Mayor Ally Medina Finishes a Lackluster Term

Q: How Did Mayor Medina Do on 

Her Pet Issues of Bikes and Parks?

A: Zilch

Opinion
And so ends the downbeat tenure of Emeryville mayor Ally Medina.  Tuesday night Ms Medina hands over the mayoralty to Council member Christian Patz, ending the Medina era of …..what exactly?  Well, it’s not bike transportation or parks, the two issues that were central to her election campaign as she ran for City Council in 2016.  On those issues, she was a dud.  A non-starter.  Anything else?  What did Mayor Medina do for Emeryville during her term as mayor?  The readers will be forgiven if they struggle with this.
The answer is: very little.

Mayor Ally Medina Posing With A Bike
Irony alert!
Use agitprop to turn your
liability into an asset.

Truth be told, one could make an argument we’re being generous when we say Mayor Medina did nothing of consequence during her year long term.  On her two pet issues, conspicuously proclaimed on the campaign trail ("I am personally committed to taking the lead" she said at the time), she's actually taken us backward.
Regarding bikes, Mayor Medina has made it clear she doesn’t like our bike boulevard system.  It’s a stance we wish she had made clear before she made all her promises as a Council candidate.  Ten years ago, Emeryville spent $200,000 and countless hours of volunteer citizen effort formulating our Bike Plan, the central tenet of which is our bike boulevard network.  It would have been nice to know at the time that a candidate running for Council held it in such contempt.

Candidate Medina said she would implement our Bike Plan but Mayor Medina now says protected bike lanes are better.  So she set about ignoring the clear and mounting problems of excess traffic on the 45th and 53rd street bike boulevards, putting bikers in harm’s way.  The Bike Plan has a prescription for how to make boulevards safe for bikers….and a timeline.  There are too many cars and trucks on those two bike priority streets according to a traffic count conducted by the City more than two years ago.  As soon as that information was gathered, the City had two years to implement a regime of traffic calming as delineated by the Bike Plan.  Then the clock ran out for Mayor Medina to install the required traffic calming.  But it's not as if she didn't have enough time.  She simply let it languish during her entire term as mayor.  Inexplicably, she refused to even let the Bike Committee discuss the issue as she steadfastly refused to explain the inaction that has effectively taken the safety of bicyclists out of the purview of the City of Emeryville, at least on those two streets.

Mayor Medina’s experiment with protected bike lanes, her unilateral answer to our bike boulevard network, has been a disaster.  Horton Street, a street with a huge amount of traffic but still listed in the books as a bike boulevard (despite a final ruling against it by Council members Dianne Martinez and Scott Donahue in 2016), has drawn her in.  Mayor Medina, who serves as the Council liaison to the Bike/Ped Advisory Committee, instructed Public Works to install plastic bollards near the Amtrak Station meant to separate bikes and vehicles instead of implementing the Bike Plan's traffic calming regimen.  Horton, like 45th and 53rd streets is a street with too much vehicle traffic to be safe for bikers, and the bollards have caused commercial vehicles to park on the sidewalks and in the bike lanes, trapping the cyclists and causing them to veer sharply out into moving traffic.  It’s an issue that a local TV news station highlighted as complaints poured into City Hall.
If Ms Medina and the City had simply followed the Bike Plan and installed its traffic calming measures, Horton Street would be safe for bicycling with plenty of parking spaces for cars and yellow curbs for commercial trucks.  But bike boulevards are an issue the Mayor and the City can’t seem to countenance, never mind all the crowing at election time. 

Regarding parks, another self proclaimed favorite topic of our mayor, Emeryville is epic: as in epically bad.  Our city is the worst in the entire East Bay as far as parks go.  Parks and open space service is measured in residents per acre and at some 500 people per acre of park, a number that keeps rising as we keep increasing our population, residents here are green space starved.
Meanwhile, our General Plan is very clear about this issue: parks are essential and it’s resolved: all new large residential projects are supposed to offset the degradation in the parks-to-residents ratio by providing no less than three acres per thousand new residents.  Unfortunately, Emeryville has failed utterly on this issue and Mayor Medina, who sanctimoniously said we could trust her on parks, has done nothing during her term as mayor to address the issue all while the condition continues to get worse.

The Sherwin Williams Tree Debacle
Council Member Medina sees what
the developer tells her to see: dead and
dying trees.
Everybody else sees healthy shade
giving trees, doing what trees are
supposed to do.

And then there's the issue of the Sherwin Williams street trees.  Ms Medina went down in flames with the City Hall staff and the developer of that impending construction project who wanted to kill every public street tree fronting it.  Without providing evidence, the developer told us they couldn't save the trees due to underground electrical cables they needed to install.  Besides, the trees in question are dead and dying they told us, over the objections from the City's own arborist.  The developer's performance was enough to convince the staff and Councilwoman Medina.
Ally's colleagues however could see the tree cutting scheme for the con job that it was; a plan to bolster the developer's profit margin at the resident's expense.  Only Council members Martinez and Medina were duped.  The others on the Council saw right through the obvious profit maximizing ploy being foisted by the developer.  Almost two years after calling their bluff, the City Council majority saw the developer and the staff, hats in hands, finally admit the trees could be saved after all.  And a chasented Ally Medina apologizing for her naivety.

While Mayor Medina has certainly been a disappointment, in her defense, it was her misfortune to follow John Bauters.  Mayor Bauters, whom we had our disagreements with during his term, nonetheless used his prodigious if artless political skills to escort Measure C, a $50 million affordable housing bond through to voters.  That plus other consequential policies he enacted made Mayor Bauters a tough act to follow to be sure.  But that doesn’t absolve Mayor Medina who, like them all, is charged with moving Emeryville forward during their terms as mayor.  We would have thought, at least on the issues she claims to champion, Mayor Medina would have made some progress.  We never would have imagined her to shut down the cause of government transparency and accountability as she has done on the issue of the 45th and 53rd street bicycle boulevards.

It gives us no pleasure to say Ally Medina has been a bust as mayor of Emeryville.

Strange Looking Pack of Dogs on Horton Street

People reported a strange looking pack of dogs on the Sherwin Williams site yesterday.

The Sherwin Williams Site on Horton Street

Residents may want to keep small dogs and children indoors until a more detailed report is available.

City Calls For Community/Business Input on Horton Street Bike Boulevard

The City Council is soliciting opinions from the community and businesses on whether or how to implement the Pedestrian/Bicycle Plan with regards to the Horton Street Bike Boulevard:

Towering Office Building Gets OK

Council overturns Planning Commission in a 4-1 vote

By Brian Donahue

A new office tower will join Emeryville's growing skyline after the City Council approved the project over objections from residents and the city's Planning Commission.

Capping many years of wrangling over the "mound site," a sealed toxic EPA Superfund site beneath Emeryville's Amtrak parking lot, the Emeryville City Council approved construction of a 165-foot tall office building Tuesday night on a 4-1 vote. Newly elected council member Jennifer West was the sole dissenter, saying the building was too tall. The vote overrules the city's planning commission, which recently rejected the same project based on concerns that the structure would adversely affect the neighborhood and traffic circulation.

Dubbed the "Emeryville Transit Center," the seven story office building will sit atop a two story parking garage. The structure received about a million dollars in state grants for transit-related infrastructure, despite having only a tangential connection to mass transit. According to earlier plans, part of the garage will be used as a storage facility for out of service Emery-Go-Round shuttle vans.

The project gained traction on the pro-business council despite flaws that likely would have scuppered similar proposals in other Bay Area cities. The structure will be built by Wareham Development, a firm that has delivered the city's Novartis campus, the Bayer Labs facility in Berkeley, the Emeryville Amtrak station and surrounding office buildings. From its conceptual inception until Tuesday night, the "Transit Center" has been showered by official largess and government support.

Beneath the asphalt of the Amtrak parking lot and a layer of clay lies a highly toxic cauldron left behind by Westinghouse which once operated a plant that built transformers and other electrical components on the site. The company escaped liability for the cleanup through a series of mergers, leveraged buy-outs and property divestitures. The chemicals were entombed and designated safe by state and federal officials over a decade ago.

With Tuesday's Council approval, Emeryville taxpayers will subsidize $3 million uncovering and removing thousands of tons of PCB-contaminated soil. The toxic waste will be trucked through local streets to a hazardous waste dump site, likely outside of California.

The structure will be more than double the height allowed under the city's own zoning ordinance. It is also more than four times what was allowed under older rules, which were amended largely to benefit Wareham and other developers. Emeryville's 25-year-old regulations limited buildings to 40 feet high in that neighborhood. The new zoning ordinance, only recently adopted, allows a maximum of 75 feet.

At 165 feet, the Transit Center would seem in obvious violation were it not for special loopholes allowing "transit centers" to rise to "unlimited" heights.

The new general plan, five years in the making, encourages a "central core" of tall buildings to create a 'downtown' district in Emeryville. The further from the central core, the shorter the buildings should become, according to the plan. Sadly for Wareham, the mound site sits outside this designated core. No matter, the company's city council friends added another loophole. Now, tall buildings can rise in the central core AND at Wareham's parcels on Horton Street.

The "transit center's" 825-space garage also violates the new general plan's concepts of actively encouraging alternative transportation, an irony not lost on critics.

According to plans, the office tower will have four bus parking spaces beneath, qualifying it as a "transit center." This linguistic sleight of hand caused consternation among some planning commissioners.

The council's handpicked Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee also raised red flags. That body unanimously warned that the project will destroy the new Horton Street Bike Boulevard by bringing thousands of cars and trucks onto Horton Street every work day.

After activists pointed out that environmental documents for the project failed to note the existence of the 'bike boulevard,' city officials retorted that the boulevard is meaningless, because the council never officially defined what a bike boulevard is, despite designating Horton Street as one.

When activists attempted to publicize the city's linguistic gymnastics, city officials placed a gag order on the writers of the building's traffic study, Berkeley-based LSA Associates, forbidding company employees from discussing the Transit Center document with the public, even privately.

Developer: I am the Law

Wareham Flexes Political Muscle
By Brian Donahue

In an example of how some in Emeryville are more equal than others, a favored developer will likely gain approval for a bulky office tower without answering criticism from Emeryville’s normally pliant Planning Commission.

Wareham Development Corporation, the builder of most of Emeryville’s bio-tech and office complexes, is so confident that its planned 165-foot tall office tower and parking garage will sail through as-is, that the firm didn’t bother to address any of the reasons the city’s appointed Planning Commission cited when they rejected the building’s plans two weeks ago.

Wareham didn't have to. The Planning Commission's ruling was appealed by Nora Davis and other members of the pro-business council majority.

The so-called "Transit Center," was rejected by the planning commission after it ruled that the accompanying environmental studies required by state law "lacked credibility." The commission also dismissed the resident amenities and benefits touted by the developer, as ‘dubious.’ One commissioner stated that the proposed building was clearly "out of scale" with the neighborhood.

A rejection of this sort, especially by a body seldom finding fault in any project, would normally cause reconsideration by the city bureaucracy or the firm making the proposal. But this is not a normal project, nor a normal city.

No need to go back to the blueprints. Wareham, and its leader, Rich Robbins don't need to listen. After all, this is a firm with the ‘chutzpah’ to name a parking garage and office tower a “Transit Center.” Robbins is also a man with enough juice in Emeryville to get what he wants.

The council majority didn't even wait for Robbins to pony up the cost of filing an appeal. Instead, they appealed it themselves. Now the council gets the chance to overrule its own hand picked commissioners.

Tomorrow, the council will likely ignore the planning commission’s objections and approve the project without alteration. Even the planning department's official report urges full acquiescence to Robbins wishes.

The project has created controversy over the years. Many millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies were demanded by Robbins and granted by the Council. Before the ink was even dry on the city's new general plan, a special exemption was added for Robbins' garage and tower. Construction will disturb one of the city’s EPA Superfund Sites, a toxic legacy of a Westinghouse plant currently sealed beneath the Amtrak parking lot. Construction will excavate tons of PCBs and truck them through our community. Additionally, the Bike/Pedestrian Committee unanimously objected to what the project will do to the city’s new and only Bicycle Boulevard----bring heavy traffic to a street from which bicycle lanes were removed.

The Council will consider their own appeal of the Planning Commission's decision Tuesday. To anyone who might want to witness an expression of raw political power, attend the meeting, scheduled to get underway at City Hall on Tuesday, February 16 at 7:15 p.m.