The City of Emeryville Gives Us Six Sexual Positions to Choose From
We're Supposed to Select Our Favorite
This Kind Of Thing Used to be Considered Private Info
Which sexual position do you prefer? The City of Emeryville wants to know and they have given us a total of six to choose from. The City's website says you can go to the Emeryville Center of Community Life (ECCL) website at emeryvillecenter.org to take the quiz about your particular sexual proclivities. The six City of Emeryville approved positions are graphically presented for those with dull imaginations.
Not generally known for its prudishness, the Tattler has nonetheless provided an expurgated version of two of the positions on offer at the City website (see photo at bottom). To those not wanting to view straight up pornography should be warned however; although the Tattler added the black bars in the photo for this story, the lurid photos are graphically displayed without bars for all to see, including children, at the website.
A search revealed the City's website seems to have been taken over sometime in 2024 by someone using 'Porkbun', an ironically named internet domain name registrar. As it stands now, this site, being connected with the School District, certainly has lured children to it. Specifically, anyone looking for public art at the City's official ECCL site will be directed to the following address in all its prurient carnality (warning, click on it at your own risk and children are told to not click on this):
What Will It Take to Lock The School Security Gate at ECCL?
A Bad Guy With a Gun?
Opinion
Rebecca Sermeno Community Services Director
Emery School District begins the new year with an old reoccurring problem: a security gate off the San Pablo Avenue public sidewalk is constantly wide open during school hours, inviting anybody to stroll right in and access any classroom filled with children. The Tattler has documented this for years now but so far there has been no fix for this easy to solve and potentially calamitous problem.
The school campus is part of a community center known as the Emeryville Center for Community Life (ECCL) and is a joint City/ School District facility. As such, both the City of Emeryville and Emery Unified are responsible for keeping the children safe there. The gate that they can’t seem to ever secure is just off the public lobby for both the Community Services Department and the School District.
Quiauna Scott Superintendent of the Schools
Rebecca Sermeno, the head of community services for the City and Dr Quiauna Scott, the superintendent of the schools are the two managers responsible for this ongoing problem and they have repeatedly told the Tattler they will fix it but virtually every time we pass by on San Pablo Avenue, we glance over and see the open gate. When we have time to stop and interact, each time the explanation is the same: “We thank you for bringing this to our attention, we take this seriously and we’re going to fix it.” Then the next time, sometimes the very next day, it’s, “We thank you for bringing this to our attention, we take this seriously and we’re going to fix it”.
After a couple of years of this, it’s obvious they don’t take the children’s safety seriously. Is it going to take some kind of violent security breach for the responsible employees, the one’s paid to provide safety, to fix this? We don’t think it’s too much to ask that the government keep our children in their care, safe. Locking a security gate should be the simplest thing to do to provide a basic minimum of security for the children. It’s sad the Tattler has to report on this.
Here is a small sampling over the last few months:
Homeless Clearances Reveal Emeryville's Policies Are Not Compassionate, Not Truthful
Official Claims Don't Stand Up
Emeryville they say, is a smart, compassionate and nimble city that quickly matches homeless people with emergency shelter and other services. With the City so committed, the downtrodden are seldom visible, City Hall explains. Turns out, reality is far from that image.
This sign was recently placed on Emeryville public property to stop homeless people, according to the City Manager.
In fact, local homeless people report they intentionally avoid Emeryville, saying they are rousted without warning by the police, their possessions confiscated and discarded. Sharply contrasting with the City's official "all are welcome here" reassurances in the wake of recent right wing attacks on the LGBTQ community, City Manager Adam Politzer last week admitted an on-going and punitive city policy against those most disadvantaged.
Mr Politzer confirmed that a "no trespassing" sign recently placed on City owned public property behind City Hall was intended to prevent a homeless encampment there. The sign was placed amid a field of boulders placed by a landscaping firm paid for with tax dollars whose contract stipulated that the Emeryville PD clear away a homeless encampment that was previously starting to form there. Boulders spaced 12 inches apart on the City owned property apparently wasn’t enough to chase away homeless people so the City put up a no trespassing sign for them like a maraschino cherry on top of a cupcake made of boulders.
"All* are welcome in Emeryville". *except homeless people
Cleared homeless encampment on Wood St in Oakland, Friday. On Emeryville's border, 300 were sent packing. Where did they go? Why haven't any set up camp in Emeryville?
To anyone asking, the EPD, City Hall and the City Council has for years explained the reason there are no homeless encampments here is because they do such a great job helping those people find shelter (and other government services). Emeryville would have us believe Oakland and Berkeley have cruel policies towards poor people that is evident in all the homeless people encamped in their respective cities. And to skeptics of this official explanation, the City of Emeryville lets the explanation of ‘no homeless visible is proof of a compassionate local government’ speak without any other supporting information. Concerned citizens are told to just believe City Hall and the police.
If Emeryville is so good to homeless people, last week’s (and continuing) well publicized clearance of a camp of some 300 people on Wood Street in Oakland near Emeryville will make it plain for all to see. The City of Oakland freely admits there are not enough beds in local shelters or homes for the massive influx of unhoused people left by the unprecedented clearances. With a compassionate Emeryville right next door, they would migrate here and we would be seeing many tents going up. Because there are not enough local shelters to accommodate them, tents should now be proliferating here if Emeryville has been truthful to us. If not, then everyone will know the City has not been entirely truthful about what it does with homeless people found sleeping in our city. So far there are no new tents in Emeryville, EPD informs us.
A compassionate city that helps homeless people doesn't place boulders and no trespassing signs on the public's property to stop camps from forming. The Tattler spoke Sunday with five people displaced by the clearances on Wood Street about what Emeryville is like for people without homes. A woman who wished to remain anonymous told us what all unhoused people in Berkeley and Oakland know: "Emeryville cops arrest you. They take your stuff and they throw it away and they arrest you. They don't play." she said.
Several police personnel and City Hall employees were contacted for this story but all refused to comment.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
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.
City Council Listed as Responsible Party to Protect
Emeryville Citizens
An employee with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) turned whistleblower has notified the City of Emeryville that he will be submitting a citizen complaint with the United States Attorney’s office for the Northern District of California, alleging fraudulent practices of a DTSC staff member related to regulatory oversight at the Emeryville Sherwin-Williams toxic brownfields cleanup site. Speaking as a private citizen, in a June 29th letter to the City of Emeryville and City Council, the former Sherwin-Williams project manager and current DTSC employee, Tom Price said the department has a “corruption problem” related to this toxic site and that the public may ultimately be exposed to toxins at the future residential site as a result.
Toxic soil being removed at the Sherwin Williams site.
Mr. Price filed complaints with state overseers against DTSC staff starting back in August 2019 regarding what he called bogus sampling plans and inadequate investigation and cleanup of volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOCs and SVOCs). At the time, Mr Price charged DTSC officials of working with improper regulatory oversight, hand in glove with the residential developer of the site, Lennar Multi-Family Communities, a charge he is continuing in his impending complaint with the feds.
The impending citizen complaint by Mr. Price, who has protective whistleblower status under Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, include complaints already made against the state-issued professional licenses of five DTSC employees, including an engineer, Jose Salcedo, whom he says “inappropriately approved site development documents” at Sherwin Williams since proper investigation and cleanup were skipped. Former DTSC Northern California Division Chief of the Site Mitigation and Restoration Program, Mark Malinowski is also named in the citizen complaint for what Mr. Price says amounts to a cajoling of DTSC staff to inappropriately approve development plans with inadequate technical evaluations and attempting to deprive future residents of the honest regulatory oversight services which DTSC normally provides.
Mr. Malinowski has since reported to be retired although the DTSC appears to be using his services in some consultancy capacity.
Regardless of the misconduct of DTSC managers noted by Tom Price up until this point, the former project manager told the City Council it is not too late to properly clean up the site. He said the City of Emeryville, with its authority over a grading permit which was issued to the developer, should direct DTSC to require the developer to investigate and/or excavate potentially contaminated soils from hundreds of feet of abandoned utility lines on the site that were identified on old maps from the days when Sherwin Williams was engaging in pesticide and paints manufacturing. Writing as a private citizen in his letter to the City and the Council, Mr. Price recommended bringing a mobile laboratory to the site to complete the investigation with screening of soil gas samples for VOCs and SVOCs in the locations of the abandoned utility lines and former tanks which correspond to the planned living spaces which have not been tested yet. Mr Price named DTSC senior staff in Southern California including Shahir Haddad and Theodore Johnson, who conducted a review of site documents and identified those deficiencies yet, he noted, they failed to recommend customary investigation and cleanup.
Speaking as a private citizen to potential risks at the Emeryville Sherwin Williams site, former project manager Price told the Tattler, “According to guidance documents of DTSC and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, a vapor intrusion mitigation system such as the one planned for this site should not be considered a substitute for appropriate investigation and remediation. If that is skipped, the long-term protectiveness of the remedy may be compromised. That is unacceptable because these residential buildings will house sensitive receptors including pregnant women and children for decades.”
Mr. Price’s professional experience includes conducting dozens of such field investigations as a field chemist at former industrial sites and service stations across Northern California. It was noted Branch Chief Richard Hume of DTSC's Sacramento office has not responded to Mr. Price's requests for the additional investigation and cleanup of the site which has a history of being one of the most polluted sites under DTSC oversight in the region.
A long-term DTSC employee and Sherwin Williams project manager from May of 2018 to October 2019, Tom Price used the June 29th letter to the City of Emeryville and the Council to inform them that the people of Emeryville, especially the future residents at the Sherwin-Williams site, deserve the honest and professional services of the Department of Toxic Substance Control and they have not received it. The City and the Council have not yet responded to Mr Price's letter.
After his attempts to provide appropriate regulatory oversight for the project were unsuccessful due to reported interference from Mr. Malinowski, former Northern California Division Chief of the Site Mitigation and Restoration Program at DTSC, Tom Price requested to be transferred off of the Sherwin-Williams cleanup, a request that was accepted. He remains an employee at the department.
The Sherwin-Williams residential project will have land use restrictions owing to the toxins that will remain on the site.
The apartments being constructed, including many 'family friendly' units, will be ready for occupancy some time in 2022.
A new park adjacent to the residences will be separated from toxic soil by a geotechnical cloth product according to the DTSC cleanup plan.
A 1996 video from the UC Graduate School of Journalism (above) presupposed that underground toxins in Emeryville would be contained in a good faith manner. They didn't count on the Department of Toxic Substances Control, a government agency tasked with regulating private sector developers and polluters, would be in bed with the very organizations it is supposed to regulate. It's a classic case of 'regulatory capture'.
The City of Emeryville and Emery Unified School District are going to the voters for a pair of taxpayer funded ballot measures in March that would raise almost $4 million annually between them. The City is seeking passage of Measure F, a quarter cent sales tax that would raise approximately $2 million per year and Emery Unified is seeking passage of a new parcel tax, Measure K, that would raise about $1.8 million per year.
Both measures purport to fund a laundry list of items mixed with a crowd pleasing teaser; teacher pay increases advertised by the school district's Measure K and increased funding for the Emery Child Development Center from the City's Measure F ballot language. Neither measure however, guarantees funding for these specific issues, even though they figure prominently in the ballot language of the measures.
Measure F will fund personnel additions for the police department, the fire department as well as for code enforcement while Measure K is more nebulous, funding academic core programs as well as after school programs, sports, music and art programs.
Both Measures will require 66.7% of the electorate for passage.
'Do As We Say, Not As We Do' Fire Trap at Emeryville Police Department
After the deaths of 36 people in Oakland’s Ghost Ship Fire on December 2nd, East Bay municipalities, looking to avoid appearing cavalier about public safety in the face of intense and building public scrutiny, have been on a tear seeking to root out fire hazards. In Oakland and Berkeley they've already started finding violations in makeshift warehouse live/work housing settlements. In Emeryville, they only need to look in the mirror.
Behold the newly remodeled Emeryville Police Department 2nd floor public lobby: fine so long as there’s not a fire…but if there is, you’re gunna die. That’s because the only way out besides the elevator is through a set of locked doors that lead to a stairway to the outside and safety; a clear cut major fire code violation. And a major public safety hazard.
The Alameda County Fire Department as well as the city manager of the City of Emeryville, the chief of police and the chief building inspector have all known about this problem for years as a result of numerous public complaints. But they've been kicking this embarrassing public safety violation can down the road all that time leaving the fire safety issue still unresolved. After December 2nd, there will be perhaps a new found sense of urgency.
Death Trap The police department's public lobby. Doors on the left open up to stairs that lead outside. But during a fire (and all other times as well), they're locked.
The public officials were all alerted to the condition after the City undertook a major $2.7 million taxpayer funded remodel, finished in 2012. The construction work which took two years to complete was done ostensibly to improve public safety but the public was safer before when the building's escape stairs weren’t located behind set of permanently locked doors says a fire department employee. The source within the Alameda County Fire Department who wished to remain anonymous agrees the newly remodeled lobby at the police department is a public fire hazard that should be addressed but doesn’t hold much hope for a fix.
While the City of Emeryville starts its search for fire code violations amid artist's home/studios and local businesses, the hypocrisy is not lost on the fire department employee, "All businesses in Emeryville are required to have annual fire inspections, however government buildings are not under the same scrutiny. It's a loophole that allows violations to slip through the cracks”, the anonymous source told the Tattler.
It was conjectured that the reason the doors at the police station became permanently locked as part of the remodel, was to save police personnel the trouble of having to fumble for keys as they traverse through two doors that would have been constructed on either side of the former public stairway if public safety had been foremost in the City's mind during the remodel planning stage.
Notified that the Tattler would make this public safety hazard public and perhaps not sensing any irony, officials at the Emeryville Police Department refused to unlock the door for photo documentation of the formerly public stairs for this story. They also refused comment for this story as did City Hall officials and Alameda County Fire Department officials, save the one employee who wished anonymity.
Community: Emeryville Bicycle Safety Rodeo this Saturday! FREE RAFFLE-WIN A BIKE!
The City of Emeryville is hosting a Kids to Parks Day celebration at Doyle Hollis Park this Saturday May 17th from 2pm to 4pm. The Community Services Department will be out with fun activities in the park and the Police Department will be hosting a Bicycle Safety Rodeo on 62nd Street next to the park. The Police Department has 40 FREE kids helmets of various sizes. Get there early if you want one, once they're gone, they're gone!
The Emeryville Police Officers Association will be there and has generously donated snacks and three shiny NEW bicycles to raffle off. The raffle is free to enter for kids (1 ticket each). You do not need to enter the bicycle rodeo to get a raffle ticket, just come on down and play! The raffle will be held at 3:30pm and you must be present to win.
.tiff)