Apparently forgot to title this one

Remember how I mentioned here that City Councilmember Tony Daysog refused to answer a question about the “state 30 acre requirement”? And then rather than answer the question Tony Daysog responded thusly:

“I asked @tonydaysog to clarify what the ‘state 30 acre requirement’ is and I have not received a response.” . . . The City of Alameda went over this extensively in 2012 (roughly July) when it discussed the Housing Element. I suggest you go on the web-site and look that up. You can also google . . try the following search terms:

Section 65583(c)(1) 30 units per acre

Good luck in your research!

And when I pointed out that he didn’t answer the question, he replied:

Ugh . . .. like I said, this was vetted in 2012. I can’t do your research for you. In Alameda, it’s 30 units per acre. Again, good luck in your research!

So I asked help from City Staff to answer the question that Tony Daysog would not. Specifically:

I received assurances from the City Manager that someone on staff would respond and sure enough, I got this response.

Overlay overestimation

What has been amazing about this post-Z process is to see how the narrative has changed around the multi-family housing overlay and its role in preserving A/26 and allowing Alameda to have a certified Housing Element. The way that folks like City Councilmember Tony Daysog and ACT would have us all believe is that the multifamily housing overlay was something that everyone in Alameda totally agreed to and that the expectation was that a no on Z vote was that A/26 would remain and everything that circumvented A/26 was a-okay as well. That a campaign that warned against traffic jam and developers tearing down historic buildings knows, for sure, that an Alamedan who voted on no understood the nuances around how Alameda can have a certified Housing Element and by violating the charter amendment that they just voted to uphold and are okay with that.

But given that there’s a fair percentage of people who believe that there was widespread voter fraud and that somehow Donald Trump has won the presidential election I’m gonna go with most people probably have no idea what a Housing Element is. Probably don’t understand what RHNA is. Probably wouldn’t be able to tell you what a multifamily housing overlay is. And probably couldn’t tell you why the City of Alameda adopted a Density Bonus Ordinance. And probably don’t even understand how multi-family housing units were built in Alameda when they were asked to vote on a Measure to remove an amendment in the charter which says that multifamily housing units can’t be built in Alameda.

So let me take you back to July of 2012 when the multifamily housing overlay was being discussed and voted on. This comes three years after the State of California rejected Alameda’s Housing Element as being non compliant in 2009.

National Horror Story: speaking of embarrassing

Look I don’t know how anyone can say, without bursting into flames of embarrassment, that they’re a member of the Republican party any longer.

Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn's lawyer now working for Trump, says the election was rigged by "communist money" and a scheme devised by the late Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuala. pic.twitter.com/8XTnRHCzAM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 19, 2020

Why you gotta be so rude

Looks like we don’t have to wait until Trish Spencer is seated on the dais for some drama. Councilmember Tony Daysog has decided that he will fill that role until Trish Spencer returns to the Alameda City Council. On Wednesday morning, while reviewing #alamtg on Twitter this tweet caught my eye:

I can't express how out of line, out of control, and fucking wrong @tonydaysog was here. He owes the speaker and his colleagues an apology. #alamtg https://t.co/fg2OJ7JiTp

— Gaylon Parsons 🦅🇺🇲 (@gaylonparsons) November 18, 2020

It sounds pretty bad but the video was oh so much worse and really doubled down on Alameda’s reputation as insular and hostile to outsiders

Return to innocence

Okay, first off I will say the Alameda Police Department did a bang up job in apprehending the alleged suspect in an armed robbery from two weeks ago. This happened down the block and another half a block away so it was definitely a concern. I had a direct conversation with the people I live with (both large and not so large) about locking our doors and closing windows which they tend to be lax about.

What is less of a bang up job is how APD’s social media arm decided to announce that they had a suspect in custody. Appended to the post below is the mug shot of the suspect in custody. Additionally APD’s social media person decided to use this opportunity to remind us all about what we can do to safeguard our homes.

The space between

So I know that the County is not done counting quite yet but here’s an interesting little tidbit from the vote currently available around the vote for Auditor and Treasurer.

One would think that they would get a fairly close number of votes if not right on the dot. But this year there was a huge gap in the number of votes received by Kevin Kennedy and Kevin Kearney:

About 1301 more votes for Kennedy than Kearney. Add to that 133 more voters wrote in a different candidate for Treasurer than they did for Auditor. In the past the votes for both these seats have been nearly identical. I’m not including the vote for 2016 because it was the first time in a while that these two seats had opposition candidates.

So embarassing

You know who deserves a big ole box of donuts? Mayor Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft who has the thankless job of having to sit through an ABAG meeting right after Measure Z was voted down. During the meeting an Alameda resident read aloud a letter, during the wrong agenda item, which basically just echoed the Tony Daysog/ACT line. Alameda should get less housing allocated because we have natural hazards that are different and special than can be found anywhere else in the Bay Area, nay, the world.

During comments from this committee’s members, Sonja Trauss (a committee member) put that commenter and, frankly, the city of Alameda on blast. Essentially saying that Alameda is showing itself when it claims it can’t do higher density that it is unwilling to think of itself as part of a larger region and plan accordingly. Not only that, but that Alameda has complained about its lack of infrastructure forever and that it’s had plenty of time to actually make changes to be more desirable to businesses to bring more jobs, etc and so forth.

Elections have consequences

Looks like the leaders of ACT are in full “oh shit” mode now that they’ve realized what the failure of Measure Z means from a practical standpoint. As folks have pointed out time and time again is that A/26 remains intact because the City Council over the years has, for all purposes, ignored the existence of A/26 in planning land use policy. Through the density bonus ordinance and the multi-family housing overlay we’ve gotten around scrutiny from the state over the existence of A/26 in our charter because we’ve all just seemed to agree that we’re going to violate that part of the charter without consequence.

However, now that the voters of the city of Alameda have opted to defeat Measure Z which would have removed from the charter all of the provisions of A/26 we’re left in quite a pickle. The only thing that we can surmise from the vote is that voters want to double down on A/26 and citizens of Alameda can no longer expect their City Council to continue to violate the City Charter by ignoring A/26.

With that, Vice Mayor John Knox White has a Council Referral on next Tuesday’s agenda to start the process of aligning our land use policy with the will of the voters:

Parachuting in

It’s so exhausting when people try to parachute into an issue and then kitchen sink it to try to get whatever outcome they’re seeking. Case in point the RHNA allocation, ACT and friends have decided to hone in on “natural hazards” as the reason why Alameda should get a lower allocation that everyone else is the Bay Area because, unfortunately for Alameda, there’s no “we’re an island” map to point to. As I wrote about yesterday, the natural hazards map shows a lot of other cities in hazard areas. The city which would be transferred the bulk of Alameda’s units if the CoCoCo preference was selected based on the druthers of ACT, Tony Daysog, and company would be Oakland who has the same type of natural hazard designation as Alameda.

But what’s even more laughable about this tactic some folks in Alameda are taking is that natural hazards were already addressed in October when the methodology was crafted. Specifically this is what the committee determined would guide the methodology:

1. More housing should go to jurisdictions with more jobs than housing and to communities exhibiting racial and economic exclusion
2. The methodology should focus on:
   • Equity, as represented by High Opportunity Areas
   • Relationship between housing and jobs; however, no consensus on specific factor
3. Equity factors need to be part of total allocation, not just income allocation
4. Do not limit allocations based on past RHNA
5. Housing in high hazard areas is a concern, but RHNA may not be the best tool to address it

So negative

This post is really just to memorialize, for future reference, Councilmember Tony Daysog saying that Alameda should not focus on equity when he asked that the City Council sign on to a letter from deep east Contra Costa Co and Alameda Co. mayors.

In fact he, and the other City Council members, were on an email thread between Paul Foreman of ACT and Andrew Thomas, Planning Director about this very issue. In response to Andrew Thomas asking the million dollar question about Alameda’s values, Tony Daysog decides to double down on the ACT position. Andrew Thomas on equity:

How Does Alameda Feel About Equity? If Alameda wants to support the Tri Valley proposal, Alameda must be comfortable advocating to retain the existing land use trends where the big cities (SF, Oak, and SJ) provide for most of the region’s housing need, and smaller more affluent cities with good schools and parks bear a smaller burden for providing for those families. Does Alameda as a community care more about lowering our allocation by about 1,500 units or does Alameda care more about addressing inequities in the Bay Area? It’s an interesting policy question,
and everyone will have a different opinion based upon their personal perspectives and values.