spokesman Ed Hirshberg that while everyone else is paying $0.32 per square foot any large scale owner with lots of building square footage will be paying $0.01 per square foot because of the cap on business taxes of $7999 that was requested by Boardmember Trish Spencer.  When you drill down to the core of their argument, the only large scale property owner they are really complaining about is Alameda Towne Centre.   And when you further drill down through that complaint, it turns out that they are only referring to one parcel out of the 13 or 14 that Harsch Investments (the owner of Alameda Towne Centre) actually owns.

Therefore “32 to 1 Ain’t Fair.”

And all I can see is red

I have to say that I always get a kick out of what certain local measures will be named, and honestly for the new parcel tax, I am enjoying the fact that it is going to be called Measure A.

Actually I tend to like any Alameda-centric measure that forces some die hard Measure A (no multiple units…) people to have to be against Measure A.   But I imagine that some die hard Measure A people probably get a kick out of people like me who aren’t the biggest fans of Measure A (no multiple units…) to be all “Yes on Measure A” for this upcoming parcel tax election.