Mayor Christian Patz, Lacking Leadership and Drive Gets a D+

Mayor Christian Patz

Continuing our tradition of looking back on each year-long mayorship of the rotating Emeryville City Council members/cum mayors, with Christian Patz now moving aside to make way for Dianne Martinez, we take this opportunity to look back on Mayor Patz’s shambolic tenure as Emeryville's highest elected official.  This year, the Tattler adds a new feature to these mayoral wrap-ups; the assignment of letter grades for each mayor—and to that end, we report Christian Patz has received a disappointing D+ for his efforts as our mayor.

Opinion

The most noteworthy aspect of Emeryville's mayor Christian Patz was his lack of energy and lack of follow through.  

Emeryville 2020 Mayor
Christian Patz 

Each mayor tends to assign for themselves some scope of work that can fairly be described as their signature issue.  Usually, it's introduced and brought to fruition during their year long term.  For Mr Patz, the defining issue of his term as mayor was the renaming of 47th Street after Steve Dain, a former teacher-of-the-year who was subsequently fired in 1977 by Emery Unified School District for being a transgender person.  But after introducing early in his term, the idea to rename the street to honor the teacher specifically and inclusivity in general, Mr Patz seemed to lose interest in the issue and he failed to follow through.  It was a noble thing Mr Patz proposed, but after Transgender Awareness Week and then the Transgender Day of Remembrance quietly passed in the weeks before his term as mayor ended, it became clear Mayor Patz had no intention to follow through with his own good idea. 

An item Mayor Patz had a hand in that actually got done was last March’s Measure F, a quarter cent sales tax passed by Emeryville voters that will help fund the Emeryville police department's quest to hire more officers as well as pay to hire a new staff member at City Hall to operate code enforcement.  Mr Patz, who was a strong supporter of the tax increase, cast himself as the leader in the push for the measure.  To the mayor's chagrin, this election victory came right before the very public murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department in May, making for terrible public policy optics if not demonstrable furtherance of the police culture dystopia. 

Beyond these two issues, one squandered and the other feckless, Mayor Patz's record was one of mostly ignoring problems.  Below is the roster of shame:

-Mayor Patz didn’t deliver a public library or even start to explore the building an Emeryville library after he officially placed this task as one of the top ten 2020 priorities for the City Council at the beginning of his term.  

-He refused to implement traffic calming for the 45th & 53rd street bike boulevards as required by the City’s Bike Plan.  He even refused on his watch, to conduct a traffic count for all bike boulevards as the City is supposed to do, once every two years so we can know how bad it is for bicyclists.  

-He refused to call out Lennar Development before the Council to explain their misdeeds after a high level Department of Toxic Substance Control whistleblower revealed a regime of cheating the cleanup at the Sherwin Williams toxic soil clean up site on Horton Street.

-Mr Patz failed to act on Emeryville’s deplorable lack of public parks, the worst of any East Bay city.  Regardless that the General Plan calls for three acres of park for every 1000 new residents, Mayor Patz couldn’t be bothered to do anything about this emerging quality of life concern for Emeryville residents.  Incidentally, the plan, if followed, would move Emeryville from the worst to the second worse East Bay city for parks in ten years.  

 -Not big on accountability and sloppy with records, the Mayor missed his FPPC campaign filing deadlines, making it impossible for citizens to see who funded his political campaigns.

-More recently, the Mayor has sat by idly and unconcernedly as City Hall has implemented a policy shift, weakening it’s duty to enforce COVID-19 mask wearing regulations.  The staff has relaxed the enforcement protocols for developers and their construction workers who are supposed to be wearing masks.  But Mayor Patz has not joined with citizens asking why the City would lower the safety guidelines even as the virus has been exploding in the community.

-He is thin skinned and cannot countenance citizens criticizing his job performance as mayor.  He has acted in a childish and impetuous manner, lashing out at citizen critics asking for accountability.

Christian Patz has served as the source of levity on the Council, using his position to offer up rations of bad puns, funny asides and humorous anecdotes.  These make for more enjoyable meetings to be sure.  He seems good natured (except when he feels attacked) but the most salient thing about Mr Patz as our mayor overall was his simple laziness.  He didn’t really put in any effort to get anything done, the pro-cop Measure F notwithstanding.

We may be a bit harsh with regards to Mayor Patz and his inaction on parks in the bullet point list above.  While it is true he did not taken action to implement the General Plan's park dictates, in his defense, neither have any other City Council members.  But as we look back, we remember what citizen Patz gallingly said about bike boulevards in 2016 when he was asking for our votes.  He made this specific campaign promise: “What makes a Bike Boulevard is more than just Vehicle Trips per Day (VTD), it has more to do with optimizing bike traffic.  As VTD approach and surpass 3000, more separation between bikes and cars should occur.  Ideally, this would be done by reducing and diverting traffic, but can also be achieved by dedicated and protected lanes.”  Christian Patz ignored this subject utterly both as our City Council member over three years and as our Mayor over the last year.  And for that, plus the litany of failed policy highlighted, we give Mayor Patz a D+ (and we’re being generous).