The Tattler is 15 Years Old

Emeryville's Oldest and the Longest Lived Independent News Source

The Tattler is 15

The Tattler is 15 years old today!  That makes us the oldest and longest running news site about Emeryville in Emeryville history.  And like 15 year olds everywhere, we’re rebellious and we're generally pissed off.  We are little but we punch up.  We take on authority.  A decade and a half is a long time to be taking on the rich and the powerful for a scrappy little online news outlet that doesn't take a penny from anyone.  So our 15th birthday is fairly noteworthy.

Back when we started, business was king in Emeryville, controlled by corporate developers with an obsequious four person City Council majority willing to rubber-stamp every development proposal.  Now, business is still king but we have an obsequious four person City Council majority willing to rubber-stamp every development proposal.  Wait…what?…

We're 15 and we're pissed.

It’s true, we’re sad to report: the elite power dynamic in our town is precisely what it was 15 years ago.  Fifteen years of gum shoe reporting has amounted to the following change: Whereas before, developers wanted to build suburban style auto-centric shopping malls, now they want to build all rental market rate apartment blocks.  Fifteen years on, developers are still having their way with us but the profit maximizing overlord these corporate developers pray to has changed the building type.  

The people of Emeryville have nothing to do with this.  They're outta the loop.  But the Tattler has been trying to cut average citizens back in.  If history has taught us anything it's that persistence is needed when it comes to the question of control of the public commons.  The people with money have persistance.  Ordinary people generally don’t.  Against this dreary backdrop, the Tattler continues on.  

We did have a short lived flowering of democracy in Emeryville some 13 years ago when citizen activism and the Tattler helped deliver a two person progressive City Council minority with a discredited and dispirited conservative majority that was willing to break bread with the progressives.  It was during that brief 4-5 year progressive period when Emeryville took leadership status in the Bay Area and the Council passed our landmark minimum wage ordinance, showing everyone the dynamism of people power.  That enlightenment period didn’t last long and rejuvenated conservative forces soon took power back at City Hall.  But it was people over profits for a New York minute in Emeryville.  Alas, progressive movements always tend to be short lived and a conservative and angry majority can always be counted on to come roaring back.  Sound familiar?

Doing the kind of work the Tattler does always brings the haters.  They seem to come in waves, dependent on how far up we stick our head.  Progressives are rarely as angry and passion filled.  They tend to stick to the business of delivering public policy that works for the public.  Irrational conservatives are where the anger has always resided in our town (and beyond).  It's what you would expect.  What’s new, is the Emeryville City Hall that itself has joined with the traditional haters and even surpassed them.  Our City Attorney is actively trying to take the Tattler down, so perturbed is he at the prospects of local journalism pushing for accountability at City Hall (more on that in a coming Tattler story).  Readers should know, the Tattler has never backed down from a fight.  We will continue on even with the full power of the entire City Hall leveled against us.  They have been going extra-legal in their attempts to shut us down recently but we have the law on our side and we intend to use it to our advantage.

15 Years Old:
If the Tattler were a young Mexican woman,
we'd be wearing this dress today.

We’ve made a lot of powerful enemies doing what we do here and we've always managed to hold our own. But with a rogue city hall now enjoined, the consequences of the new paradigm are likely to get conspicuous. 

It should get pretty exciting around here.

So change happened in Emeryville years ago but then it changed back.  There have probably been some nation-wide mega trends at work adversely influencing our politics in our little town.  One change that appears to be permanent is the fact that most City Council members now ride their bikes, even some of the ones who support the takeover of our public housing policy by YIMBY Real Estate Investment Trust corporations.  That’s a positive change we'll take….we suppose. 

In the ways we've elucidated here, one could argue that the Tattler has a juvenile take on what the ‘adults’ in Emeryville do.  We’re outraged at their audacity and we’re rebelling against these power elites, be they in City Hall or in the far flung corporate boardrooms that control our town.  Like we did 15 years ago when we took up this fight for the public commons, we do this work because nobody else is doing it and because we believe that people, ultimately, will act in their interests if they have the information they need to see how their interests are being subverted.

It’s all quite rebellious at the Tattler.  But it’s also optimistic at its core.  Optimism that democracy will have the final say: that’s what separates the Tattler from most 15 year olds.  At the risk of being branded as a pollyanna, we're going to continue on telling Emeryville residents what they need to know about what's going on in Emeryville.

So while it's true we're rebellious at 15, we've always been rebellious.  Fifteen years old: that’s usually around the time people expect little rebels to morph into adults, to settle down and accept life as it is.  Here at the Tattler, all we can say on that score is don't hold your breath: we're going to continue fucking shit up (journalistically).

Interested readers can track these birthday celebrations at the Tattler.  We celebrated at one year, five years, and ten years.  You can track how we saw ourselves at one year and at five years as being pugnacious with massive forces aligned against us until at ten years, we were starting to say the Tattler had achieved some level of victory, and how Emeryville had transformed into a much better town (only to see it fall back into the clutches of conservatives with today's fifteen year story).

The Tattler Celebrates Five Years

The Emeryville Tattler turned five in February and during our month long celebration, we re-blasted some oldies but goodies from the archives. 

We finish the celebration with a piece from Wednesday June 5, 2013.

The Emery School District pulled out all the stops to kill a bike/pedestrian path required by Emeryville's General Plan on the western property line of the Center of 'Community' Life.  The sad epic included copious amounts of lying to the City Council and the people of Emeryville.  Ultimately, the District won their fight against walking and biking by indefinitely postponing building the required path.  The losers were the people of Emeryville.  The Tattler documented the entire tale as it unfolded in several editions.

Here's the story, titled "School District Moves Against Bicycling at Center of 'Community' Life", one of our reader's faves:

June 5, 2013

"Pimps and Drug Dealers" Will Prey On 

Our Children

No Intent to Build Required Path

The Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee ruled Monday against a plethora of high level authorities that had assembled at the City Hall meeting asking to approve a plan for bike parking at Emeryville's proposed new school and to remove a bike path adjoining the school.  After the Committee voted unanimously to require the path be built and the City Council concurred in April, the Committee was descended upon Monday by a dozen City and School District staff members and department heads.  Included in the fray was the Superintendent of the Schools, the Chief of Police, the head of the Recreation Department and the President of the School Board all pleading for the Committee reverse its earlier vote to compel the District to install the required bicycle/pedestrian path adjoining the incipient Center of Community Life.  The Committee refused Monday to reverse the earlier vote. The assembled group uniformly expressed concern that the proposed bike pedestrian path, called the ECCL Path, would attract a criminal element and that the children at the adjacent school would be imperiled.

Monday's appeal to the Bike/Ped Committee seems to represent a desire on the School District's part to get as much support as possible for not building the ECCL Path but the District indicated it has no intention of building the path in the foreseeable future regardless of the Bike/Ped Committee and the City Council vote forcing them to.  

"I'm Sorry, I Don't Have That Information" Part 2

The throng also asked the Committee members to accept a bike parking component of the Center of Community Life plan but the Committee rebuffed the proposal citing insufficient parking spaces. The plan called for 44 total bike parking spots (22 secure) for the entire Center of Community Life which will include 800 students plus teachers and staff plus the Recreation Department faculty and staff plus members of the public.

Emery schools architect Roy Miller
Again, he doesn't have the information.

The Committee attempted to determine how much bike parking would be appropriate based on how many people would be using the site on a given day, the standard metric the Committee uses as it recommends bike parking for commercial projects in town.  The School District architect, Roy Miller told stunned Committee members he had no idea how many people could be expected to be on the site leaving them unable to make an informed decision, "I'm sorry, I don't have that information" he said, in a moment of deja vu.  Mr Miller had uttered the same remark to the planning Commission and then the City Council in April about size of the existing school pool deck, as those decision making bodies attempted to determine whether to shrink the deck to make way for the ECCL Path.

After Mr Miller punted on the number of people expected at the Center of Community Life on a daily basis, the Bike/Ped Committee members determined on their own it must be more than 1000 and they called for at least 10% bike parking spots or 100 for the cramped site, a number that seemed to stun the school officials.

"Classist"

Schools Superintendent Debra Lindo
Bike/Ped paths are bad..."drastic" even 

So why are WE being picked on? It's not fair!

The meeting was punctuated with plenty of hyperbole and overblown bombast as the authorities attempted to throw their weight around and intimidate the Committee members.  Two school security personnel testified that the bike/ped path would be crawling with criminals preying on the school children, upping the ante of the previous "gang rape" rhetoric from Council member Nora Davis.  The chief of school security, Ken Wright noted thugs and criminals would use the path as an access point; "pimps and drug dealers" would be "cutting holes in the fence" to get at the children he said.  In an emotional plea, he hinted children could be "taken" and he said no one would want that on their conscience.

Schools Superintendent Debra Lindo said the bike/ped path is "drastic" and she complained that it is unfair that the neighboring private school, Escuela Bilingue Internacional (EBI) was released from a proposed path alongside that facility while the Center of Community Life is being forced to accepted its path, a double standard.  She called the April decision by the City Council allowing removal the EBI Path "classist",  owing to the advantaged private school and disadvantaged public school dynamic.

Ms Lindo and the anti-ECCL Path crew plans on taking its show on the road after the drubbing it suffered at the Bike/Ped Committee Monday.  They plan on giving the Committee a tour of the site in the near future in hopes of peeling off a majority of Committee members before appealing to the City Council at a later date.

The Tattler Celebrates Five Years

The Emeryville Tattler turned five in February and we're re-posting some of our favorite stories and the reader's favorites during our month-long celebration.  As the news cycle permits, look to see some of these oldies but goodies re-blasted. 

We continue the celebration with a piece from Wednesday December 8, 2010.

 As "Mr Testicles" was greeting Pixar employees arriving to work, the Tattler story about it went viral.  Some readers weren't happy with the story and one commenter called the story "vulgar".  Note the low res photo from an early camera phone.

Here's the story, titled "Emeryville Police Gets A Pair", one of our reader's faves:

December 8, 2010

"Mr Testicles" Solicits Help From Pixar

This morning the Emeryville police responded to an unusual call:  "There's someone dressed up as a man's private parts in front of the Pixar entrance."  Police checked out the lone costumed picketer and left the scene to attend to the seminal work of crime fighting.  The individual seeking to gain Pixar's attention distributed business cards reading:

Pixar can you help? We are a small innovative charity hoping to inspire your support. Can you help us? www.malecancer.org

 The charity's website reveals that this is "Mr. Testicles" which is part of the Male Cancer Awareness Campaign, which seeks to challenge the "prevailing ‘culture of embarrassment’, that discourages men from discussing and resolving problems related to intimate parts of their body."  The charity argues that "too many men die of prostate, bowel andtesticular cancer because they do not know how to detect the symptoms in the early stages, when treatment would be more effective."
Perhaps the funniest call that the EPD will receive today might also be their most important.  Have you or the men in your life been screened?
The American Cancer Society provides guidelines on who should be screened (and when) on their website: 

ProstrateCancer:http://www.cancer.org/Healthy/FindCancerEarly/CancerScreeningGuidelines/american-cancer-society-guidelines-for-the-early-detection-of-cancer
TesticularCancer:http://www.cancer.org/cancer/testicularcancer/detailedguide/testicular-cancer-detection

The Tattler Celebrates Five Years

The Emeryville Tattler turned five in February and we're re-posting some of our favorite stories and the reader's favorites during our month-long celebration.  As the news cycle permits, look to see some of these oldies but goodies re-blasted. 

We continue the celebration with a piece from Sunday June 5, 2011.

The Emeryville Tattler's reporting has been a force for change at City Hall since its inception and this 2011 story has been perhaps the most influential of all.  

Emeryville politicians now universally agree there needs to be more family friendly housing built in our town.  It wasn't always like that.  Many residents had for years challenged the City Council to get developers to build more of this kind of housing, especially after the School District took on the task of rebuilding the schools with the Center of 'Community' Life project.  But for decades, the Council showed no interest in family friendly housing, deferring instead strictly to market forces.  That all changed after the Tattler released this story that depicted a dysfunctional Emeryville within the Bay Area through an unflattering independent report from the University of California.   

Here's the story, titled "Scathing Emeryville Housing Report Released", one of our faves: 

June 5, 2011

Long Anticipated Goldman Report Released:

Report: Council bungled unprecedented boom, leaving Emeryville and its schools in disarray, downward spiral

Emeryville's leaders have squandered unprecedented opportunities over the last quarter century in their rush to reconstruct a crumbling industrial core into a retail Mecca. Rather than an urban oasis, leaders have delivered a gleaming, yet demographically unstable post-industrial city, according to a new report from UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.

The May 5th report titled Building a Community: Affordable Family-Friendly Housing in Emeryville  found that giving housing developers a free hand has resulted in a preponderance of one-bedroom apartments and trendy open-plan lofts, but a dearth of housing suitable for growing families.

The report faults the council for refusing to use its authority to compel developers to produce housing that meets the needs of the real world. Instead, the council's laissez-faire coda has allowed development firms to deliver a plethora of cheaper-to-construct lofts and jam more, smaller units, into a building of the same footprint, maximizing profits.

With only a handful of family appropriate housing units, Emeryville has become increasingly a transient city, a place young people depart once singles begin pairing off and starting families.

New Emeryville housing: One 

bedroom units with parking 

on the ground level.

City Council Neglectful

The Goldman report blasts Emeryville, noting that families with children constitutes only 7 percent of the total population, a number that is "exceedingly low" compared to 33 percent nationally.  What few families do make a home in Emeryville, have a tendency to leave as their children get to be of school age because, "the housing developments do not meet the needs of growing families," according to the report.

Further, the report sees few encouraging signs for improvement in the near term. The city council continues to abdicate its responsibility to attain a more balanced mix of units from developers for at least the next three years. "While the city is expecting to increase its housing stock by 64% over the next 30 years, this will most likely not ameliorate the issue because, of the 1,281 new dwelling units the city has issued building permits to be built by 2014, the vast majority are more single bedroom luxury condos and apartments."

Open plan (no bedrooms) lofts 

turns their backs to the street; 

not conducive for families. 

Schools Pay The Price

The report also links poor student achievement within the Emery Unified School District in part on the lack of family housing.

The report's author, Master of Public Policy candidate Homayra Yusufi, is unequivocal; "Without adequate housing that accommodates the needs of families and encourages a strong sense of community, it will be difficult for the [school] district to increase enrollment and improve academic outcomes".

Ms. Yusufi notes that research demonstrates a "strong link" between housing and education. "The negative impacts of the lack of adequate housing can be seen in Emery Unified School District in that the district has considerably high attrition rates, which are constantly substituted by incoming inter-district transfers.  Due to the small size of the district, this greatly affects the district's overall academic performance".

One bedroom condos above,
empty retail below.

The lack of adequate family housing contributes to a high level of school "mobility"--- families that frequently move, enroll their children in different schools.  The report notes that high levels of mobility reduces academic performance by degrading the cohesive school environment and "greatly hinders the ability of teachers to teach effectively within the classroom".  Teachers are constantly being forced to assist new students and must backtrack and reteach information to the new students who are lagging behind, the report noted.

No Family Housing, No Accident

Emeryville's Redevelopment Agency, with its state mandated requirement that no less than 20 percent of all new housing be affordable, hasn't been any help in delivering family friendly housing.  The report notes that, left to their own devices, developers will not build family friendly housing since there is more profit in building single bedroom condos or lofts.  Since the Emeryville city council hasn't pushed developers to build family housing, the affordable housing that has been produced has been almost uniformly one bedroom units.  The report goes on to say Emeryville's affordable housing  "has mainly attracted senior citizens and disabled persons without children".

Even as the population has surged over the past two decades, Emeryville has actually lost families.  The housing breakdown in terms of newly constructed units since 2008 is illustrative of the city's lack of will to build family housing.  The report shows just 4 percent of the newly built housing are single family units, a number the report calls an "extremely low percentage, even for the Bay Area."

More one bedroom units but with
a twist; below is parking and a
shopping mall.

Emeryville's Housing Committee, hand selected by the city council, has placed concern over this issue on the back burner.  The issue was not seen fit to be included in the committee's list of seven goals for housing city-wide included in the "Housing Element" the committee contributed to the city's general plan.

In a bright spot, the report noted that residents nevertheless appear willing to support their schools as evidenced by the recent approval of Measure J, aimed at rebuilding Emeryville's school facilities. The report suggests that this may spill over to residents asking or even demanding that the city build new family friendly housing to support the school investment.

The Tattler Celebrates Five Years

The Emeryville Tattler turned five in February and we're re-posting some of our favorite stories and the reader's favorites during our month-long celebration.  As the news cycle permits, look to see some of these oldies but goodies re-blasted. 

We continue the celebration with a piece from Thursday 12/26/2013.
It's an opinion/news analysis about how all the low wage/ low benefit fast food and retail built by the City Council majority over a generation has been undercutting resident's values and about how the pernicious effects of this glut of service sector jobs can be offset by worker owned co-operatives.  With the minimum wage story so much in the news of late, these worker owned kinds of service jobs can leapfrog past the usurious and oppressive model offered by standard corporate fare and other bottom line driven business models.  It was presented in 2013 but it's relevant today. 

Here's the story, titled "'Worker Owned Co-Operatives' Needed to Restore Emeryville's Tarnished Reputation", one of our reader's faves: 

December 26, 2013

A Large Corporate Low Wage Service Sector 

Makes For a Town Without a Soul 

We Need Living Wage Jobs

Enter Worker Owned Co-Ops

Opinion/News Analysis

There's been much public debate in Emeryville over the years over how to best develop our town even as City Hall long ago settled on a pro-developer course, regardless of the debate.  As a result of this willful ignorance, many have come to rightfully condemn Emeryville decision makers over the flawed auto-centric model of development those decision makers have brought to our town over the last 20 some odd years.  This model, favored by developers, has brought us lots of shopping malls and drive-in drive-out lofts (formally condos, now morphing into one bedroom 100% rental projects).

This is well understood by Emeryville residents as our town's once unique character is eroded and the streets become ever more clogged with traffic.

But what's been debated less is how this model, resplendent with fast food franchises and retail chain stores, also brings a plethora of low wage/ no benefits service jobs that seem to be attached at the hip with this brand of development.  So ubiquitous now is this kind of development in Emeryville, minimum wage/ zero benefits service sector jobs have fairly come to be seen as representative of Emeryville and its values by the greater community.

This is who we are at this point, like it or not.

This is Emeryville
Minimum wage / no benefits;
the corporate service sector is
who we now are.

As Emeryville starts a new building spree in the wake of a recovering regional economy and with a finite amount of land left to develop, we need a new development model to fill out our town, one that will temper our 20 year binge of alienating, unsustainable and usurious development.  We need a new paradigm of public policy out of City Hall to create retail service sector jobs that pay a living wage and treat their workers with respect and dignity.  We need to become a model for how cities can move forward instead of a model for what's gone wrong in the Bay Area and beyond.

Attracting worker owned co-operatives to our town offers us the chance to remake our image and reclaim a city that more properly reflects our values.

Formerly known as a mecca for high paying mostly blue collar jobs in the East Bay, Emeryville long ago jettisoned that mantle, now instead there's been a wholesale embracing of the corporate low wage service sector model.  In so doing, not only have we thrown our town over to cars and all the degraded environment that comes with that, we also have shirked our civic moral duties to build a town that works for everybody.  The fact that we didn't shirk these duties in the past means we can do it again.  We can create a new municipal polity.

Enter Worker Owed Co-Ops

Businesses where the workers themselves own the enterprise represent a different model for how retail stores and other business can be refashioned in Emeryville.  These worker owned businesses offer a living wage and benefits for their workers. They also offer Emeryville residents a moral choice as they comport their daily transactions in the commons.

 So what exactly is a worker owned co-op?  The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC or "no boss"), the oldest and largest regional association of democratic workplaces in the United States, tell us these kinds of businesses are enterprises that produce goods, distributes goods and/or provides services and are owned and democratically controlled by its worker-owners.  Worker owned cooperatives generally have comparable or better pay (salary/wages plus profit-sharing) and benefits than comparably-sized conventional businesses in similar industries.  This is because the worker-owners decide what percentage of profits will go to themselves and what percentage will be retained by the cooperative.  Moreover, worker cooperatives don’t have overpaid managers, owners and outside shareholders who siphon money from the business.  These businesses allow money spent by residents to stay in the community, bolstering the local economy.  Worker owned co-ops run the gamut on types of businesses from bike shops and restaurants to web services, financial services and bookstores.  Just about any business can be a worker owned co-op.

Emeryville already has two such worker owned co-ops right now, San Pablo Avenue's Arizmendi Bakery and Pedal Express, a bicycle courier company on Powell Street. 

Pedal Express

Pedal Express is the East Bay's only bicycle courier company.  They have been worker owned and operated for the past twenty years and perhaps ironically count the City of Emeryville as one of their clients.

Co-owner Dominic Lucchesi says Pedal Express offers a different vision from Emeryville's current business sector model.  He told the Tattler, "Cooperatives provide long-term job opportunities with growth potential.  We at Pedal Express pride ourselves on paying a living wage, offering meaningful benefits, and encouraging flexibility and creativity.  The cooperative model also provides workers with a sense of ownership and connection to their community and its businesses.  These desirable qualities are often lacking in the low-paying service sector jobs that are all too common in today's corporate franchises and big box stores."

Arizmendi Bakery vs Panera Bakery

Arizmendi Bakery has operated at 4301 San Pablo Avenue since 2003 after former councilman John Fricke worked to attract the popular cooperative to the newly built Emeryville Promenade amid skeptical colleagues on the Council.  The bakery has been extremely popular offering a locally owned counter point to the national chain restaurant  I-HOP also in the Promenade development.

Arizmendi Bakery and Panera Bakery on 40th Street offers us a chance to directly compare the two business models:

Arizmendi Bakery (worker owned cooperative model)-

• pays at least $16 per hour
• full health insurance and dental coverage for all
• worker owned and democratically run
• worker/owners share in year end profits
• stipends paid for work related purchases
• five Bay Area locations
• Emeryville store is independently owned

Panera Bakery (standard Emeryville corporate model)-

• pays employees $8.06 per hour
• no benefits
• stockholder owned and run by CEO and Board of Directors
• more than 1500 locations across the US and Canada
• corporate headquarters in St Louis MO
• Emeryville unit sends its profits to the corporate headquarters

Worker owned cooperatives have also been shown to increase social justice and stability.  Cal Berkeley graduate student Amanda Cook, wrote a 2009 thesis documenting this benefit.  From her study, "In many conventional workplaces, workers perceive their interests as opposing corporate interests. Worker cooperatives, on the other hand, promote the idea that business practices should be compatible with everyone’s interests. Instead of becoming a battleground for individual and corporate interests, worker cooperatives adopt a family-like atmosphere of support, mutual responsibility, and, of course, cooperation."    

Ms Cook documents how worker cooperatives provide benefit to workers and the surrounding community in three major ways; she shows how this work "...is intrinsically valuable, participatory democracy is an educational activity, and active participation in decision making in one social sphere is likely to encourage active participation in other spheres."

The plight of minimum and low wage workers has been much in the news recently as fast food and other workers take to the streets to protest.  The corporate model is cruel and not sustainable.  These workers cannot survive on these wages and many are forced to use food stamps and other government provided services to make ends meet. Besides being an unethical abdication of government duty, this model represents a transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the wealthy.  Emeryville has been complicit in this.

However Dave Karoly of NoBAWC says it doesn't have to be this way, "There is no reason why there can't be more than two worker owned cooperatives in Emeryville.  The establishment of more (worker) cooperatives in Emeryville would help change the perception of people living outside Emeryville that the city is just a destination for retail chain shopping" he told the Tattler.

The Emeryville Chamber of Commerce, historically an advocacy group for Emeryville's largest corporations on the other hand doesn't appear to be comfortable with such worker empowerment talk.  Chamber CEO Bob Canter was contacted for this story but he refused to comment.

Developers, itching to take advantage of a newly favorable market (especially in rental properties), are loading up the agendas at the Planning Commission and at City Council meetings.  A glut of new residential development is moving forward towards permit approval at City Hall from the Sherwin Williams project to the Avalon Bay project, to the Market Place development to the (just approved) Maz project, and there's more in the pipeline.  These development proposals all contain retail components along their respective street fronts.  This is where a new polity of worker owned cooperatives can be developed.

We need to realize how un-radical this whole idea is....or should be.  Neighboring cities are expanding these cooperatives and they're realizing the benefits.  Indeed, our own General Plan requires us to approve development that provides jobs for Emeryville residents.  These low wage service sector jobs aren't cutting it.  Workers at these jobs have to travel to our town for their employment since these corporate service jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in Emeryville.  This type of retail and fast food development is expressly forbidden by Emeryville's General Plan and yet there doesn't seem to be much of an interest among the decision makers at City Hall to rectify this.

Emeryville's new mayor Jac Asher is an outlier.  She agrees worker owned cooperatives offer a better way for Emeryville moving forward and she has publicly called for it.

We like Mayor Asher's idea; let's start adding these worker owned neighborhood enhancing kinds of retail establishments as conditions of approval for these incipient development proposals across town.  We've had more than our share of the neighborhood degrading and morally bankrupt low wage service sector development here thank you.  Let's finally start the job of making a livable town here in Emeryville.

The Tattler Celebrates Five Years

The Emeryville Tattler turned five in February and we're re-posting some of our favorite stories and the reader's favorites during our month-long celebration.  As the news cycle permits, look to see some of these oldies but goodies re-blasted. 

We continue the celebration with a piece from Sunday 8/22/2010.

The Apollo Crematorium, a source of much consternation in the Park Avenue neighborhood, continues on with it's dirty business in our town even after several attempts by City Hall to shuffle it off to Richmond and other locales.  As we posted this story, Oakland was fighting off Emeryville's attempt to move the crematorium to that town.  Apollo's tenacity bested the assisted living community of 40th Street neighbor AgeSong, since replaced by another assisted living entity Bay Side Park.

Here's the story, titled "I See Dead People", one of our reader's faves:  

August 22, 2010

There's Dead People On The Side Of The Building

Don't accuse the dearly departed of not leaving a mark.

It's certainly not true of those cremated by Apollo Crematorium, one of the state's most busy incinerators of human remains.

The longstanding Emeryville business, whose attempted relocation to Richmond was scuppered by protest, continues to operate where it always has. But the once heavily industrial area is now blossoming with chic loft residences and sprouting trendy businesses.

Richmond residents, already enduring refinery releases, successfully blocked the move in 2007 citing mercury toxicity, presumably from burnt fillings.

Meanwhile, though the crematorium and its smokestacks have been hemmed in by development, it is no longer invisible to casual observers.

An off-white ashen smear mars more than 100 square feet of the metal-clad side of AgeSong, a $29 million assisted living facility with about 160 residents. The discoloration reaches all the way up to the building's roof deck.

While death is ultimately part of life, having 3,000 to 4,000 cremations a year drifting past your window, maybe a little bit more of a reminder than necessary that life is after all cruel, brutish and short.

The Tattler Celebrates Five Years

The Emeryville Tattler turned five in February and we're re-posting some of our favorite stories and the reader's favorites during our month-long celebration.  As the news cycle permits, look to see some of these oldies but goodies re-blasted. 

We continue the celebration with a piece from Tuesday January 11, 2011.

Republican Party apparatchik and Christian evangelical Sam Hardage, CEO of Woodfin Suites Hotels had just been forced by Emeryville (and the courts) to pay his Emeryville workers their back wages as mandated by Emeryville's Measure C, the 'living wage for hotel workers'.  City Council members (except Ruth Atkin) all fought against Measure C before the election but were obliged to enforce it once Emeryville voters passed it.  Mr Hardage spent far more on attorney fees fighting Emeryville then he owed his workers.  The victory for Emeryville culminated in the wages being distributed to the workers after a nearly five year battle including big weekly protests in front of the hotel on Shellmound Street and the largest protest march in Emeryville history (from the hotel to City Hall) .  After his defeat, Mr Hardage decided he had enough of Emeryville and he sold the hotel to Hyatt House and left town with his tail between his legs.

Here's the story, one of our faves:  

1/11/2011

Woodfin CEO & Christian Evangelical Laments:

In Emeryville It's 

Woodfin Workers: 1, Jesus: 0

Loser

Woodfin Hotels CEO Sam Hardage tries to do the Lord's work.  A self-professed Christian evangelical, he's a member of the Council for National Policy,  a right-wing group pushing what it terms Christian precepts on policy-makers.  It's also why Mr. Hardage fought so hard against Emeryville's 'Living Wage ordinance for Hotel Workers' and then refused to disburse unpaid wages, even after ordered to do so by a 'secular' court.  As a good Christian, Mr. Hardage was presumably following Christ's example. After all Jesus would certainly never have paid His workers what they earned if He had owned a hotel chain back in the day in the Bethlehem/Nazareth metropolitan region.  Mr. Hardage put up a good fight but in the end the Woodfin workers proved more than a match for Sam or Jesus.

Sam Hardage: Works

for Jesus and against

his employees.

The non-profit organization East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), recently announced that Woodfin workers finally received their back pay, some $125,000 in a negotiated agreement divided among 54 workers.  Woodfin for its part, hired a phalanx of attorneys and fought the workers and the City of Emeryville for four years in an effort to impose upon the employees the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ: that the wealthy dwell upon a mountain of riches and dispatch the less fortunate to penury and pestilence. Mr. Hardage and Woodfin spent an undisclosed sum on their losing cause, a figure likely exceeding what was owed to the hotel maids.  After their bruising loss, they have indicated they now intend on obeying Emeryville's laws.

Nora Davis:

Not too fond of

working families.

Measure C, the ordinance that mandates a living wage for hotel workers in Emeryville was passed by voters and implemented five years ago in December.  During that time, Measure C has delivered a cumulative 1.2 million increase in employee wages. The ordinance increased the pay-rates by up to $5 per hour (most received less), putting up to $5,000 a year into the wallets of working families, helping them make ends meet without relying on public assistance.

Ken Bukowski: He's poor so

why should workers make money?

The Measure was passed by Emeryville voters on November 8, 2005 and was endorsed by the Alameda Labor Council, UNITE HERE Local 2850, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Assemblywoman Loni Hancock.  54% of Emeryville voters approved Measure C despite $115,000 spent by the Chamber of Commerce and the hotels to defeat it.  Local politicians who worked to defeat the living wage in Emeryville include Council members Nora Davis, Ken Bukowski and Dick Kassis.  Political operative and Chamber of Commerce political action committee (EMPAC) chairman John Gooding also joined in the fight against the living wage.  See Tattler story (May 18).

Another loser: John Gooding,

strangely he works for Barbara Lee

and against living wages.

Mr. Hardage, in addition to spreading Jesus' word, has sat on many conservative councils and public policy think-tanks including the Council for National Policy, an umbrella organization for social conservative activists described by the New York Times as a "little known group of the most powerful conservatives in the country".  Mr. Hardages' colleagues on the CNP board included Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.   Mr. Hardage also sits on the board at the Adam Smith Institute, an anti-government libertarian think tank that is among the most effective groups advocating for privatization of government functions in the United States.  Rounding out the list of powerful appointments is the Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger  appointed State Commission on Judicial Performance.

Mr. Hardage was the Republican nominee for Governor of Kansas in 1982 and was twice an elite 'Bush Pioneer,' the highest echelon of campaign donors that each bundled contributions of more than $100,000 for former President George W. Bush campaigns.

The impressive political work of Mr. Hardage was joined by our own Emeryville City Council members and Jesus in their fight against living wages for Emeryville workers.