Getting out of Dodge

On Friday, the Oakland Tribune posted the first real leak in who has been shortlisted in the Alameda City Manager search.    Oakland’s elected City Attorney John Russo is one of three candidates that the City Council, in a closed session meeting, voted unanimously to move to the next phase of the search process: background checks and vetting through the advisory panels.

For those following Oakland politics, there have been lots of article and blogs written about how unhappy John Russo has been lately — rumors have speculated about a possible Assembly run (which he quashed via Twitter), he had listed himself as a mediator for ADR, and essentially has told anyone who will listen that he has considered quitting as Oakland’s City Attorney.

John Russo has, of course, clashed publicly with newly elected Oakland Mayor Jean Quan over her appointment of her friend, Dan Siegel, as an unpaid legal advisor to her administration.   Dan Siegel’s law firm is representing the defendants in a gang injunction that John Russo has spearheaded to purportedly help stop gang violence in the Fruitvale district.

What’s new pussycat?

Based on all the community meetings and the survey on line, City Staff has  analyzed all the responses which will be presented in a enormous report the first week of April.   However they did provide a digest of major findings in this update which will be presented for comment to the Planning Board on Monday.

Staff broke down the major categories and then what most people were in agreement with one another and what they disagreed on.   So here is my digest of their digest.

They want you for your brains

The best part of the No on Measure A campaign have been the unintentionally hilarious campaign tactics that have been used.   From the “32 to 1 ain’t fair” tagline which uses grammatically incorrect conjunctions to further their cause AGAINST funding education for kids (but it’s folksy!) to a few more recent posts on the No on Measure A Facebook account.

Here are two that I particularly enjoyed, the first:

I mean, seriously, likening the No on A lawn sign to a flag remaining amidst cannon fire as though the anti-parcel tax folks are patriotic revolutionaries, you cannot make this stuff up.

Somebody’s watching me and I have no privacy

I thought this portion of John Knox White’s City Hall Confidential column deserved recognition on its own in light of the ominous suggestions in some camps after both Ann Marie Gallant and Teresa Highsmith were placed on paid administrative leave that this would cause other staff to start abandoning ship for fear that they would be the next targets of a firing rampage.   While we all know now that Interim City Manager Ann Marie Gallant was monitoring the emails of Councilmember Lena Tam for an undetermined amount of time, it appears that Big Brother was not just looking over one shoulder, but many.  From CHC:

About a year ago, the city purchased a new phone system which allowed for better accounting of who staff was talking with. One former department head recently related that she had received calls on several occasions from the interim city manager’s office asking about specific calls that she had received, including calls from council members and community members, myself included.

Promises, promises

The plot, as always, thickens when it comes to the Chuck Corica Golf Course.   The last time we left off, Kemper Sports, the current lease operator, has presented two scenarios that they were willing to entertain and only one included KemperSports investing any capital for improvements to the site, reducing the number of holes from 36 to 27.

The assumption that I believe everyone had after that meeting was the Kemper Sports was going to spend the capital upfront themselves to pay for the improvements on the site.  In fact, based on the public discussion that night with Kemper, I don’t think anyone would dispute that it certainly sounded as though when they spoke about the $5 million in improvements that this would be privately funded, here are a few compiled clips from the January 25 special meeting:

Happy President’s Day

Taking the day off, back to regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow.

Prove yourself

So one thing I failed to touch on in yesterday’s fact check of the East Bay Express article on Alameda is that the main thesis of the piece is flawed.

It sort of came up during the fact check around Dennis Evanvosky’s claim about the spirit of the Alameda charter and the supposition that Alameda has a “strong city manager” form of government, but let’s examine this further in light of the main thrust of the article, which was summed up in the subheader:

Some island residents worry that a new three–member council majority intends to undermine the city’s strong–city–manager form of government.

First of all, as I stated yesterday, this notion of a “strong-city-manager” form of government seems to have taken off during the Ann Marie Gallant regime as Interim City Manager.   Alameda has had the same form of government since the City Charter was written but at least during the Debra Kurita regime, you never heard anyone suggest that we had a “strong-city-manager” system in place.   As I wrote the other day:

Express yourself

Oh lord.  Where to start.   For those that don’t read the East Bay Express, count yourself among the lucky ones.   For those that do, I’m sure that the most recent Alameda narrative that the EBX has decided to run with is no surprise.   Riddled with factual errors and conclusions based on fairly little information, it is what we have all come to expect from a paper that relishes jumping to conclusions about a city they  know so little about.

Let me just dive right in and perform some fact checking and point out that the “article” crossed the line from reporting to commentary right off the bat.

A series of investigations, recriminations, and apparent reprisals have left Alameda government in disarray… The situation has undermined the faith Alameda voters place in their elected officials.

First of all, while a lot of Alamedans are tapped in politically and get politically involved.  Most Alamedans don’t care what’s is going on in City Hall.  You stop 10 people on Park Street and ask who “Ann Marie Gallant” is or ask then to name all five members on the City Council and few could probably answer the question, unless standing in front of the Civic Center Garage where the plaque hangs listing four of the five current members.    So the notion that the “faith” of Alameda voters in their elected officials has been undermined is a really huge leap based on sourced information that is not made clear in the reporting.

Connect the dots, la la la

So about those Erwin & Muir  invoices, despite the fact that  many people who bothered to open the PDF have pointed out that it doesn’t prove what CAMA says that it proves, it seems to fall on deaf ears of the folks who believe — without a doubt — that AUSD is plotting some nefarious actions and using political consultants to do their dirty work.

Of course, it might have been the the structure of the PDF was just too confusing, there were a lot of open POs and the invoices were largely out of order.  So I went through and extracted all the invoices and separated them out in easy to digest smaller PDFs by date.

So here is a list of the invoices:

• November 2008 mailer ($7546.59)
• December 2008 ($1875)
• May 2009 ($5100)
• May 2009 mailer ($5254.78)
• June 2009 ($8450)
• July 2009 ($5475)
• August 2009 ($4237.50)
• December 2009 ($4650)
• May 2010 mailer ($3054.88 & $10757.37)
• June 2010 ($8664.48)

CAMA chameleon

So after a number of Measure A proponents challenging the Committee Against Measure A’s secretary, Leland Traiman’s assertions that:

The draconian plan of school closures the Alameda Unified School District says it will have to implement if Measure A fails is a fraud. This plan, known as Plan B, was not written by educators or even the AUSD’s accountants but crafted by political consultants whose only interest was to give the district a political tool to scare people into voting for Measure A.

…The AUSD hired these political consultants [Erwin & Muir] to create Plan B. The invoice copies were obtained from the AUSD using the California Public Records Act. Political consultants Erwin & Muir have been on the AUSD payroll since June of 2009. The AUSD paid these political consultants $300 per hour costing the district over $100,000 in total. This makes Plan B a very expensive political fabrication.

The “proof” has finally been proffered, so to speak.   But first some clarifications in Leland Traiman’s OpEd.   First, “Plan B” or rather Scenario B located in the Master Plan is not just a plan of school closures to help close the budget gap that will be left if a parcel tax is not passed.  School closure is just one of many options, the list starts on page 42.

What is clear from these OpEds and from the proof is that sometimes opponents have issues of separating what are actions taken by the school district and what is done by folks outside of the school district.