City Staff Holds General Plan in Contempt

Contemptuous Staff and Weak City Council Means the People's Will is Ignored

Family Friendly Homes Keep Getting Torn Down Because That's What the Staff Wants

con·tempt

kənˈtem(p)t

noun

The feeling that (a person or) a thing is beneath consideration or worthless.

News Analysis

For the upcoming City Council September 5th meeting, Emeryville’s city staff, in seeking to grant a developer permission to tear down two houses on Doyle Street, has prepared a report for the Council that deprives them critical information that the two single family houses are in a General Plan protected ‘zone of stability’ and shouldn’t be torn down.  This comes after the staff also hid that fact from the Planning Commission in July.  
It’s not a mistake; the failure to inform the Council (and the Planning Commission) about such houses has been an ongoing issue for the staff ever since the General Plan was implemented in 2009.  It’s part of a pattern and practice that’s been firmly established by a recalcitrant Emeryville city staff that’s contemptuous of our General Plan.

Contemptuous is not too strong a word. Seven times in the last two years, homes in the zone of stability have been proposed by developers for demolition.  In seven out of seven cases, the staff has recommended the Council approve demolition.  That fact tells us the staff, specifically the Planning Department, doesn’t like the zone of stability provisions within the General Plan. Rather, they prefer to tear down homes in our town, zone or no zone.  But more tellingly and more contemptuously, for seven out of seven of those cases, the staff has seen fit to deny the City Council and Planning Commission the fact that the houses in question are in the zone of stability; the very information the decision makers need to make an informed decision.  In fact not once in eight years has the city staff informed the decision makers the information they need to know that a home in question is in the zone of stability.  It betrays their not-so-hidden contempt for democratic processes and contempt for our General Plan.

City Manager Carolyn Lehr
During her tenure at least four houses
in the zone of stability have been demolished
or approved for demolition in accordance
with her recommendations.
As an overseer of the Planning Director, she 
has made sure the City Council has
been unaware the homes were in the 
zone of stability as they 
approved destruction.

The ineradicable protections of the zone of stability language notwithstanding, the staff is free to recommend the Council approve a tear down for any home a developer wants to demolish, even those in the zone.  It’s their job to recommend whatever they feel is best, given their encircling directives.  However they are not free to withhold information, especially as derived from our General Plan, that could effect the elected official’s decisions.  Clearly, of all of the houses demolished since 2009, the fact that they were in the zone of stability if made known to the Council, would have affected their decisions about tearing them down.  There is a chance some might have been saved.

The Tattler has alerted the Council and the staff of this governmental breakdown for years but the staff persists in keeping the Council members in the dark regarding homes in the zone of stability.  There’s no conceivable rational argument to be made there’s anything going on here other than a rouge agency pressing its desires by means of deception... and that constitutes contempt.

It should be pointed out that the General Plan represents the will of the people of Emeryville.  The stuff in there is what we want.  We know that by virtue of the fact it’s in the democratically vetted Plan.  We know the staff doesn’t like the General Plan.  It probably feels constraining to them. We know the City Council up to now has not done the people’s bidding with regard to the zone of stability, otherwise at least some of these homes would have been saved over the years.  
We also know that the type of housing protected from demolition by the General Plan, detached single family homes, represent the most family friendly housing there is.  That’s been well documented.  The people of Emeryville had an innate sense of this when they crafted the General Plan.  The elite in Emeryville don’t care about any of that as judged by their record on this.  
Regardless they’re being kept in the dark by the staff, we shouldn’t be facile about this; the Council has been busy tearing down this family friendly housing stock, built before the term ‘family friendly’ was invented, and over the last two or three years, the Council has been trying to build new “family friendly housing” by use of developers.  The result has been disappointing by any metric.  Emeryville continues to be the worst city in the East Bay as far as families go.

The politics in Emeryville is locked.  The pro-developer former City Council majority hired the staff we have and the new ‘progressive’ Council majority so far hasn’t found the strength to impose its own vision for development in our town.  Perhaps it puts too much stock in the juris prudence artifice of stare decisis.  Appearently the people, as they say, will have to wait.

Earns Two Smiling Nora Davis'!
Nora Davis smiles down on her 
hand picked city staff.