A: 101 Emeryville Citizens (None on the School Board)
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| Regular citizens could have guessed. The authorities however couldn't have foreseen. |
Opinion
There is a school property in town, currently the site of Anna Yates Elementary on 41st Street, which has been used as a school site for over a century, since before Emeryville was incorporated as a city. Then there is another school property, the former Secondary School site--now the Emeryville Center of 'Community' Life site--on San Pablo Avenue, that, as anyone with any curiosity about or knowledge of Emeryville history could tell you, has been a site that housed a whole host of businesses engaged in producing nearly every kind of toxic industrial waste imaginable. When the Emery School Board obstinately decided, against the urging of 73 stakeholders, to consolidate all of Emeryville's children onto one site, WHO COULD HAVE POSSIBLY FORESEEN that there might be downsides to that decision, such as these toxins in the soil that we are now disturbing and have to handle at a cost of over $1.7 million? And when 28 residents asked for a full environmental impact report last summer, they were rebuffed by this School Board, who assured us that there would be no significant environmental impacts of the ECCL project.
It's really such an astounding train wreck, that there isn't any joy in saying, "We told you so."
Good for you, Brian. You are dead right. What can we do to get rid of these amateurs? They are picking our pockets for ill conceived ventures. Soon there will be a Transportation Tax on the November Ballot, and a move to make Emeryville a Charter City, thereby opening the possibility of a Real Estate Transfer Tax. How can we effectively go against this surging tide? It makes me sick!
ReplyDeleteI would say nice try but your conflation of two totally disparate ideas; raising taxes by democratic plebiscite vs unintended outcomes from anti-democratic autocratic government is not analogous.
DeleteIt is to me. It's my money, and I am helpless to stop it, as I watch my funds go down the drain. It is your right to have a different opinion, but I believe your perspective is narrow.
DeleteMy perspective IS narrow. It's posted for all to see in the masthead of the Tattler: it's the resident's interests in the Emeryville commons. The residents in the aggregate. That's my perspective. What I'm NOT interested in is promulgating business interests. So yes, that's a narrow perspective.
DeleteYou too seem to have a narrow perspective: furthering the notion that taxes should be going down (across the board I presume). To do that means to disempower one of the critical two sides needed to create a civilization: the government. To take away one of the critical two sides needed to have a civilization is to disregard the residents interests. So for me to promulgate that wouldn't be cogent...it would subvert my perspective.
So your interests and mine don't coincide . You're free to try to promulgate your narrow interests here but I'm not of a mind to not let it go unchallenged (owing to my perspective). You seem to think government is too large and that the other side of the civilization equation, the private sector, is too encumbered. I think the opposite (in Emeryville and elsewhere). In Emeryville, owing to the particular world view of the Council majority, developers and business pretty much call all the shots.... I'm not even sure how we can give them any more power than they already have. So I think your side is hegemonic...you've already won, as it were. My side is the untried side. We've never had a paradigm of resident centric government here....a City Hall where the resident's interests are the ones looked out after. I think it's time to try that for a change.
Could you express yourself a little more simply. I'm having trouble understanding what you're message is. I'm not indicating the irradication of local government. I just think there's enough money already in the budget to get the job done; with more prudent management. That means good, sound decisions; not the opposite.
DeleteEnough money? Can you quantify that? I mean with actual numbers? And what's "the job"? The "more prudent management" meme is always there like ripe fruit, waiting to be picked.
DeleteI am beginning to think that we should leave the children at AY, and send the rest of the children/youth to Berkeley Schools. Time to give up the idea of a new school here. We haven't the family homes or the numbers of children to make the ECCL adventure viable--let's call it a day!
ReplyDeleteBetter yet, why not vouchers? Without the middle and high school and the entire ECCL fiasco, the city and the school district could give an $100,000.00 per year voucher to every City of Emeryville student.
DeleteWhere's the line between neglect and criminal neglect? If there's a pattern of neglect, does that move the line closer to the criminal side?
ReplyDeleteYes !
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