Boy, you’ve got to carryover that weight

So a hijacking of the APD and Occupy Oakland comments thread turned into discussion about a recent vote by the School Board to allocate a certain amount of excess funds to textbooks and other assorted student related “stuff” for lack of a better term.

On Friday while dropping #1 Daughter to school at Ruby Bridges, I noticed there was an abnormally large number of adults milling around the drop off area. I overheard one of these adults talking about the “Superintendent’s raise” and notice a sticker which read something to the effect of “Ask me about the $$.” And then was stopped by a teacher who mentioned that the teachers and the teachers union was not happy with the School Board’s vote on the excess money.

Fuss Budget 2012-2013, continued

Tuesday night’s budget meeting was really good and just is a continuation of the great work that Assistant City Manager Lisa Goldman and Controller Fred Marsh are doing on budget type issues. It’s definitely worth a viewing if you have a few hours to spare.

I wanted to circle back to the slide that I mentioned a few days ago which showed that the Alameda Fire ratio of sworn firefighters to 1000 people was out of whack with the comparison cities. Turns out, the City staff acknowledged that night that the comparison wasn’t necessarily an apples to apples comparison since the cities that they selected did not provide paramedic services. Added to the slide, but not available the other night, was the ratio of Berkeley, which provides paramedic services as part of their Fire Department:

APD and Occupy Oakland

I had read somewhere that in order to maintain “order” at Occupy Oakland on Tuesday, the Oakland Police Department relied on mutual aid from lots of neighboring Police Departments and Alameda County Sheriffs Department and I wondered to what extent Alameda Police officers were involved.   So I reached out to Police Chief Mike Noonan who has been so responsive and forthcoming — actually both public safety Chiefs are really models of public responsiveness — but since he is out of town, but still answering emails, he directed me toward Captain Paul Rolleri who coordinated Alameda’s team.

I’ll just post the response he sent me verbatim:

Tie a public notice around the old Alameda trees

Last week the clear cutting of the trees on Park Street took almost everyone by surprise. I had mentioned that work was to be done on Park Street earlier this month and lamented the really crappy timing but I have to say that I was shocked when I saw this video posted by the owner of Monkey Bars last Thursday. I’ve been going back and forth about posting about it because — well because Patch had done a number of articles about it already and I didn’t necessarily want to pile on top of the already outraged pile of people.

But then yesterday commenter “Not. A. Alamedan” posted a photo of a stump on Park Street that really made me seriously cranky:

Fuss Budget

Tonight the City will have its first budget study session to examine the budget for 2012-2013, of course you may be all asking, “but hey, didn’t we just finish the 2011-2012 budget?   Absolutely, but give the five year forecast if no changes are made to the City’s Budget, the City will run out of reserves to spend down by 2015 -16 and I don’t think anyone — short of a few serious Alameda haters out there — wants to see that happen.

So here is the Powerpoint in preparation for tonight’s meeting, can I just say I seriously hate the way that the City’s website handles PDFs right now?  I hope that will change whenever they get around to fixing the website.

Stronger than yesterday

I’ve been thinking a fair amount about the criticism leveled at City Manager John Russo in the comments section under this topic.  The portion of the comment that I’ve been rolling over in my head:

Perhaps I’m in error, but the last I heard Alameda is a strong manager city, not a strong mayor, (or council) city. Which means it’s your job to influence and lead the city council, not follow them: “If the Council wishes to go forward with the land exchange, I will implement their vote. If they do not wish to go forward, that’s ok with me too,” makes it sound like you are following the lead of the mayor and council.

Which again continues to perpetuate the myth of the “strong city manager” government that Alameda supposedly is.  The notion sort of mushes the whole idea of a strong mayor vs weak mayor government and the council-manager vs the mayor-council government and turns it into some great big muddy soup where people who are upset with government can turn around and declare the government one thing and say that the current structure somehow is not living up to their expectations.

Falling to pieces

I want to start this post out my pointing out that I have never seen any benefit to the Ron Cowan land swap and have been pretty down on the whole concept pretty much from the start.   Yes, even before all these people started cropping out of the woodwork to be so vehemently against the project.   But I have to say that the kitchen sink approach that is now being used to be against the land swap is almost as frustrating as the presumptuousness of Ron Cowan and Co.   Almost.

There are a lot of good arguments against the land swap, but the conspiracy theories, the allegations of collusion and the whole finger survey thing is just getting a bit ridiculous.

Call the ambulance, come and pick up your people

At Tuesday night’s City Council meeting there was back patting aplenty going on from updates about the Facade Improvement program (one of my favorite City program’s by the way and yes, I know it’s a little dorky to have a favorite City Program, but I’ll own it), to the first reading of the Sunshine Ordinance, and finally to the execution of a contract with the County to execute an agreement with the County for the Alameda Fire Department to provide Advanced Life Support transport services for the City of Alameda.

For more background on this, I have an older post on the issue, highlights from that post:

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:

Those fingertips

There is this email that has been floating around about an informal poll being taken on Bay Farm in response to the Ron Cowan development land swap thingamajig.   At this point the whole proposal has taken on this epic weirdness that someone needs to come up with a good acronym for all the moving parts.   Adding to the cluster is this informal traffic survey that is being done by a “coalition of your neighborhood home owner associations.”

So this whole week during the morning commute HOA staff will be taking a “finger survey” to figure out where people are going in the morning.   If you are confused about what a finger survey is, here are excerpts from the email describing the reasoning behind using this methodology:

I’ve been waiting so long

Tonight, the City Council will be having a first reading of the new Sunshine Ordinance that the Sunshine Task Force worked so hard on last year.

Some notable items in the Sunshine Ordinance is that no new business can be heard after 10:30 p.m.  – thank goodness — the Sunshine Task Force originally had this at 11 p.m., but I think 10:30 p.m. is much better because honestly the kookiest discussion always happen late at night.  While entertaining, it’s certainly doesn’t add anything to the discussion.

Also notable is that approval of the Sunshine Ordinance will create a new commission the “Alameda Open Government Commission” made up of five full time residents aka you have to live here to be on the commission.     The members will be selected by each City Council person and the Mayor, so essentially each member on the City Council gets one pick and if you are selected your term is based on the term of the City Council person who selected you.    This body will essentially ensure that the City is in compliance with the Sunshine Ordinance, and will hear citizen filled complaints which allege a violation of the Sunshine Ordinance by either the City Council or City of Alameda staff.