Why in Hell Would the Emeryville City Council
Brag About Christie Park With its
Shameful 2636 Residents Per Acre?
How About a Plaque Reading "On This Site, the City of Emeryville Sold Out the Residents"
What’s the adage about mushrooms sprouting after a rainfall? It’s been raining a lot in Emeryville recently and we’ve noticed mushrooms are popping up everywhere. But so too are commemorative bronze plaques extolling the would be great works of our City Council members. Unlike the mushroom/rain nexus, Emeryville’s bronze plaques don’t come as a result of rain, rather they pop up upon completion of any construction project that could be conceived as having public benefit. After the rains quit, the mushrooms disappear. But embarrassingly, the bronze plaques in our town remain, their numbers only increasing over time.
We’ve never seen a town so big on congratulating itself. Maybe it’s because they screw up so often, they're trying to show us when they don’t. Maybe the plaques are meant to serve as a tail wagging the dog counter narrative. It’s like our City Council is repeatedly engaging in one big conspicuous, Trumpian, in-your-face selfie after another. It’s all because they want us to know they’re doing the job we pay them to do.
Or not.
Sometimes a plaque will present a project associated with and in tribute of the Council members, but it’s all out of proportion to what’s actually been built. Sometimes it directly contradicts what's been built.
Take the recently rebuilt Christie Park upgrade and expansion far example. The plaque installed on the site brags that the council members are responsible for the newly expanded park. But what it is not telling us is that the park they provided is substandard and in gross violation of the City’s own General Plan.
Marketplace development project will bring 1,213 new residents (using the standard Emeryville formula of 1.8 residents per housing unit times the planned total 674 units the project brings).
The park acreage per resident ratio for housing projects is not to exceed three acres per 1000 new residents according to our General Plan. Therefore Christie Park should have been expanded by a minimum of 3.6 acres to properly offset the new residents the Market Place project brings. An additional amount of approximately one acre would be needed to offset all the new workers in the retail and office spaces generated by the project according to the General Plan. Combining the two, the total amount of park acres to offset this project needs to be approximately four and a half acres instead of .46 acre.
So the total amount of park land the people of Emeryville were screwed out of when the Council approved the Market Place development was about four acres. Hiding that colossal screw up, they audaciously installed a vanity plaque of disinformation at the park telling us how great they are. Christie Park: Far more pan-worthy than praiseworthy….but it gets a bronze plaque regardless.
These plaques our Council keep putting up will someday be seen like index fossils in the world of paleontology: representative of a very specific time and place. In this case, of and suited to this time of Trump's America when people felt justified to wallow in narcissism and when government felt less constrained by public service and more animated by tooting its own horn. And in the case of the Christie Park plaque, lying by omission.
What we need is some righteous truth presented in the commons to serve as a counter narrative to what the City Council is serving up and with equal audacity. Graffiti artists, if you're listening....
"All glory is fleeting," said George S. Patton Plaques are but vain attempts at acknowledgement and immortality. The truth is, the named individuals on these plaques will soon be forgotten, and become meaningless reminders of the futile superficiality of human endeavor. We shall all disappear, soon enough, behind the diaphanous veil of eternity, and the City of Emeryville itself, will soon be at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay desintegrating in the depths of rising sea levels. Plaques point only to the silliness and self-aggrandizement of its bearers. A desparate act by desparate individuals.
ReplyDeleteI've always said that Tattler readers are generally a very erudite and literate bunch. Thanks for confirming it, Eugene.
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