City/School District Fails on Acknowledgment of Wrongdoing Against Transgender Teacher

 What To Do About Steve Dain?

Emeryville Settles on Inaction 

Opinion/News Analysis

Hey Emeryville!  November 20th was national Transgender Day of Remembrance.  A day that honors the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.  What did you do to observe it?

The answer is nothing.  Nothing was done by our government in our name to observe the date or even to set its own terrible record right with regard to the mistreatment of transgender people.  Regardless that in 1976, Emeryville fired a transgender teacher for who he was and with lots of recent talk about that not representing who we are emanating from our government, nothing is being done.

Still 47th Street
The City of Emeryville said this sign would 
read 'Steve Dain Drive' by this time.

The just passed national Transgender Day of Remembrance November 20th, followed Transgender Awareness Week November 13th through the 19th; an auspicious time for a ribbon cutting ceremony if there ever was one to reassert our Emeryville values.  But that was not enough to get Mayor Christian Patz to follow through with his pledge to re-name 47th Street Steve Dain Drive.  Mr Patz, who’s mayoralty ends on December 1st, took up the charge for the City, promising the name change after Emery School District failed to acknowledge the wrongdoing of the firing of Mr Dain.

Call it just another failure to honor Steve Dain, who was humiliated by the government here in Emeryville, for being transgender.  That humiliation goes on today following his 2007 passing.  With neither government agency able to do the right thing by Mr Dain and therefore all transgender people, the humiliation is on us, the people of Emeryville.  Indeed, WE fired Mr Dain for who he was and WE refuse to apologize here and now for that act of public cowardice. 

Transgender Flag Flying
at Emeryville City Hall
As far as Emeryville is 
ready to go at this point.

Surprisingly, Mayor Patz claims that 47th Street is already named Steve Dain Drive (it is not).  He says he has done it and he was given an award for it in September.  At the 8th annual East Bay Stonewall Pride Awards ceremony on September 13th, Mr Patz, accepting the award, told the group,  "I worked with the School Board to honor Mr. Dain, but just as in the 70s, there are too many bigots in public office.  Thankfully, I work with an amazing City Council and together, we were able to rename the street in front of the school Steve Dain Drive."

It's all talk now in Emeryville.  Two elected officials, Christian Patz of the City Council and Susan Donaldson of the School District, rode in to set Emeryville right but both dropped the ball.  Mr Patz let his mayoralty run out and Board member Donaldson wrote a public letter, posted in the Tattler in May, stating that the Board would finally and officially apologize for the firing of Mr Dain.  But without any interest among her School Board colleagues, Ms Donaldson has also quietly dropped the issue.

The electeds in Emeryville (at least two of them) have a message for you Steve Dain: The people of the City of Emeryville didn’t care about you when you were alive and we sure don’t care about you now.  And with that, it seems it's time for Emeryville to move on.  With this unpleasant issue forgotten, it’s back to brunch in Emeryville apparently.

Parks Presentation Propaganda

Staff, Council Deception on Parks

Public Policy Failure is Cast as a Success

Opinion/News Analysis
Emeryville City Hall recently hosted a meeting on the state of our city parks now and in the future, after which the citizen attendees and TV viewers came away happy, assured the City Council is working to provide all the planned new parks in town as they’re supposed to.  Some may have gone into the meeting thinking there aren’t enough parks here but not to worry the attendees were told, the City Council is on it.  The parks box is checked and everything's A-OK they learned.  The citizens left the meeting happy…. happy but ignorant.
Were the actual facts about parks in Emeryville revealed, the departing citizens wouldn’t be happy.  They’d be angry.  Because there is a major problem with parks here.  We’re not getting them.  And that’s a problem not even admitted to by City Hall.  What we ARE getting instead is agitprop and evangelism by our government.  The meeting, on March 19th, is revelatory; it was set up to deceive and mollify the people.

The City Council took pains to cajole the citizens into thinking they’re doing fine with the goals the City has with providing parks.  They highlighted the two or so acres of parks they built over the last ten years and referenced their plan to build another three or four acres of parks that have been funded over the next several years.  But what was brazenly left unacknowledged was the 800 pound gorilla in the room: Emeryville is midway through the 20 year General Plan and to satisfy it, the City needs to build not three or four acres but 26 additional acres of parks in the next ten years.  Got that?  Twenty six acres in the remaining ten years after having built only two acres over the first ten years.

After joking about pressure coming from the Tattler on the issue, Mayor Ally Medina opened the discussion, adding some realism for better effect into the otherwise pure whitewash.   She began by interjecting a little mea culpa contrition into the presentation, “We could do a little bit better of a job addressing, as we increase our density,  some of this livability and park space for our ever increasing residential population.” she said.   And then the propaganda whitewash began.

'We're doing great on parks in Emeryville!'
says the City Council
The General Plan, weighing in at 800 pounds,
says something different, but is ignored.

The General Plan is as clear as it is ignored: at least 26 acres of new park land needs to be built in Emeryville over the next ten years.  But the March 19th meeting revealed City Hall has no intention to deliver on that.  The abdication of its duty to the General Plan in general and parks specifically thus represents a public policy failure. The staff obviously put in many hours for the presentation that purposely left out the information the people need to know about the City’s failure providing parks.  We want to know how much paid staff time was spent preparing this hood thrown over our eyes.

As friends of Bill twelve steppers and other drug rehabbers are fond of saying, ‘the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging there IS a problem.  And how it goes for addicts is true too for municipalities seeking to solve their problems.  Cities need to admit they have a problem before they can move to fix the problem.
The Emeryville City Council, going around telling the citizens they’re doing great with building the parks they’re supposed to provide, is reprehensible and irresponsible.  The truth is that they’re asleep at the wheel, using the staff do do their dirty work and Emeryville residents are being cheated out of the parks we’re supposed to be getting.

The meeting in all it's shameless glory, may be viewed here:
http://emeryville.granicus.com/player/clip/1618

Introducing Fannie Lou Hamer Park

Emeryville's First Large Park in 40 Years:

Fannie Lou Hamer Park

Opinion/News Analysis

Emeryville, you've been lied to.
It doesn't have to be more housing.
We could build a large park instead.

Emeryville residents, long agitating for public parks, could finally get a new large park at the Sherwin Williams site along Horton Street as part of a City Council led drive to deliver on the promise of 26 acres of new parks built in our town before 2028.  The fallow Sherwin Williams site could be turned into a large new park almost eight acres in size and would be funded by the sale of a park bond floated by a newly chastened City Council who, since the 1980's has been terribly remiss in the building of parks to keep up with our population growth.  We propose the new park, the biggest built in Emeryville since the Watergate peninsula was constructed, be called Fannie Lou Hamer Park named in honor of the famous civil rights leader of the 1960’s and as such would represent our values in social justice and recognize the citizen's need for a leafy green open space respite from the daily tribulations of congested urban life.  After a long multi-decade program of building housing and shopping malls in Emeryville, Fannie Lou Hamer Park would provide a much needed counterpoint to that as well as redress the long-on-talk, short-on-action issues of livability our town has been subject to.  Fannie Lou Hamer Park could correct a lot of wrongs and make our town as nice as other towns.

The Why's and How's of Fannie Lou Hamer Park 
Emeryville is vastly underserved by parks/open space according to the American Planning Association and other good government/city planning institutions.  But not for long:

• The Sherwin Williams site is Emeryville’s last large piece of fallow ground available to build a large park on, and fallow land is the least expensive location to build a park.
• Emeryville’s residents to park acreage ratio, now almost unimaginable at nearly 500:1, has increased every year since 1979 and FLH Park offers a chance to reverse that.
• No cost to relocate any businesses, building tear down or clean-up (like we incurred at Doyle Hollis Park).
• Financed by floating a general obligation park bond leveraging Emeryville’s copious assessed valuation. 
• The property is acquired by standard private to public eminent domain after paying the developer fair market value.
• The trade off is clear; 30 affordable units above our existing average to be provided by the Sherwin Williams project and a small art gallery versus an eight acre public park.
• Beautiful tree framed sight line to our future iconic South Bayfront Bike/Pedestrian Bridge that will touch down in the park.
• The Horton Street Bike Boulevard is saved.
• Much less traffic in Emeryville. 
• Chances for citizen recharging and even solitude available that only a large park can provide.
• Parks foster civic pride and citizen engagement.
• We get the park now rather than waiting for 12 years. 

The above list offers a cogent and rational take one would expect to have traction in a normal democratically served municipality.  Unfortunately here in contemporary Emeryville, citizens acting as rational cogent agents has been supplanted by a different paradigm.

Fannie Lou Hamer
1917-1977
"I'm sick and tired of 
being sick and tired"
A great moral force of the civil rights
struggle.  Naming our park after her
would continue the pre-Ronald Reagan
tradition of elevating labor leaders
and social justice crusaders by naming
grand civil projects; libraries, town halls
and parks in their honor.
Interest in learning about
Fannie Lou Hamer by children would
be served and Emeryville's values
would be proudly proclaimed.

The Pro-Developer Meme 

The idea that Emeryville would begin a program of building enough parks to catch up with our exploding population growth, an idea considered rational and normal in a different era in a different town, sounds idealistic if not crazy in a town grown used to a naysayers paradigm that has overtaken our town these last decades.  In Emeryville, we’ve been mugged by these naysayers who tell us we’re simply not good enough to have what other towns have.  A strange Patty Hearst Stockholm Syndrome has replaced a former culture of expecting civic spaces that are liked and wanted by the residents.  Now many residents here readily accept what developers and the Council tell us is our only option; let the developers do what they want in our town.  Lots of Emeryville residents feel pride in all the new development projects and are happy developers are paying any attention to us. 
  

Like the thirty year project promulgated by right wing think tanks that gets us repeating the line that limited government is best, after a while it begins to seem like common sense; government is bad, inefficient, wasteful…isn’t it?   It’s no accident that the American people, who 40 years ago used to think the government is good at solving problems now thinks government itself is part of the problem. 

Here too we’ve foreclosed on our own agency to service a long standing right wing meme that insists like trickle down nostrums created in Washington, we have to let developers develop our town…the fact that we have almost 500 residents per acre of park/open space compared to Oakland’s 67 acres per resident only highlights how much better and more desirable Oakland must be according to this meme.  The meme permits a kind of twisted thinking that makes it unreasonable that we could expect to get the 26 acres of parks that our own General Plan requires we build within 12 years.  We’ve become a people who dream of nice things like other people in other towns do but have no expectation at all in getting them, thanks to the pro-developer meme.  

The meme in Emeryville is so ubiquitous, so pervasive that “progressive” City Council members are not at all distinct from the old school conservative Council members on this subject: even though they campaigned on parks, there’s little chance they would consider Fannie Lou Hamer Park because the developer doesn’t want to do it.  The meme is so powerful that even the “progressive” Council members will retract when confronted by the idea that we could build a park, they retract instead of offer a reason why we cannot build a park; reason takes a holiday thanks to the meme.  It is cast as reasonable to not provide reason; developers must be placated and no other vision is entertained. To do otherwise, to build Fannie Lou Hamer Park at the Sherwin Williams site, is so far off the radar that to propose it is tantamount to proposing an Emeryville space program.  

And it’s not just the Council “progressives” and otherwise who cannot even imagine building a park, it’s the citizens too, seduced by the pro-developer meme that Emeryville just isn’t good enough to get what other towns have, who vote for Council members who promise parks but don’t deliver, who worked on our General Plan that promises parks that’s not worth the paper its printed on, who publicly profess the love of parks who dismiss the idea we could build a park here and now for reasons they refuse to specify.  

And the new City Council candidates plying for our votes in November are telling us exactly the same as Council members seeking election have said for decades: they like parks, they’re going to deliver parks they say but they don’t think the Sherwin Williams site is appropriate for reasons not specified other than the dog whistle of the pro-developer meme.  Of course anyone who is aware of the pro-developer meme will not be taken in by the new crop of wanna be Council members.  They seem to be playing to new resident rubes and those mesmerized by the meme.

In coming weeks, Fannie Lou Hamer Park will likely fade into the ether like bike boulevards here and the other things the residents say they want but run afoul of the desires of developers.  Our polity is stark and bereft.  As opposed to what the residents get in other towns not taken over by an alien ideology overlain public policy.  And that’s really sad but it’s also who we’ve become; a town with no pride.  So remember Emeryville, next time you hear anyone say anything good about our town: we’re actually measurably much worse than our neighbors.  We have almost 500 residents per acre of park/open space land and that number is rising with no clear way to reverse the trend or improve on that.

Parks in Emeryville are always going to be built at some future date.  Say, about 12 years from now.  A newly arrived Emeryville citizen, looking at our General Plan and its built-in impending sunset in 12 years, might assume the City is going to engage in a massive flurry of park building at the end of the sunset period.  Cynical old timers who haven't been hoodwinked by the pro-developer meme know better.  They know the score; 12 years from now when we write our next General Plan (with lots of citizen participation mind you), the same 26 acres of parks that will make us as good as other cities will be in there...only a new 20 year clock will have been reset and a new program of placating developers will begin afresh.  The only place to build parks in Emeryville then will be on the site of existing viable businesses and expensive buildings.
Or we could build Fannie Lou Hamer Park now and prove the cynics wrong.