Emeryville is One of the Last Cities to Open Up Public Meetings to In-Person

Emeryville Vies With Oakland to be Last in Democracy

Both Cities are the Last Holdouts for Public Meetings

Opinion/News Analysis

As the Covid pandemic settles down into epidemic status, cities across the Bay Area are opening their city council meetings back up for full public in-person participation.  It’s a flowering of democracy after the long dark night.   However, two cities continue to be closed; Emeryville and Oakland.  They're the last holdouts.  

For months now, the State of California has allowed cities their discretion for opening the people’s city halls to the people and Emeryville’s neighbors (save Oakland) have done that.  

The following neighboring cities have completely opened up for full democracy:

• Berkeley
• Hayward 
• Piedmont 
• Orinda
• Walnut Creek 
• El Cerrito

The following cities are now in the process of opening back up:

• Lafayette 
• Alameda

The following cities are closed indefinitely:

• Oakland
• Emeryville 

During the pandemic, cities used Zoom to try to facilitate the people being able to still participate in their government but online access was shown to be a pale and anemic simulacrum of democracy.  Whole classes of people, including the elderly and the poor were shut out.  Anytime entire classes of people are (effectively) barred, it cannot be described as democratic.  And that holds true for Emeryville today.  Emeryville has not had democracy since March 19th 2020.

Hayward City Hall
Enlightened
Poor people and even elderly people can come here
and freely speak out about government policies.

So why does our city council not want to open City Hall back up for full throated democracy?  They are invoking the fear of Covid.  Does that mean our city council thinks neighboring city councils are reckless for opening up?  Does the Emeryville city council think the Berkeley city council is negligent and imprudent?  Do they think the city council of Hayward is foolhardy and thoughtless?  Is the Walnut Creek city council brash and audacious? Or maybe it’s the Emeryville city council.  Maybe the Emeryville city council is just more comfortable keeping meetings closed.

The public is messy, loud and opinionated.  They have strong opinions and they don’t mind telling their local government about it.  The elderly and the poor too.  Sometimes they’re not happy with policies coming out of City Hall.  If they could be silenced, the meetings would be so much more comfortable for the city council.  Who wants to be yelled at and berated? 

The public speaking freely can be messy.
The establishment authority sometimes
doesn't like it so much.

But the Emeryville city council and the staff are paid to take the public being unhappy with them.  It’s supposed to be part of the job.  This city council likes to attack public commenters who are critical.  When they attack public commenters, they show us they don’t accept the compact with the public that government employees are required to accept.  Is this anti-democratic culture at Emeryville City Hall affecting the city council’s decision to keep public meetings closed?  Or is it that they simply want to protect us from disease as they say (and Berkeley doesn't)?  

We’re keeping tabs on this and it doesn't look good for Emeryville.  Right now it’s the City of Oakland and the City of Emeryville neck and neck in last place for democracy.  Oakland?   Really, Emeryville?  Someone should tell Emeryville that Oakland is a low bar.  

Is Emeryville going to wait until the State of California finally forces them to open up their meetings for democracy?  Only our city council, the same city council that publicly attacks dissenters that have the audacity of speaking out in full throated democratic fashion, knows for sure.

Elderly people commonly have a tough time with these 
computer contraptions.  Maybe it's easier to just forget about 
speaking out at the online city council meeting.  Judge Judy beckons
and she's on at the same time as the city council meetings.

 

Emeryville Reverses Course on COVID Mask Policy

Public Mask Wearing Order Policy Thrown Over to Private Sector

City Hall Places Public Health Trust With Private Developers 

No More Surprise Inspection Visits From the City

News Analysis

The City of Emeryville has initiated a new COVID policy that claims to punish contractors at construction sites in the city for their workers not wearing masks—but only if they get caught—and they won’t get caught because the City will only check for compliance during regularly scheduled construction inspections.  The contractors will be fined $188 if their workers are not obeying the Alameda County mask order but, absurdly, they know exactly when the City inspectors will be coming to their job sites so workers can quickly slip on their masks during the inspection thus avoiding both the fine and public health policy capacity.  How’s that for effective public health policy during a deadly pandemic?  It’s like if the police gave warning to crack house squatters that they’ll be breaking down the doors next Thursday at noon to look for crack and make arrests.  Think there’ll be any narcotics to be found at the crack house next Thursday? 

This ridiculous situation is where Emeryville City Hall is in the fall of 2020 with COVID-19 raging through the population.  It represents a regulatory relaxing of deterrence against rule breakers.  The new COVID policy replaces former policy from last April when the City didn’t give warnings before they came to check on mask wearing compliance at construction sites in town. 

With Americans’ expectations of general dysfunction or even uselessness from their government the new norm, Emeryville’s new public health policy in the face of an exploding pandemic is notably feckless and reckless.  It is after all the preeminent role of any government to protect the health and welfare of the people.  Maxims aside, the COVID policy we’re getting in Emeryville is inverse to the threat level the deadly virus poses. 

Emeryville City Manager
Christine Daniel
 'Emeryville COVID policy
should be relaxed as the 
virus explodes exponentially.'

When the pandemic first took hold last April, Emeryville formulated an effective response to the Alameda County mask wearing order it is charged with enforcing.  Citizen complaints registered with City Hall against workers seen not wearing masks at any of the construction job sites in town would draw a surprise visit from a City of Emeryville building inspector.  Violators were given warnings at first but the City formulated a program of increasing punishments against wayward building contractors.  This policy has been replaced this fall with a new policy where, after receiving a citizen complaint, the City will not send a surprise visit from a building inspector.  Instead, building inspectors have been directed to notice if any workers are not wearing masks at the job sites during regularly scheduled calls for inspection services.  The calls for inspection it should be noted, come from the contractors themselves.

The City’s first iteration of mask wearing compliance at job sites allowed the contractor to mete out punishment against the workers with promises from at least one contractor to the City that offending workers employees would face employment termination.  A public records request revealed that the contractor at the Sherwin Williams building site on Horton Street had violated the County mask order in late August with a City building inspector recording in his report from his surprise visit he saw “12 individuals without masks on.  Four of these individuals were within 6 feet of another worker.”  No workers were reported terminated for that violation nor were any for violations called in after that initial contact by the City.

A new policy without such surprise visits from City inspectors arose sometime after an early September flurry of violations, primarily at the Sherwin Williams site and with some recorded at the “Intersection” site (AKA the Maz Project) on San Pablo Avenue at Adeline Street.  The new policy was clarified by City Manager Christine Daniel who told the Tattler Wednesday, “The City’s building inspectors continue to remind contractors about the requirements and will cease an inspection if proper [mask wearing] practices are not being followed.” 

The new policy, unsurprisingly, is less effective at catching violators at the job sites.  The employees of the contractors are now all wearing masks having been forewarned when the inspectors are arriving at the sites but subcontractors, who aren’t at the site every day have been problematic as it turns out.  The subcontractors apparently aren’t getting sufficient forewarning from the contractors and are consequently getting caught by City inspectors.

The City has stopped relying on the contractors to terminate offending employees, a relic from the first COVID mask wearing policy and now the punishment leveraged against contractors is that the inspectors will leave a site if any workers are seen not wearing masks.  City Manager Daniel reported to the Tattler on Wednesday,  “As recently as Monday of last week an inspection was terminated, a correction notice issued and the contractor was requested to notify all sub-contractors to review the importance of compliance with the County Health Officer Orders.”  The fee for rescheduling an inspection is $188, an amount so low that it can be easily absorbed as a cost of doing business for any large project in town.

So the new policy from City Hall is not effective according to the City itself.  The former policy had a mechanism to catch violators but lacked effective punishment and the new policy is ineffective with regard to both catching and punishing violators.  The result is worksites without workers wearing masks continuously happening in Emeryville since last April.  

Emeryville is not interested in doing what it takes to satisfy the Alameda County mask order and therefore not interested in helping to stop viral infections, even as cases spiral in our community.  This is not an opinion.  This is demonstrably true, using the City’s own records.  This story is not an editorial or an opinion piece. 

The City Manager failed to explain when and why the City’s new COVID policy was enacted, only that it had been implemented.

$188: Not Much of a Punishment
Letter from the contractor to sub-contractors at 'The Intersection' project.
This violation cost the contractor $188 in a project that will run 
more than $50 million.  The workers don't want to wear masks and neither the
contractor nor the City wants to force them.

Council to Make Doyle Street Traffic Diverters Permanent

COVID-19 Delivers Emeryville's First Bike Boulevard

Newly Calm Street Very Popular

Could Other Bike Boulevards Also Get Traffic Calming?

News Analysis

The City Council has placed on its October 6th docket, the permanent closure of portions of the Doyle Street Bike Boulevard to vehicular traffic, a move that likely would bring the street into full compliance with Emeryville’s Bike Plan, a first for any bike boulevard in the City.  The Doyle Street Bike Boulevard, with its temporary ‘K rail’ traffic calming measures placed last April, is now safe for bicycling for the first time in years with fewer cars on it than the maximum allowed in Emeryville.   Every other bike boulevard is still unsafe for bicycling according to the Bike Plan, because of too much vehicle traffic.

The much reduced vehicle traffic load on Doyle has come about because the City of Emeryville, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, blocked some portions of the street from vehicle usage with the water filled plastic K rails.

The temporary K rail diversion was done administratively owing to its low cost and the COVID-19 emergency invoked by the City.

View of an Emeryville Bike Boulevard
COVID-19 made something better
in our town.
K Rails will be replaced with
permanent (more attractive)
concrete  barriers. 

The new traffic calmed street has become so popular in the north Emeryville neighborhood and among regional bike commuters, the City Council has been prompted  to vote to make the changes permanent.  Emeryville will be helped with this expenditure by Alameda County Measure BB funds the City announced.

The Council action comes as a ‘consent agenda’ item (10.7) at the October 6th meeting, a sign they will almost certainly vote in favor.  Consent items are grouped together in bulk and voted on without discussion barring some new negative revelations.    With funds fully secured to permanently add traffic diverters to Doyle Street, a 5-0 Council vote is near certain. 

The diverters have not only made bicycling on Doyle Street safe but also enjoyable, say neighbors.  The reduced traffic street has also helped Emeryville to finally be able to make a claim of bike boulevard legitimacy.  Ten years after the City Council certified its Bike Plan that calls for a network of five bike boulevards, Emeryville finally now has a legitimate bike boulevard in Doyle Street thanks to the diverters.  

COVID Upsets the Dominant Paradigm

The Bike Plan calls for traffic counts to be made every two years for each of the City’s five bike boulevards to inform the Council as to the necessity of increased traffic calming.  Each bike boulevard is only allowed a certain number of average daily vehicle trips (ADT) and any overage is supposed to set off a new round of prescribed traffic calming measures.  That’s the way its supposed to work anyway.  The highest level of calming according to the Plan is Level Five, or traffic diversion, as Doyle Street now has.  The City of Berkeley has used Level Five diverters to great effect to help bike safety over the years.  But Emeryville’s bike boulevards have never progressed beyond Level Three traffic calming despite traffic counts that have called for increasing calming.

Many years ago,  the late City Councilwoman Nora Davis famously announced Emeryville will never have traffic diversion like Berkeley and she would only allow up to Level Three traffic calming on any bike boulevard (signs and paint on the asphalt, no diverters).  She stated Levels Four or Five traffic calming would disrupt vehicle traffic and therefore not be tolerated here regardless of what the Bike Plan says.  That default policy has been followed ever since by every iteration of the Council, making the COVID traffic diversion for Doyle Street a paradigm shifter for Emeryville.

The newly safe Doyle Street could ‘go viral'.  The street is now so popular in the North Emeryville neighborhood, others might demand the Bike Plan be followed in their neighborhoods as well, forcing the City Council to add diverters on the rest of the bike boulevards.

Councilman Bauters Gets Full Funding For Emeryville 

Council member John Bauters sits on the Alameda County Transportation Commission and has been instrumental in getting the funding for the traffic calming needed for Doyle Street (and possibly the other bike boulevards in Emeryville).  Measure BB, passed by voters in 2014 allows for this kind of safe street infrastructure but Council member Bauters was able to convince his Commission colleagues to waive the normally required matching funding from the municipality.  Mr Bauters argued that Emeryville’s small size made the matching funds requirement an undue burden and that the spirit of Measure BB would be subverted if Emeryville were to be forced to pay as much as the big cities.  His colleagues agreed and Emeryville has subsequently been released from the matching funds requirement as has two other small cities in the County. 

 Emeryville's Latest Traffic Count Results (2019)

Every bike boulevard is shown to be in violation of the Bike Plan due to too much vehicle traffic. At only 4% over the maximum allowable traffic before the COVID pandemic, Doyle Street certainly has been brought into compliance with the emplacement of the diverters.  However the other four boulevards are in even greater need for traffic calming.  Will the Council follow the success at Doyle Street and make the other bike boulevards safe too?

Police Flummoxed by County COVID Order at Emeryville Construction Sites

COVID Cat & Mouse Game Plays Out at City Construction Sites

Police Unable or Unwilling to Force Compliance

Workers at the Maz housing construction site on San Pablo Avenue got a surprise visit from the Emeryville police on Monday who, responding to complaints from citizens, gently reminded the workers they need to wear face masks to help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the community.  It marked the beginning of a week of community calls and police responses to this and other construction sites in Emeryville where large numbers of workers have been flouting the Alameda County Face Covering Order, issued on April 17th.  The dynamic of police prompted to show up to ensure compliance has descended into a puerile if deadly game of COVID cat and mouse, workers keeping their masks at the ready to slip on at the sight of police cars or even an Emeryville Tattler photographer (we were sneaky and quick and caught several workers before they had a chance to slip their masks on).  And so the City of Emeryville appears to be flummoxed by strong willed construction workers and rendered inert in their charge to provide public safety.  Emeryville, it would appear, is not taking the COVID-19 virus seriously.

From the beginning when the pandemic arrived in our area, the Emeryville Police Department has shown a lack of concern.  The Chief of Police, Jennifer Tejada, didn’t alert her troops to the fact that it is the municipal police departments in Alameda County who are charged with enforcement of the county order decrees for the deadly virus.  Distressingly, it was the Tattler who informed the Emeryville police rank and file, that it is their responsibility to enforce the orders.  After the Chief had been made aware it was her and her department that bears responsibility for enforcement but before the Tattler disseminated that information to the EPD personnel, the officers were oblivious to this fact.  Emeryville police officers across the department had mistakenly thought it was the responsibility of the Alameda County Sheriff to enforce the COVID orders.

Starting after they were made aware it is their responsibility to enforce, Emeryville police have mostly reported worker compliance at various construction sites in town.  But how trustworthy is that?  They’re getting calls from the public, they’re driving out to the sites and the workers are pulling up their masks before the police get out of their cars.  This is what has come to pass as effective public policy in today’s Emeryville.  Tempting fate, perhaps the police and the Chief feel they can trifle with this virus.

Some of these work sites in town have 20 or 30 workers laboring shoulder to shoulder, many without wearing masks.  This is not some piddling thing.  This is precisely the kind of public health infection risk the county face covering order seeks to stop.  Alameda County Interim Health Officer and signatory to the order, Dr Erica Pan is adamant that construction workers and others wear masks saying the failure to do so "...constitutes an imminent threat and immediate menace to public health".  Failure to comply with the order can result in a fine or imprisonment or both.

Regardless, contractors in Emeryville aren’t forcing their workers to wear masks and the developers aren’t forcing the contractors and the police aren’t forcing any of them.  But in this dysfunctional dynamic, it’s not the private sector who the Tattler will go after.  They’re to be expected to lie and cheat and cut corners, chasing their profits.  It is the public sector we hold accountable.

And so we are distressed at the idea that our city is rendered impotent in the middle of a deadly pandemic by construction workers who don’t like wearing masks.  We like to think that it would take more than mask hating workers to bring our city down in their charge to protect the public.  But so far in this age of COVID, that’s not the city we live in.  Absurd as it sounds, COVID is likely spreading in our community because the Emeryville Police Department hasn't so far had the wherewithal to defeat cleaver construction workers who quickly pull up their masks upon the sight of a police car.

Insofar as construction site mask compliance may be had as a result of an embarrassed Emeryville Police Department due to our reporting, this is not a responsibility the Emeryville Tattler wishes.  We don’t want public safety to be in our hands.  We’re not paid for this.  We are here simply to report.  It is the Chief of Police who is paid for this.  We want her and this city to start taking this virus seriously.

No Masks at Maz Work Site
Caught in a candid moment by a Tattler photographer Thursday, workers wait for a crane
to lift a modular housing component into place.  Elsewhere on the site, when they saw our camera, workers quickly put their masks on... for us and for the police.  

COVID-19 Forces 'Maz' Developer to Negotiate With City For Affordable Housing

Finally: Something Good Comes From the 

Caronavirus Epidemic

Virus Increases Emeryville Housing Affordability

The developer of the ‘Maz’ project, a large apartment building being constructed at 3800 San Pablo Avenue, renegotiated his agreement with the City of Emeryville last week, volunteering to add 10 units of affordable housing as a result of the Alameda County COVID-19 Shelter at Home Order.  The County order includes a prohibition on construction projects during the corona virus pandemic and would have forced Holiday Development to stop all work on the 101 unit housing project because Maz was approved without any affordable units.  Rick Holiday, CEO of Holiday Development, approached City Hall Thursday offering to renegotiate his project to add a permanent deed restriction for 10 affordable units to thwart the County’s stop work order for all housing construction projects with less than 10% affordability, coming in just under the wire (actually 9.99%, 10 out of 101).

Mr Holiday has had a very difficult time completing the Maz project, formerly called ‘The Intersection’ after getting City Hall approval for it back in 2013.  The 1.1 acre project, located at San Pablo Avenue and Adeline Street has been set back two times before after an arsonist twice burned down the nearly finished five story building.  After the second fire, the developer optioned to change to modular offsite prefabricated construction.  During the interim period, Holiday also contracted with the University of California to make the building exclusively for the housing use of Berkeley students, a change that incidentally wasn’t cleared with the City of Emeryville.

Maz developer Rick Holiday

In response to citizen calls received by the Emeryville Police Department last week referencing the County work stoppage order and police visits to the site enforcing the order, Mr Holiday at first claimed that since the project is now for student use, that could be defined as low income housing. The argument was presented that with the students (at 100%), the Maz project qualifies for the County’s 10% minimum affordability mandate but was rebuffed by the City Manager Christine Daniel, according to City Hall sources.  Following that rejection and facing a County work stoppage of unknown duration, Holliday agreed to guarantee 10 units of affordable housing with an irrevocable deed restriction.
Emeryville's new housing regulations, enacted after the approval of Maz, require a minimum of 17% affordability for all projects over 10 units.

The Maz project, likely to be renamed, has been controversial from the start.  Approved in 2013 in a 3-2 City Council split vote (Kurt Brinkman, Nora Davis and Ruth Atkin voted YES and Jennifer West and Jac Asher voted NO), Maz turned away from the attempts to make Emeryville housing more family friendly and affordable being promulgated by the then progressive Council minority.   With its zero affordability all market rate housing, Maz also is not family friendly, coming in with almost no three bedroom or even two bedroom units.  Studio apartments make up fully 60% of the unit mix at the anachronistic housing project.  At the time of approval, Mr Holliday told the Emeryville Planning Commission that he saw Maz as a building filled with dynamic young [affluent] people, “Younger people seeking an interesting place to live”,  a prospect the Commission called “exciting” as they passed it over to the City Council for approval.
When it's finally finished, almost ten years after approval, the Maz apartment building will push Emeryville's housing affordability percentage down, despite last week's renegotiation and will drive down the City's already low ratio of resident families to non-families.

The Tattler criticized the project after it was approved in 2013, likening it to a “men’s dorm” owing to the predominance of tech workers drawn to such market rate housing with so many dorm-like studio units.  The ‘men’s dorm’ charge rankled conservative Emeryville business advocate and Tattler hater Rob Arias, to such an extent, he publicly accused Brian Donahue, the editor of the Tattler of being the Emeryville arsonist at a police press conference in 2017 after the second Maz blaze.
The fact that the Maz project will now be for the exclusive use of UC Berkeley students and is therefore actually a dormitory, is merely a coincidence and the Tattler makes no claim of extraordinary prescience when we called it a dorm in 2013.

Build Baby Build Hits COVID-19

Developers' Best Laid Plans No Match 

For the Virus

How California Cities Develop Will Change 

News Analysis/Opinion
Scoring a stunning victory highjacking California housing policy, multi-national development corporations and billion dollar real estate investment trusts who recently persuaded Sacramento lawmakers to legislate away the ability for California cities to maintain local control, appear to have run into a force even greater than they: COVID -19.  Poetry is invoked when such a lopsided and unexpected contest as this is joined.  Especially when the winning side is so small they can’t even be seen.  These squiggly little viruses are poised to run roughshod over the collective will of our ruling overlords and they don’t seem to care a whit about the hubris of neoliberal capitalism.  Unlike the Emeryville City Council majority, they’re downright unimpressed with all that power.  And so, as we wait for the calamity to pass, human nature, being such that it is, will no doubt reset the paradigm in its wake.
Alas, there are no guarantees we will return to the by now familiar refrain from the developer class, “build baby build”, caterwauled from the rooftops and boardrooms about the supposed existential threat of the ‘housing crisis’.  COVID-19 has taken care of that narrative, hasn’t it?
Nobody seems to be concerned with any of that now.  However, we know some new way to imagine our cities will assert itself....or maybe it's going to be the old way.  We may even collectively decide we want to return to the days when city planning served as a guiding principle for how to develop our town.

It’s pretty obvious that once this scourge passes with its economy wreaking recession in tow, things are not going back exactly how they were, in Emeryville or anywhere else.  And public policy is bound to reflect the changes.  We think that means the end, for all practical purposes, of build baby build.

It was bound to happen one way or another.  The former world, the former Bay Area real estate world, was never going to be sustainable.  The narrative from developers, that the housing shortage was here to stay until we handed the reins totally over to them, was as convenient as it was blinkered.  A market correction was bound to reveal that sham for what it was.  The only surprise is that it came in the form of a virus.

Looking beyond COVID-19, it would do us good to remember the former world.  Three Emeryville City Council members, John Bauters, Dianne Martinez and Ally Medina all told us they were throwing our lot over to the tender mercies of billion dollar developers as they sought to build baby build.  It was to be for our own good they assured us.  It was like the talking points from the former queen of the City Council, Nora Davis… except on steroids.  It didn’t matter that over the previous twenty years, Emeryville had build more than 200% of market rate housing as recommended by the Association of Bay Area Governments, the public agency in charge of Bay Area housing and jobs.  These three Council members, Bauters, Martinez and Medina  said that the fact that our population had doubled every ten years for three decades running amounted to precisely zero.  Developers wanted to increase profits and these three sought to help them by pledging their allegiance to their facile neoliberal notions of supply and demand.  So casting aside any ideas about market crashes (2007 forgotten), they cheered on Sacramento’s anti-democratic SB 330 and other legislation that takes away Emeryville’s right to decide for ourselves how we plan our town.  It’s an emergency they said and the only solution was to build baby build.

The people's will didn't enter into the Council's thinking.  However, you have to assume people moved to Emeryville over the years because there’s something about it they like.  “The small town atmosphere” is what’s commonly cited.  It’s a stretch to assume people moved here hating the small town atmosphere but betting three Council members would rise up and overturn our autonomous City Hall in order to Manhattanize the town.  We know this is false because we’ve already  collectively said we don’t want that.  We voted on the town we’ve been building (more or less) before the build baby build crew took over.  That vote was taken in the form of our ten year old General Plan…the same document John Bauters, Dianne Martinez and Ally Medina now hold in contempt.  We voted on our General Plan…and then we voted for these three Council members.  They never told us when they were asking for our votes that they would move to destroy our General Plan.  Had they done so, it’s likely they would have lost their respective elections to the Council.

If COVID-19 had not reared its ugly face and we had done to our town, through the three member Council majority, what the developers had in mind for us, the wreaking ball would have begun swinging and a town filled with unaffordable luxury apartment skyscrapers would have begun to rise up, in contradiction of our General Plan.  After that, there would be no way to go back to what we were.  The reasons we created our General Plan would have all been rendered void amid all the hulking monstrosities.
But reality was bound to catch up with this boomtown winner take all mentality.  The virus has stripped bare the hubris of the elite, be they in the corporate boardrooms, among individual wealthy real estate investors, in the Statehouse and the warren of lobbying firms orbiting it or even in the Emeryville City Council chamber.  These three Council members either got caught up in the hyperbole or they’re true believers.  Either way, it’s clear in matters of city planning, one of the most fundamental functions of any municipality, they’ve simply stopped working for us.  They should stop trying to be heroes (as they couch it), doing the bidding of the developers and start doing our bidding.  That’s what we pay them to do.
Emeryville public policy in the hands of a developer smitten City Council has long bent towards destructive forces and more enthusiastically over time, notwithstanding our General Plan.  Developers have been having their way with us it's true but now it’s going to be COVID-19’s turn. Afterward, when we’re back on our feet, we’re going to tell the developers we’re no longer impressed by them.