Introducing the Horton Street Community Bulletin Board

The Tattler introduces the Horton Street Community Bulletin Board.  Located on the east side of Horton Street at the Sherwin Street intersection, the bulletin board is available for neighbors to leave messages of interest to the community: missing dogs, services available, things for sale, poetry, community news, opinion on local politics and more.  The Tattler provided the board and will maintain it including a City News section and a current Tattler story section.

To contribute, neighbors are asked to tape messages to the plexiglass and if they meet the requirements (no advertising for businesses, no hate speech, etc) they will be added to the board.  Please place a date on submissions so we can keep the messages timely.

The Community Bulletin Board replaces an earlier board in the same location that was stolen several years ago.  

This community resource is similar to several other such boards placed on the public sidewalks over the years in Emeryville, notably a very popular one placed by former community activist Richard Ambro in front of his house on 64th Street.  We are hoping the City of Emeryville moves to encourage more community bulletin boards around our town because they encourage community involvement and help disperse valuable information for the community.

The Horton Street Community Bulletin Board is located at an extra 
wide part of the public sidewalk, encouraging people to linger and
gather with the community there.

A Guy With A Camera Causes Most of City Hall To Be Permanently Closed

Really Emeryville?  You're Going to Permanently Close Swaths of the People's Hall to the People Because of a Guy With a Camera?

Emeryville: Imagine Democracy, Accountability

News Analysis / Opinion

A man with a camera came to peacefully, quietly and legally make a video of the publicly accessible portions of Emeryville’s City Hall.  Would the public servants we hire who work at City Hall allow him unmolested, to use his camera?  Or would they panic and call the men with guns to come and remove the videographer?  The answer is of course, the latter as the Tattler reported back on July 28th.

Now, large portions of our previously open City Hall have been quietly closed off forever.  Fully 2/3rds of the old part of Emeryville City Hall are now closed to the public indefinitely.   The grand front steps and front doors of the beautiful Beaux Arts people’s hall are no longer accessible.  Inside, the entire lower level, the main floor and the Council Chambers all used to be open but are all now closed to the public (the Chambers are open during meetings only).  

This is what counts as accountability
for Vice Mayor Courtney Welch
A majority of City Council members
refuse to be held to account:
John Bauters, Courtney Welch and 
the newly appointed Sukhdeep Kaur.   

This closing of our democratic hall of governance was done because of a peaceful man with a camera and an interest in the First Amendment to the US Constitution.  So says City Manager Paul Buddenhagen who told the Tattler after repeated inquiries, the man with the camera caused him to reconsider open government in Emeryville.  It is closed he said because of “security” but also because of “Covid”.

After several Tattler attempts, Mr Buddenhagen refused to elaborate what he meant by “security” and “Covid” as legitimate reasons to close our City Hall to us.

Before the mystifying closures, the public could walk all around the open areas of our hall as the man with the camera did.  The only difference was the camera.   However cameras are perfectly legal.  It is legal to film in public.  Somehow in Emeryville though that basic freedom we all enjoy is seen as a security risk.  

We don’t get it.  If a person can be in a public place, they can film in that place.  The Supreme Court has been very clear on that.  Cameras are not menacing and the public, especially public employees have no expectation to privacy in public.  In fact, we are expressly allowed to check up on our government and our public employees.  It’s the first law of the United States.  But our City Manager takes a dim view of this most basic right we Americans enjoy.  

And then there’s Covid.  Why, we asked, when the State of California lifted the Covid emergency order did the City of Emeryville then invoke this as a reason to close our hall of government?  Why did City Hall remain open for months before the man with a camera came, when the State of California still had the emergency order in place?  Again, the City Manager refuses to explain. 

Emeryville City Manager Paul Buddenhagen
Men with cameras are so scary, City Hall
must be closed to stop them.  Lack of community 
access to their government is a small price
to pay to stop cameras.

Put bluntly, phony unqualified Covid and security scares are not good enough reasons to close our property off to us.  This is an abuse of power.  We were told our old City Hall would be open to the citizens after the City moved back to the original City Hall site in 2000.  Before that, Emeryville’s City Hall unceremoniously occupied the 12th floor of a private tower at Watergate for decades.  One of the worst features of the Watergate City Hall location was the not-so-subtle message of closed back room politics sent out to the citizenry.  After the LaCoste corruption scandals of the 1970s and 1980s, reformist civil servants wished to highlight a new day and a new democratic vision for our town.  Reopening Emeryville’s beautiful turn-of-the-century Beaux Arts City Hall was central to the new vision.  So was the ample use of glass in the new addition.  It was to be transparent, literally and figuratively.  The grand front stairs were once again to be open to the public in a nod to the salve of democracy and openness for Emeryville.  But this noble vision has now been taken from us not because of the corrupt former police chief John LaCoste but because of a guy with a camera.

In Trump’s America, there’s a paranoia that has settled in.  Democracy has taken a hit.  In Emeryville, too.  A cult of personality has taken over the mayoralty, resulting in groupthink and homogeneity on city committees, accountability and transparency are in retreat as most City Council members now refuse to talk to the local press and now our beautiful City Hall is closed not because of security or Covid but because of a guy with a camera.

This is why we can't have nice things in Emeryville.

Cronyism Charged as Council Appoints Former Councilwoman to Planning Commission

 Councilman Priforce: Cronyism 

in Martinez Appointment 

Votes 'Predetermined' as Council Majority Seeks New 

Housing Policy Backstop 

In an unprecedented vote at the April 18th City Council meeting, the Council majority, bolstering Emeryville’s reputation as the indispensable Bay Area city for unfettered rental housing development, appointed YIMBY advocate and former Council member Dianne Martinez to the position of Planning Commissioner, an action that drew the ire of Council member Kalimah Priforce who charged the Council with “cronyism”.  The indictment rolled off the backs of the four other City Council members however and they proceeded on with the installation of Ms Martinez over Mr Priforce's objections.  

Councilman Kalimah Priforce
He says the Council vote for
Dianne Martinez was "stacked".

For the record, Ms Martinez’s cronies Mr Priforce referred to are those Council members who support her pro-housing policies that derive from the real estate developer lobbying organization YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) she forwarded on her years on the Council, especially Mayor John Bauters and Vice Mayor Courtney Welch.

The Planning Commission historically has been a faithful supporter of the Council majority’s housing  policies, however Ms Martinez was appointed by the Council to shepherd any wayward Commissioners on the pro-YIMBY track.  Mr Priforce, who interrupted the Council’s deliberations with peals of laughter at the prospect of the appointment of Ms Martinez, said his colleague’s vote for the developer friendly former Councilwoman was “stacked”.

The YIMBY organization has been active across the State, convincing municipalities to give up their independence on housing policy, but nowhere as successfully as in Emeryville whom the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed the “most YIMBY town in California”.  Critics of YIMBY, including the Tattler, have noted the organization, being a business lobbying group, has an agenda wholly based on increasing developer’s profits, not on ‘building housing’.   In fact, it has been shown that cities that follow the YIMBY path do build more housing (at the expense of other necessities) but primarily, housing of a particular type - that being luxury rental housing.  Accordingly, Emeryville, largely doing the bidding of YIMBY over the last ten years, has been transformed from a mostly home owner city into a mostly rental city, a fact Council member Priforce has been touting on the dais and in his blog.  The transformation of the city’s black and brown people from homeowners into renters has been especially pronounced, Mr Priforce has shown.  

In fact it’s not just black and brown people that have been negatively affected by the increase in rental housing over home ownership housing.  The YIMBY transformation has been stark; Emeryville now stands as the highest percentage of renters over homeowners of any city in the East Bay.  

Former Councilwoman Dianne Martinez
Appointed to Planning Commission, she
says people who want the General Plan 
followed on housing are nothing
but 'NIMBYs'. 

Mr Priforce, the lone City Council voice of independence over YIMBY,  apologized to Watergate resident Eugene Tssui, the other candidate hoping for the Planning Commission slot at the April 18th meeting.  He told Mr Tssui the Council’s decision was predetermined, the votes had “already been counted and decided” in favor of Ms Martinez he said.  He dismayed at the “cronyism all of this displays to the people of Emeryville” and the “baggage that would come to the Planning Commission as a result of this decision [to appoint Dianne Martinez]”.  

Perhaps as an attempt to draw attention away from the YIMBY connection at the Planning Commission appointment, Councilwoman Courtney Welch said she was voting for Ms Martinez not because of her housing advocacy but rather because of her gender.  Noting there’s only one woman currently on the Planning Commission, Ms Welch told the other audience, “To add to the gender balance, we should at least add one other woman”.

YIMBY’s insistance that good and affordable housing will trickle down for everybody if municipal housing policy is simply handed over to private real estate corporations is analogous to the trickle down nostrums of the Reagan era that posited the middle class would be helped if massive tax cuts were provided for the wealthy.  Then and now, the idea hinges on a 'market infallibility' fallacy.  And like the zealotry of trickle down idealism from the 80’s, government deception is required to keep the thing going.  In the case of YIMBYism, local governments are put to work to obscure the fact that real estate developers are here to maximize profits for themselves, not to provide a public good.  Thus the government, abdicating its role here and now, means only build luxury rental housing will be built.  Not only are the City Council zealots ignoring our General Plan provisions that we must increase ownership housing over rentals, they are also precluding that we could be using our clout to force these developers to provide the proper amount of park space the General Plan prescribes and other quality of life infrastructure the addition of more people in our town necessitates.  The pro-marketplace zealotry means we remove any chance to try to craft a place people want to live, all for obedience to the trickle down housing scheme.