Contract of the Day: Program Development

The Emery School District and the City of Emeryville is entering into many contracts with consultants and builders for the Emeryville Center of 'Community' Life.  The money spent on these contracts is public and the public has a right to know.  Large contracts and small, the ECCL Contract of the Day will highlight what your money is being spent on.

Today's Featured Contract(s):

 $208,800 to National Equity Project, Children's Aid Society, MIG, and Partners in School Innovation 

for program development

approved February 2012.

In January of 2012, the School District's then-Director of Youth & Community Engagement presented a proposed contract in the amount of $194,900 for an "ECCL Program Design/K-12 Incubation Process."  This proposal was met with outright anger from City Council members as they received the information at the January 2012 City Schools Committee meeting.  Councilmember Ruth Atkin, in particular, expressed the view that they had done this work already for years and, from the documents presented, she could see no reason to do such work again.  "Back sliding", she called it.

The proposed contract contained some items only a long-time public consultant could dream up.  First item on their list was a "Listening campaign" to take 15 days, including planning time, and to cost $22,500.  The Tattler might be better known for talking than listening, but at a rate of $1,500/day, even we could be persuaded to simply sit and listen to people talk about the ECCL.

Then there was $38,600 for "Transitional Leadership Team: Development and Capacity Building" and another $40,800 for "Organizational Capacity Building."  It's unclear what all this "capacity building" was supposed to be about, but apparently the District needed $79,400 worth of it.  The Tattler has long had concerns about the capacity of the ECCL site, given all the buildings the District plans to put on the site, but there is reason to doubt that this was the sort of capacity problem the consultants hoped to address.

After a thorough drubbing, the District staff assured the City Schools committee that the message had been heard loud and clear and a revised proposal focused on critically needed services would be presented to them at the February meeting.

It takes a special kind of hubris to do what the District staff did next.  They returned to the February meeting with a group of four contracts for "Program Development" that totaled $208,800--more than the contract amount proposed in January!  These contracts provided for $57,600 to National Equity Project, $72,000 to Children's Aid Society, $32,000 to MIG, and $47,200 to Partners in School Innovation.

The services described and the deliverables in each contract are virtually identical, and each so trivial or devoid of meaning as to leave one uncertain whether a deliverable has ever been delivered.  For example, Page 8 of the Partners in School Innovation contract shows that they are paid roughly $4,000 per day to sit in a room with other people and "collaborate" and "comment as requested" on the design components of the over-arching program.  Each of the contract's deliverables contains "relationship building."  How does one know when a relationship is sufficiently "built" so as to be "delivered"?

Why does the District need to pay someone thousands of dollars so that District and City staff can sit in a room and talk to one another?  Are we so dysfunctional that we should also bring in boxing gloves and a referee?  And isn't the "program" of the ECCL largely to educate students?  Do we not already know how to do that or at least have in-house expertise on how to do so that wouldn't be so costly?

At this February meeting, the School District's Deputy Superintendent, Anakarita Allen, spoke at length to the Committee on the pressing need for these contracts, without ever mentioning to them that she serves on the Board of Trustees of the National Equity Project.

The City School Committee was beaten down by the District's insistence that this was the only way for them to plan for the ECCL and approved the use of joint City and School District funds for these contracts.  Enjoy these ECCL Contracts of the Day!

School Board to Vote on 'Surplus' Facilities Including City Owned Property

Fate of Public Properties/Community Services to be Mostly Determined Behind Closed Doors

Another $170,000 For Consultants

The Emery School Board conducted an early morning meeting last week to determine the fate of "surplus" school properties and included City of Emeryville owned properties. The decision made at the meeting would forward payment of some $170,000 for consultants to coordinate plans for a "Six-Site Master Plan" that will be decided mostly behind closed doors the Tattler has learned.

The Master Plan will be formulated by a Task Force led by the consultants in series of meetings to be concluded in June 2013.  San Francisco based consulting firm MKThink, one of the two firms coordinating the Master Plan, announced public representatives in the Task Force will be permitted at less than half of the 22 meetings planned.

The Six-Site Task Force will be led by consultant John Flores, formerly Emeryville's City Manager and will determine the fate of:

1. Anna Yates Elementary School
2. Ralph Hawley Middle School
3. Emery Secondary School
4. The Recreation Center
5. The Senior Center 
6. The Child Development Center

The Recreation Center, the Senior Center and the Child Development Center are owned by the City of Emeryville.

The other consulting firm paid to coordinate the Master Plan, Berkeley based MIG will jointly control with MKThink, the non public meetings and will present to the School Board final determinative fate of all community services in Emeryville in June.  The actual community is not invited to the majority of the slated meetings.

The non-televised School Board Facilities Committee early morning weekday meeting last week constituted a legally required public '1st reading' of the proposed sweeping policy change enabling placement of the issue on the Consent Calender for the Board's normally scheduled Wednesday meeting.  The Consent Calender decree would constitute the legally required 2nd and final reading of the Six-Site Master Plan.   Consent Calender items are commonly grouped together and considered accepted by "consent", meaning there is no actual specific vote.

Family Friendly Housing In Emeryville: No Longer An Opinion

November 2nd, We Set Our New Course

Now We Will Remake Emeryville 

News Analysis / Opinion

The voters spoke on November 2nd and what they said will reverberate for generations to come.  The voters said in a loud and very clear voice; they expect Emeryville to be recast.  The game changing  Measure J vote, passed by some 72% of voters, mandates that our town will be completely remade with a whole new guiding vision.  Emeryville will morph from the existing auto dependant loft & condo commuter burg filled with single or childless couple professionals and Cal Berkeley students into a new city brimming with young families living in a new type of housing scarcely recognizable by current standards.

Emeryville residents of the future

Just how we're going to get there is unclear but get there we must since residents are now committed to a nearly $400 million new public school rebuild that requires attracting a minimum of 700 new Emeryville students, according to the school district.  Critics of Measure J , including the Tattler, called attention to this glaring problem of a lack of existing family friendly housing in the run up to the November 2nd election while proponents of the measure devoted no time to explaining how the lack of housing problem would be resolved but residents threw caution to the wind and voted to move forward regardless.

Epic in it's scope, Measure J represented a vote of NO to the status quo and YES to a complete make-over for the town.  Now, it's up to the city council to deliver family housing; lots of it and really fast, to support the new school and make sure the voters will is assuaged.  We mustn't fool ourselves; this would not be easy in the best of times let alone during the current economic morass.

Nevertheless, Measure J will usher in a whole new development paradigm for our town and our aging council members must radically change to meet the new demands; a difficult task given their specific personalities and their overall conservative nature.  Now, city leaders must actively and aggressively seek out new housing options.  The old way, waiting for developers themselves to make development proposals won't deliver the family housing that we need.

Not Open For Interpretation

Up until recently in Emeryville, the phrase 'family friendly housing' has been an imprecise term, even as many sectors have clamored for it.  It's been one of those things that everybody seems to want and yet we still can't seem to get.  The city council members have been liberally using the term of late and developers have noticed the change in rhetoric emanating from the council dais and they have provided assurance to the decision makers that any housing proposals they champion can be considered family friendly.  Some decision makers have gone out of their way to let everyone know that they know just what this new type of housing is.

Meet your new neighbors

Planning Commissioner Frank Flores, for one chastised the council in a sharply worded November 18th letter for even discussing whether a development proposal under consideration was family friendly and whether to require appropriate adjustments from the developer.  Mr Flores, who works for the developer in question, told the council members the loft/condo housing development proposal at 3900 Adeline Street is already in fact family friendly and no improvements need be made on that account.  Mr Flores would have us believe what constitutes family friendly housing is a matter of personal opinion and the developers for their part no doubt would like us to leave it at that.

Unfortunately now in Emeryville, we don't have that freedom anymore.  We must bring families to Emeryville to support the voter approved new school investment and families won't listen to Mr Flores or developers or even the council for that matter; they'll decide for themselves what constitutes family friendly housing and unlike the developers, their decisions will be based on if they actually feel comfortable living there as a family with their children.  Hubris from developers or the council and their sycophants will be exposed immediately by actual families in the marketplace.

Going Backwards

Up til now,  Emeryville has been going backwards; we've actually been losing families over the last twenty years even as our population has risen dramatically.  The lack of family housing has exacerbated the situation.  Council member Ruth Atkin recently complained developers, left to their own devices, have only provided eight three bedroom units in the last ten years in Emeryville.  Ms Atkin is correct; we can't afford to go down this path anymore.

Quaint old Emeryville; so very 2010

Against this bleak backdrop, the city has accepted the offer of local planning firm MIG & Associates to define what exactly constitutes family friendly housing in an urban context with a power point presentation made expressly for Emeryville.  This firm has shopped their presentation around town, and so far they've made their presentation to the School Board, the Housing Commission and the City Council.

Luckily for us, MIG has agreed to help us with our lack of family friendly housing.  We no longer need to guess about what it takes to bring families to Emeryville; no longer do we need to listen to opinions from those with hidden agendas to maximize profits for shareholders who might try to fool us.  No longer do we need to listen to ideologues that would help those seeking to maximize profits claiming to want to help build family housing and all the while working to subvert that effort.  Now we have MIG & Associates, a real independent arbiter that is a professional in the field and highly respected among their peers.

You won't see many of these anymore

Bay Street Site Up For Grabs

Given the limited geography of Emeryville and the pressing timeline, every piece of land freed up for possible redevelopment must now be put into play toward the goal of bringing in the 700 new students.  The first on the docket is the large piece of empty land along Shellmound Street directly to the north of the Bay Street mall and coveted by Bay Street developer Madison Marquette.  This land has sat idle for five years, waiting for Madison Marquette to make up their minds if they really want to do a Bay Street mall expansion.  The council has granted the developer exclusive rights to this valuable piece of Emeryville real estate for expanding the shopping mall five years running.

Now the council must expand their thinking and figure a way to build family friendly housing on the site, even if Madison Marquette demurs.

This is what the new Emeryville will look like

Indeed, the council must now be thinking in terms of building family friendly housing on every piece of land until we bring the 700 new students to the district.  Every development proposal must now be considered a contested site.  The past high profit margins from lofts and one bedroom condos developers have enjoyed in Emeryville are at an end.  Now, the profits will be much slimmer.  The council will have to learn how to say NO to developers as they make their claims that family housing developments "won't pencil out", like they always do.  They'll have to hold fast when the developers threaten to leave Emeryville if they don't get everything they want, like they always do.  The council will have to learn to bring a new kind of development to Emeryville.  These old dog council members are going to have to learn some new tricks.  The bonds proscribed for Measure J are being prepared for sale right now and the clock is ticking.  We need family friendly housing now in Emeryville.

Emeryville will be lousy with these

MIG is here:

http://www.migcom.com/