Kurt Brinkman Uses Oakland Tribune to Misinform Emeryville Residents

Former Mayor Spreads Misinformation

on Minimum Wage Debate

Obfuscation and Outright Falsehoods 

Former Emeryville mayor and multi-year Chamber of Commerce Board member Kurt Brinkman is using his position as a community leader to misinform the community in an opinion piece in the Oakland Tribune revealed in that newspaper's 'My Word' section this week.  Mr Brinkman, known to misinform and deceive the public while serving his five year term on the City Council in order to help the business community, told Tribune readers Wednesday the City Council is forgoing transparency and businesses are being left out of deliberations regarding a proposal to raise the minimum wage in Emeryville, a false statement.  Additionally, he says the Council's lack of intimate knowledge about small business is corrupting their judgement, rhetorically asking, "who on the Emeryville City Council has ever hired an employee, run a business or made payroll?", a dismissal of one Council member's 25 year proprietorship.

Mr Brinkman says he is concerned about Emeryville's small business and he tells the Tribune readers Emeryville's small businesses will not be given a phase-in period with the proposed wage increase, another patently false statement.  He also disregards the two City Hall public meetings held on this topic so far stating that the Council is turning a "deaf ear" on small business by conducting only one meeting.

Kurt Brinkman
Oakland small business 
owner has met a payroll 
for 18 years.

Also in the Tribune opinion piece, former Mayor Brinkman goes on to say Emeryville and other cities should not institute minimum wage laws on their own but instead defer to the State of California and its minimum wage, now pegged at $9 per hour.  He ventures Emeryville businesses will be "put out of business" or driven out of town, precisely the same charge he made as a Chamber of Commerce Board member in 2005 against the last minimum wage increase for Emeryville's hotel workers.  Mr Brinkman was part of a concerted $140,000 effort by the Chamber of Commerce to stop the wage increase for the hotel workers enacted as a result of the passage of the Emeryville ballot initiative Measure C.  At the time, Mr Brinkman and the Chamber assured residents the four  Emeryville hotels would go bankrupt or flee to Oakland or Berkeley as a result of the wage increase.  In the intervening years, Emeryville has approved the building of hotel number five, all paying their workers the higher wages, hardly the destruction of the hospitality industry Mr Brinkman predicted.   For his remarkable lack of prescience in the Measure C fight, Kurt Brinkman has steadfastly refused to comment.

The Tattler has long chronicled Mr Brinkman's ethical transgressions to further big business interests at the expense of Emeryville's small business on the dais at the Emeryville City Council.   In 2011, Councilman Brinkman joined colleague Nora Davis in an action to stop a citizen led initiative drive to remove Emeryville's infamous business tax cap, a law that makes small business pay a higher rate of taxes than big business in town.  The tax cap, still in place, forces Emeryville's small businesses to subsidize big businesses.

Councilman Scott Donahue
Emeryville small business
owner has met a payroll
for 25 years.

Last year, after voting to move Measures U&V (a pair of 'charter city' and real estate transfer tax initiatives) forward from the dais, Councilman Brinkman joined a failed $100,000 effort by the California Association of Realtors (CAR) to stop the Measures, stating Emeryville will effectively be destroyed if voters pass the Measures.  Mr Brinkman lent a hand to the Sacramento lobbying entity CAR by robo calling every Emeryville voter, a spiel that contained many factual errors and misleading tropes.

Current Councilman Scott Donahue took the opportunity to set the record straight regarding Mr Brinkman's erroneous comment about the Council's lack of business experience, "To answer Kurt's question, I've had a small business in Emeryville since 1990, employing over 20 people intermittently.  I've met my payroll obligations for my employees during all that time and I'm fully aware of the employee costs to small businesses" the Councilman said.

The public will get another chance (number three) to weigh in on this minimum wage proposal on April 7th at the regularly scheduled City Council meeting.