New Private School Ok'ed, Dissenters Attacked

Drink this and you'll want to quash dissent

Woe Be To The Dissenters

Is The Water OK In Emeryville?

Opinion

Is there something in the water here?

We have to ask:  What is it about Emeryville that makes the power elite so keen to automatically attack dissenters?  Take last month's resident appeal of the Esquela Bilingue Internacional school:  Three resident citizens were attacked after they took issue with the neighborhood damaging aspects of the private school to be located on San Pablo Avenue.

These courageous neighbors spent $200 of their own money to try to force this private school operator to work with the neighbors and limit some of the worst impacts the school will bring to the Triangle neighborhood.  This audaciousness was enough to make School Board Member Pat Hooper and Planning Commission member Frank Flores launch into a personal attack against the appellants: they discredited the appeal and called these Triangle neighbors "NIMBYists".  The spokeswoman for the Oakland based school it should be noted, piled on and derisively called the three Triangle neighbors "appellant landlords"; a clear attempt to discredit and try to re-cast the three residents as some kind of exotic money grubbing interlopers.

NIMBYism

The three neighbors, by their appeal, forced the traffic for student drop off and pick up, some 400 students in all, away from the residential 45th street and over to 47th Street.  The project before the appeal would have resulted in a massive amount of cut-through driving on 45th Street from San Pablo to Adeline Street. Now the cars will turn onto 47th Street, and turn around in the school parking lot and re-emerge onto 47th and back to San Pablo, leaving the residential neighborhood unimpeded.

Further, the appellants got the school to agree to 'Transit Demand Management' practices, including carpooling and van pooling, thereby lowering the total vehicle loads to our streets.

Also, the three neighbor appellants forced concessions on the school to make the new pedestrian path jogging around the back of the school to be gated to keep out nefarious types late at night, owing to the lack of visibility for the police.

These concessions would only have been made as a result of the appeal since the Planning Commission was not interested in lowering the impact on the Triangle neighborhood.  Together, the concessions make the Esquela Bilingue Internacional school a less impactful presence on the Triangle neighborhood and a better project for the whole town.

These three neighbors who bravely faced the anti-dissenter gauntlet at City Hall should be thanked for their work improving the livability of our town.  Instead, these three Emeryville residents had their integrity challenged by our government in the accusations leveled by Ms Hooper and Mr Flores.

We use the word courageous to describe the three neighbors because of Emeryville's infamous lack of tolerance for dissenters at City Hall.  The three neighbors likely knew they would be attacked by the government officials and undaunted they brought their appeal anyway.  We continue to be exasperated by this culture at City Hall and we thank these three neighbors for working to improve the livability for our town.

Audacity

The drama of the San Pablo Avenue private school appeal had audacity all right.  But it came not from the appeal generated by three Emeryville neighbors, it came instead from the thuggish reactions of government officials Pat Hooper and Frank Flores.