Letter to the Tattler: Donn Merriam

The following letter was received from Donn Merrian, candidate for Emery School Board of Trustees on November 4th:

To The People of Emeryville,

I've made Emeryville my home for almost four years now.  I've enjoyed living here and want to contribute to the community in a way that could best utilize my expertise and to insure successful completion of the most important endeavor the community will embark upon, the building of the Emeryville Center of Community Life.

As an licensed Architect with more than 20 years of experience in the design and construction of public K-12 schools, I've observed how schools work on a day to day basis, how staff and students interact, and how an administration works to achieve their goals. 

One of the most recent projects I was involved with was the DeAnza High School replacement campus in the West Contra Costa Unified School District.  That project was similar in scope to our ECCL project; a complete school replacement and enhancement of the entire campus.

Prior to the start of project, enrollment was approximately 800 students with a possibility of closure.  After its completion, enrollment is 1300 (full capacity) with a diverse student body and a waiting list to attend.

This is a prime example of what a new school can do.

Emery Schools Superintendent, Dr. John Rubio was gracious to invite me to the recent groundbreaking ceremony for the ECCL.  While there, I could feel the group's excitement with turning the first shovel of earth.  However, there's a long road ahead of us that we want to make as smooth as possible.

Wanting to make sure we're on that road, I've initiated a review of the project and have discovered several items that are of concern and have presented them to the School Board.

•    The elevator shaft in the Main Classroom Building is too small for the Code specified sized elevator cab (must be able to fit a medical gurney for emergency use).

•    The restroom in the same building does not meet code for equal number of plumbing fixtures between men and women toilet rooms.

•    In an emergency, exiting the Second Grade classrooms from the second floor of the Main Classroom Building is confusing, dangerous, and possibly non-code complying.

Those are just a few of the issues that if left unaddressed will have serious ramifications. 

There has to be someone on the Board to ask the right questions. 

If given the opportunity, as a member of the Board I would take the same approach on all other matters that would be encountered.

Sincerely,

Donn Lee Merriam

Donn Merriam is a candidate for Emery School Board this election cycle.  He has been a homeowner resident of Emeryville since early 2011.  Donn is a licensed architect 14 years with Deems Lewis McKinley, an architectural firm based in San Francisco that specializes in K-12 school design.  He has had  experience with numerous school districts throughout the Bay Area in his capacity as a school site planner. His campaign website is HERE.

Emery School District Pays $1.1 Million Dollars for $481,000 of Services

Strange Math at Emery Unified 
School District:

1,100,000 Equals 481,000

Opinion
Look out taxpayers.  The Emery Unified School District is not past being sneaky as they play fast and loose with the purse strings in their quest to service consultants and other vendors associated with the Center of 'Community' Life.
What else could you call it when they elect to task an outside contractor with completing a job, at more than twice the price that would have been paid to two former employees that by all rights should be doing the work?   One thing you could call it is a boon.  A boon to the contractor Swinerton Builders, selected by the School Board, who's going to get $1.1 million for a $481,000 job.

The story surfaced last week when the School District asked the City Council to sign on with them,  the hiring of Swinerton Builders to oversee the work of Turner Construction, the builders of the Emeryville Center of 'Community' Life (ECCL) on San Pablo Avenue.  After the District last January lost its architect and ECCL Project Manager, Roy Miller, the School Board realized they needed to hire someone with construction knowledge to watch Turner Construction to represent the public's interests.  That someone turned out to be Swinerton Builders, a San Francisco based construction firm.  The problem is Swinerton is going to be paid $1.1 million for a two year contract and Roy Miller, combined with his assistant would have cost the School District $481,652 to do the very same work.  Suddenly, the District is paying an extra $618,348 that's gone unexplained.

We were perplexed last fall when the District told everyone the sudden "retiring" of Roy Miller was not going to be a problem.  How could the District justify the loss of the main guy paid to shepherd the ECCL and look out after the public's interests, just as the construction of the thing was ready to begin we wondered.  School Board member John Affeldt went one further, calling the time of Mr Miller's leaving "opportune", raising the absurd notion that the best time for a project manager to quit is just as the project gets started.
Nevertheless, the School District told us a replacement would be hired, someone to oversee the construction.  They just failed to mention it would cost us more than twice the price.

To those wondering whether Swinerton perhaps will do a more complete job overseeing Turner than Mr Miller would have done and the extra costs are therefore justified, City Manager Sabrina Landreth made the District's position clear that for proper oversight, they only require the effort as would be performed by Roy Miller and the former ECCL Project Assistant Wendy Chew.  Ms Landreth put any such notions to rest, "The contract is $1.1 million and is funded from a combination of salary savings from both the District architect and the project assistant that was already budgeted in the project budget" she told the City Council, speaking on behalf of the District.

Here's the breakdown:
Roy Miller salary: $137,000
Total cost to District: $185,266

Wendy Chew salary: $37,000
Total cost to District: $55,560

Roy total cost x two years = $370,532
Wendy total cost x two years = $111,120
Together = $481,652  vs $1,100,000 Swinerton contract
Difference = $618,348

Clearly, there IS a problem when the Project Manager leaves his post just as the project is ready to get started.  And now we know how much of a problem it is: $618, 348 (and counting).

Center of 'Community' Life Project Director Calls it Quits

Roy Miller, Head Honcho for Massive Project,
Suddenly Leaves Emery

Roy Miller, Project Director for the contentious Center of 'Community' Life announced he will quit his position at the Emery School District, leaving the quarter billion dollar City/Schools project without a construction supervisor before ground is even broken at the San Pablo Avenue site. Mr Miller told School Board members, "This is the most awkward I've felt approaching the Board" as he announced he would leave in early January.
The District must now quickly search for an alternate director as construction is set to begin in December.  Board President Melodi Dice told attendees at the November 13th meeting the task will be difficult, "We'll be hard pressed to find a replacement" she said as the District now faces a massive project, ready to start, with no institutional construction project memory.  Mr Miller leaves behind reams of drawings and plans for the project, slated for delivery in the fall of 2015.

School Superintendent Debbra Lindo asked the Board to accept Mr Miller's "retirement", something Board member Josh Simon said he would do, "with great sadness."

Roy Miller
Project Director, Center of 'Community' Life
and Emery School District Chief Architect

Since the announcement on Wednesday evening, the School Board has already begun talking about how to best absorb the sudden loss of the Project Director for the Center of 'Community' Life.  Under consideration is the hiring of an interim project director, a construction management firm, a person in charge of providing a "full service vision" as well as several consultants.  The City of Emeryville, a partner in the project, may also be on the hook for some expenses as a result of Mr Miller's vacating his position the Board indicated.

Roy Miller has been the face of the Center of 'Community' Life, shepherding it since its inception; through four School Superintendents and 11 years.  He has served as the point man for the School District at countless boisterous City Council and community meetings; often taking heat, sometimes generating heat for miscalculations large and small through the years.  He told the School Board members Wednesday his long tenure at Emery has comprised more than a third of his career.

Mr Miller leaves his position as Project Director as Turner Construction is ready to start demolition of the existing buildings on the site, work that is more than a year late according to his announcements in 2011 and 2012.

The Tattler will follow this explosive news as stories develop.

 Correction:  This story originally reported Mr Miller will leave his post in mid December.  We have since learned the actual time is early January.  The story has been corrected as of 3:28 on Saturday 11/16/13.

Video courtesy of the Emeryville Property Association:

Planning Commission OKs Center for 'Community' Life, Bike/Pedestrian Path Removed

Commission Says 'NO' to ECCL Path

Tonight the Emeryville Planning Commission reversed an earlier vote and OK'ed the contentious Center of 'Community' Life without an adjoining required bicycle/pedestrian path that they had called a 'deal breaker' only last month.  The split vote 3-2 (Vanessa Kuemmerle and Steven Steinberg dissenting) came after the School District made a presentation meant to address the Commission's earlier concerns about the path, the future 53rd Street Greenway and the 'community commons' at the site.  Commissioner John Scheuerman praised the new plan tonight, without the ECCL path in it, calling the slight modifications to the Greenway and the community commons made by the School District "much improved",  even though in July he joined the majority and castigated the District and voted down the plan because it did not provide the path.

Most of the controversy among the Commissioners tonight settled around the District's continuing refusal to build the ECCL path.  Commissioner Scheuerman seemed to hold out hope that someday the path could be built somehow but Chair Kuemmerle disagreed, "If it's not done now it will not get built" she said.  Commissioner Steinberg agreed with Ms Kuemmerle stating flatly, "We should do [the bike/ped path] now.  It's an amenity everyone wants."

District architect Mark Seiberlich told the Commissioners that an existing concrete wall in the way of the ECCL path will have to be seismically strenghtened for safety and money spent on that now would be wasted if the path is ever built at some future date.  No one from the District told the Commissioners how much money would need to be spent strengthening the existing wall.

Commissioner John Scheuerman
The ECCL Bike/Ped path
can happen somehow,
 someday, just not now.
"Maybe we can get a grant"

he said.

At the onset of the meeting, Charlie Bryant, Emeryville's Planning Director announced that the City had received an award from the State of California for the City's new forward thinking Pedestrian Bicycle Plan, the second award received for the plan so far.  Several attendees and at least one Commissioner noted the irony that as the City of Emeryville starts to reap awards for the new Pedestrian Bike Plan, the City is busy removing bike/ped paths.  If the ECCL path is indeed not built, it will be the second such path removed by the City in recent months.

Commissioner Sean Moss seemed to disagree with his colleague John Scheuerman who stated a wish to someday see a path there.  Mr Moss suggested there is simply not enough space for a bike/ped path on the site now or in the future because it would constrain an existing pool deck he said as he cast the deciding vote, killing the ECCL path.

At an earlier City Council meeting, Council member Jac Asher said the ECCL path should be built now.  Otherwise, she said the ECCL path will not be built for decades because the School District and the City have borrowed the maximum amount of money legally possible and that the school construction bonds Series A through C must be paid back before more can be borrowed to build the path. She noted if not now, it likely will never be built.

The issue of the Center of 'Community' Life now goes before the City Council one last time September 3rd.  The votes tonight could be overturned by the City Council at that time.

Residents vs School District: Pivotal Planning Commission Meeting Thursday

Meeting Thursday 6:30 

Are We to Have a General Plan?

Opinion/Announcment
In most cities, the desires of the local school district are the same or close to the same as those of the citizens.  Here in Emeryville however we've got a school district that's so single minded, so dogged in its pursuit of its ill conceived vision of the Center of 'Community' Life, the concerns of the residents have taken a back seat.  From the shutting down of citizens interested in saving Anna Yates Elementary School to the sneaky and budget busting Capital Appreciation Bond construction financing, this district has sought to end run around the interests of Emeryville residents.

Now comes the final push.  The School District is trying to squeeze fit the Center of 'Community' Life, a project too big for the cramped San Pablo Avenue site...it's busting at the seams and its violating our General Plan.  The whole project is spilling out along its perimeter, ruining General Plan identified quality-of-life amenities.  On the north side of the project for instance, the proposed 53rd Street Greenway is being compromised by a major shrinking down of the proposed wide sidewalk, destroying its capacity for benches, planters and other planned amenities.  The 53rd Street Greenway is proposed to be as pedestrian friendly as the popular 'Emeryville Greenway' on the north side of town.
The Center of 'Community' Life is also ruining the proposed 47th Street 'green street', again a pedestrian and bike friendly thoroughfare on the south side of the project and the proposed bike/pedestrian path along the west border is to be simply removed.  All these resident amenities are prescribed by our award winning General Plan but they all going to be dramatically shortchanged  by the Center of 'Community' Life because there's not enough space on the site and because the School District thought it could get away with acting the bully.

The General Plan is our plan and it's being wholesale abandoned.  The General Plan is a good plan and we should ask the Planning Commission to simply recognize this.  The Center of 'Community' Life can be built in harmony with our General Plan and that's what we should tell the Planning Commission.

The Planning Commission needs to hear from us.  Please attend the fateful meeting today at 6:30 at City Hall.  Please speak up and add your voice to those who want a beautiful and pedestrian and bicycle friendly Emeryville.

Thursday July 25 6:30 at City Hall

the Planning Commission wants to hear from you

The existing 'Emeryville Greenway' 
the 53rd Street Greenway is supposed to be as nice

 

Center of 'Community' Life: Citizens See Neighborhood Impacts, City Sees Nothing

Why Won't the City Look After Our Interests?

General Plan Deep Sixed

Where Was Charlie Bryant?

Opinion
What are our expectations of our City Hall?
If nothing else, we expect them to fight for our interests.  Specifically, when we put $21 million of our money down for a project, we expect that City Hall will make sure our money goes to support our interests, not the School District's interests.
So why when the School District took our $21 million and proposed how our part, the City's part of the Center of "Community" Life (ECCL) would be built, City Hall had nothing to say?  They were given a forum to speak up at the Mitigated Negative Declaration Special School Board meeting on Monday.  They were expected to make sure the citizen's interests would be forwarded, but the City said nothing.

It's not as if there were no improvements to be made for the residents with the contentious project.  In fact an ad hoc group of unpaid independent citizens did just that.  They saw what the School District was proposing to do with our money and they made 18 pages of recommendations to better improve the project for residents while the City sat on its hands.

Charlie Bryant, 'I See Nothing'

City of Emeryville's Planning Director
Charlie Bryant
MIA: I see nothing... nothing!

The City of Emeryville actually did raise one concern.  In a letter to the School District,  Charlie Bryant, the head of the Planning Department, representing the citizens, asked the District to clarify that while the School District was telling neighbors that they would have approximately one athletic event per week at the Center of 'Community' Life and would turn off the outdoor lights by 9pm, the City, in its letter wanted to make clear that it might have City-sponsored events there and plans to keep the lights on until 10pm.  Since our $21 million is paying for the field and the lights after all.

That’s it as far as any resident's concerns are concerned from Charlie Bryant and the City as they as they hand over our $21 million to the School District.

Residents, by themselves, raised all 18 pages of concerns. In particular they explained the numerous inconsistencies that the Center of 'Community' Life  proposal has with the City’s General Plan. The residents were right to speak out for nearly every side of this project as it turns out, is inconsistent with Emeryville's General Plan or specific plans such as the Bike/Ped plan. 

General Plan Ignored By City
The General Plan calls for an east-west greenway on 53^rd street with various pedestrian and bicycle-friendly features, the General Plan would require a "connected city" that breaks up super blocks and that would have a bicycle-pedestrian path on the western edge of the property, and the General Plan calls for 47^th Street to be a key 'Green Street'.

The ECCL plans are inconsistent with all of these and don’t even show the bike/ped path in 'Phase 2' of the project. 

In addition to Charlie Bryant, we have an entire Building and Planning staff here at City Hall that ought to be experts on our City’s General Plan and that ought to be speaking up for residents in an effort to see that the General Plan is followed.  Instead, this job was left to residents alone, while the City of Emeryville acted as the School District’s accomplice in furthering the fiction that the ECCL project could not possibly be improved by more thoughtful comments.

Who's minding the store here?  Mr Bryant and company are paid after all to look out after our interests.

So where residents themselves see 18 pages of improvements they expect to get for their $21 million, Charlie Bryant and City Hall, who represent us, sees nothing.

                                       

One Citizen Takes On School Board Juggernaut

"Build It and They Will Stay Away"

Emeryville's General Plan took a hit at Monday evening's School Board Special Meeting when the Board members voted in executive session, behind closed doors to disregard 27 Citizen Commenters 18 pages and move forward with the ill conceived Emeryville Center of "Community" Life.  It was a bad day for citizens interested in government transparency, democracy, sustainable and green city planning and bike and pedestrian transportation.  It was a good day for those interested in seeing what real citizen engagement looks like however.  Five residents gave witness to an alternate vision of the contentious Center in the face of the School Board Center of "Community" Life juggernaut.  The Tattler presents the comments made by one of the commenters; Emeryville resident Brian Carver, arguably the high point of the night.
Posted by permission from Brian Carver:

"Good evening President Dice and members of the Board. My name is Brian Carver, I am a parent of a student enrolled in the District. I was a signatory of the Community Comments submitted last Thursday.

I urge you to conduct a full environmental impact report and consider feasible alternatives to the current plans. We only get once chance to do a big project like this.  Let’s make it better. In the past I’ve worried that the District was getting inadequate legal advice.  Please have your legal counsel explain to you the standards for evaluating comments on a MND: in particular the “any fair argument” standard.  I don’t see how any reasonable person could conclude that there’s not a single fair argument made by the Community Commenters in those 18 pages.  There obviously are. I believe several of them are not adequately addressed by this last minute revision that we received minutes ago and that we have not had adequate time to review.

To the details, what this document and its technical appendices say about traffic varies between being utterly incomprehensible to completely unbelievable.  Page 60 says, “the project is expected to generate a maximum of 450 peak hour trips.” I made it to page 2 of the 13 pages of responses we received moments ago and that number has been changed to 686. (It should be noted that contradictory estimates appear on page 135 where we’re told that at AM peak hour the project will ADD 530 trips over current levels, making the max of 450 or 686 even more incomprehensible).

How could anyone familiar with this project find that number, whether it’s 450 or 686 peak hour trips, credible?  The project calls for 900 students and 90 teachers and staff. Instead of just having a high school on this site as we did previously, you’re adding all the K-8 students, the community members that might want to take advantage of the community gym, library, recreation center, senior lounge, or kinder buddies facilities.  Lots of services that used to be elsewhere are all being crammed onto this one site and somehow there’s a maximum of 450 or 686 peak hour trips?  That’s just not consistent with common sense.

The only way to believe that is to say what this report says on page 117, “The increased daytime population on the project site during operation hours that would result from the project is not expected to result in substantially increased usage of these new facilities.” That is, you have to expect to build a bunch of community facilities and resources and expect no one to show up. Unlike in the film Field of Dreams, the EUSD’s motto appears to be, “Build it and they will stay away.”  It’s just not a realistic assumption and so it hides significant impacts of the project.

But the biggest flaw in this document and the current project design is its inconsistency with the guiding principles and policies of this City’s General Plan that were designed to reduce negative environmental effects, particularly those from greenhouse gases.  The General Plan calls for an east-west greenway along 53rd street and the current project proposal does not comport with the requirements for that greenway.  The General Plan calls for this greenway precisely because the enhanced bicycle and pedestrian flow that such a greenway would enable reduces negative environmental effects, particularly greenhouse gases from cars, but other related negative environmental impacts as well. To give just one example, the six foot wide sidewalk proposed is not consistent with the General Plan’s greenway.

The General Plan also calls for a bike/ped path on the western border of the property and the current project proposal does not even put that on the drawings for Phase 2.  The General Plan designates 47th Street as a key green street and the current project proposal does not follow those requirements either.

The General Plan is our City’s constitution.  A lot of effort and planning went into that document and your architects had it available to them during your design process, but it appears they just willfully ignored the General Plan, and thereby the environmental impacts that numerous General Plan and specific policies were intended to reduce.  This is also where the cumulative effect occurs. When the General Plan and specific policies, such as the award-winning bike/ped plan adopted for environmental reasons are ignored in so many instances it has a cumulative environmental impact.

Particularly for a joint City-District project, flouting the General Plan in this way is just not permissible.  This project needs to be the embodiment of our City’s General Plan, not a partially compliant work-around."

Mr Carver is an Emeryville parent with a child enrolled at Anna Yates Elementary School and another ready to enroll in the fall.  He is an occasional contributor to the Tattler.

School Board Does End Run Around Community Comments at Special Meeting Monday @ 6pm

Last Minute Cynical Ploy By School District

Opinion/Announcement
The Emery School Board has called a special meeting for Monday to adopt the contested 'Mitigated Negative Declaration' document in their final push to move the Center of "Community" Life project past the objections of Emeryville citizens.  The plan is to "discuss" comments about neighborhood and environmental impacts they recently received from 27 concerned citizens and then vote to approve the project in one short meeting.

The School Board has announced they will discuss the 18 pages of comments, some highly technical, for one hour and then they'll vote up or down, to disregard the citizens and approve the whole project, impacts or not.

School Board President
Melodi Dice
Called for the meeting allowing
one hour to consider 18 pages
of community comments before
she even saw the comments.    

School District architect and project manager for the Center of "Community" Life, Roy Miller told the City/Schools Committee Thursday that the project is running up against "hard deadlines" and there can be no delays at this point, it should be noted.

Citizens should attend the meeting and join with the 27 neighbors written comments about this high impact project for Emeryville and the surrounding community.  The California Environmental Quality Act law provides that oral testimony must also be considered and Monday's meeting appears to be the last chance.

Unlike the regularly-scheduled Wednesday evening School Board meetings, the School District has historically not video-taped or broadcast special meetings, such as this Monday's, opting instead to provide the lowest amount of transparency legally permitted. Accordingly, it can be conjectured Emery likely has no  plans on recording this meeting, thereby adding another layer of secrecy to this project.

What's especially disturbing about all this is the fact that the School District received the 18 pages of comments from the citizens at around 4:30 PM on Thursday and by the next morning, Friday, they had already released the agenda for the special meeting.  The District had already decided to schedule an adoption of the Mitigated Neg Dec before they could even read what Emeryville residents had to say about the project.  This is what passes for "transparent" and "citizen engagement" of a "community" project by Emery Unified School District.  This is how they show their respect for people who will pay for this ill-conceived project.

It's obvious this School Board has made up their minds without even looking at the community's comments and even though the School District has stacked the deck against the concerns of ordinary citizens, people should not be dissuaded from acting as an agent for change for their community. Ordinary citizens can show their courage by confronting this highly cynical School District and giving testimony and providing witness to the real community.

Special Meeting

Monday, July 15

6:00 pm

Ralph Hawley School

1275 61st Street  Emeryville