Emeryville's General Plan Overturned to Bring Gay Hating Fried Chicken Fast Food

Do You Remember 'Memorability'?  

Emeryville's Planning Director Says 'Memorability' Is No Longer A Thing, Forgettability Is Much Better

News Analysis

After months of remodel construction and with a grand opening slated for early April, Emeryville’s General Plan is being used to facilitate another fast food restaurant by skewering its provision to create a “memorable city” regardless that the new restaurant is one of a chain of 2709 locations nation-wide. 

The new automobile centric, fast food, national corporate chain restaurant, the Georgia based, Christian, gay hating Chick-Fil-A will “contribute to the well-being of the surrounding neighborhood and community” and it will “create a sense of place, a memorable place” according to the City’s Planning Director Charley Bryant.  The buoyant language Mr Bryant is using for this restaurant is held over from the findings that permitted the building of the previous fast food chain, Panera Bakery with its 1562 world wide locations at the same East Bay Bridge Mall 40th Street site.

Workers were caught last week cutting
branches of off site public street trees
that were blocking the corporate logo.
Emeryville police were summoned but
there were no arrests or citations.

Back in 2012 when the Panera Bakery corporation sought approval from Emeryville to construct the building, the City had just recently finished its new General Plan that would protect against this kind of retail use owing to its “memorability” clause.  At the time however, Mr Bryant hurdled over that problem by insisting that a memorable mural would be painted on the south side of the building as reported in the Tattler.  

However, after the gay hating fried chicken corporation recently destroyed the mural as part of their remodel, citizen complaint again invoked the memorability problem.  How could a fast food restaurant with 2709 locations be considered memorable?  Mr Bryant explained to the Tattler the gay hating chicken place would still comport with the General Plan because the mural had been photographed before it was destroyed and it has been re-created on an ink jet printed banner.  The banner would be hung on the south side of the new building in the same area as the original mural he said.  That would take care of the memorability requirements he said....but not the incessant Tattler inquiry.

Since then, the Planning Director has retracted his earlier statement about the printed banner.  Now Mr Bryant is telling the Tattler, as it turns out, memorability is not really necessary after all, regardless of what the General Plan says.  This leads to questions about the hoops Panera had to jump through in 2012. 

Panera Bakery had to pay the artist to paint the mural at the insistance of the Planning Director in order to provide political cover because without it, a fast food building would have been seen as torpedoing the General Plan right after the Plan had been freshly certified by the City Council.  Ten years later, now it seems Mr Bryant is making a calculation the public doesn't care about trying to create a memorable city anymore and that love of gay hating fried chicken will make Emeryville citizens forget all about their General Plan.  Once this newest fast food restaurant opens, a precedent will have been set and the door will be open to all manner of forgettable national franchise chain retail stand alone buildings for Emeryville.  Ideas of creating a memorable city will become quaint, traded for gay hating fried chicken and other fast food restaurants waiting in the wings.  Wings?  How about another burger franchise? 

The memorable city idea was a noble idea, vetted as it was by the people of Emeryville in a series of public scoping session meetings years ago when we were collectively trying to imagine a city we wanted to live in.  The demise of the noble idea was not democratically vetted, rather, it was simply taken away by the Planning Director and the City Council majority.  Ultimately though, our city is becoming just like every other city because the people failed to keep a watchful eye out over their government.  The fault is ours.  All is not lost however.  We may not get a nice place to live but at least we're going to get some delicious fat and salt in the form of gay hating fried chicken in the deal.

The "memorable" mural that was offered up to get a fast food bakery restaurant for Emeryville.
Now it's no longer needed according to the City's Planning Director.  Memorability is no longer
a thing for Emeryville he says.  Why have memorability when you could have forgettability?

'Worker Owned Cooperatives' Needed to Restore Emeryville's Tarnished Reputation

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.

Emeryville Planning Director Forced To Renounce Planning Canon

Pity Emeryville's Planning Director

He's Forced To Carry Water For Pro-Developer Philistines:  Fast Food Restaurants Are Now "Memorable" 

Opinion
Like the Christians of ancient Rome, who had to renounce Jesus to the Emperor to stay alive, so too must Emeryville's Planning Director renounce universally accepted planning standards and precepts as his esteemed planning colleagues in the Bay Area look on, all to keep his job at City Hall.
Trying to fit the newly approved Panera Bakery building into compliance with Emeryville's new forward thinking General Plan has been no small feat for the Director, Charlie Bryant; and he's really earned his money, giving the decision makers in town all the cover they need to push the fast food establishment through to completion.

Emeryville's General Plan gets an award
from the American Planning Association.
Mr Bryant is second from the left.

But consider how badly Mr Bryant has had to prostrate himself before his council majority paymasters in so doing.  Mr Bryant has had to find Panera Bakery, a fast food restaurant with 1500 locations to be totally consistent with the directives of Emeryville's General Plan...a plan that no reasonable person could make claim to that kind of development, let alone a planning director.

The new General Plan received a 'Small Jurisdiction' award in 2010 from the American Planning Association.  That august and professional association noted Emeryville's General Plan will transform the town into a "vibrant, livable city".  The presenters of the award took into account the fact that 20% of the people of Emeryville participated directly in shaping the plan over a four year period, a remarkably democratic public vetting led in no small part by Mr Bryant himself.

Bollocks!
Against this weighty backdrop, Planning Director Bryant has had to make some pretty outrageous claims to grease the skids for Panera, among them:

• Panera 'employs Emeryville residents', but at $8 per hour without benefits, there's nobody working there that can afford to live in Emeryville

• The archetypal fast food style building is of 'high aesthetic quality'...this makes us wonder what kind of development would be considered low aesthetic quality 

• Panera is supporting a 'vibrant community' and 'contributing to the well being of the community'...and this makes us wonder how low the bar can be set

• The restaurant and building is a 'memorable' place, even though it's only one of 1500 across the US and Canada

Loyalty is often considered a positive personal trait, especially for employees and we wonder if the Planning Director is acting the faithful employee for the city council and the City Manager.  To that we would remind Mr Bryant of his duty to his job to the people of Emeryville and to repaying in kind to us, his level of planning expertise that he is forsaking in the Panera case.
If there is some other reason why our General Plan should be so distorted to serve some foreign cause, we are ignorant but we would like to know.  We do know a general plan is not needed to bring fast food restaurants to a town.  In fact no planning is needed at all and we point to Anytown USA as proof.  Fast food is what you get in the absence of planning.
No, this is a corruption of what the people of Emeryville worked so hard for.  All those General Plan meetings the citizens participated in should not net more fast food restaurants for Emeryville.

If Mr Bryant is simply worried about his job security, we are empathetic.  We feel for Charlie Bryant; he knows it's a load of bollocks and no doubt he wishes his professional planning colleagues don't catch wind of his covering for Panera.  He can feel some consolation that his colleagues don't have to answer to the likes of the Emeryville city council majority, all his hyperbolic claims of fast food memorability and high aesthetic quality notwithstanding.

Panera Bakery Building Determined To Be "Memorable"

Planning Director Pushes Back:  Fast Food Restaurant Is "Memorable"

 Says Emeryville Spent $2 Million To Attract 
Fast Food Development

Emeryville spent more than $2 million on a General Plan to help lure fast food development and it's been highly successful according to Planning Director Charlie Bryant in a report released last week.  The Planning Director points to the success of the recently opened Panera Bakery building as a reason to celebrate Emeryville's uncanny ability to attract fast food restaurants.   Emeryville he says, knows how to create a memorable city and being part of Panera Corporation's family of 1500 fast food strip mall restaurants spread across the US and Canada is proof that the money recently spent on writing the General Plan was money well spent.

Mr Bryant made the glowing findings about the Panera Bakery Building in his June 'Monthly Progress Report' to the City Manager and released to the public on July 1st.  In the report, the Planning Director claims the existence of a mural depicting Emeryville history on the "back side of the building" qualifies the restaurant project as "memorable", a requirement elucidated by Emeryville's new General Plan.

Mr Bryant submitted the report to rebuff a May 29th Tattler article questioning the appropriateness of the Panera building and the mandates of Emeryville's General Plan.  He went on to insist the restaurant has "a main entrance" on 40th Street, thereby making the restaurant "pedestrian-oriented".  The restaurant has two entrances, the main entrance, a large double door on the parking lot side and the other door, effectively the back door, opens to 40th Street.  Mr Bryant says the back entrance provides access for the Park Avenue neighborhood, fulfilling the General Plan mandate that development be neighborhood enhancing.

As Emeryville's top planner, Mr Bryant was instrumental in guiding the General Plan vetting process with the citizens two years ago.  The Plan cost $2 million for consultants and the city spent probably another $2 million in compensated staff time according to a junior planner at City Hall.  Mr Bryant conducted many General Plan public meetings to engage the citizens and actively sought their ideas on how the town should be developed.  The citizens made it clear, according to Mr Bryant that more fast food development like the Panera Building is needed in Emeryville.  The Planning Director posits the Panera Building represents an unqualified success that the General Plan helped realize.

Emeryville's Mayor, Jennifer West, it should be noted, has publicly refuted Planning Director Bryant's assertion that the new Panera Bakery building is memorable.

Panera Bakery Building Violates New General Plan

$2 Million New General Plan Falls Flat:
Big Fix Needed

Opinion
The Emeryville Planning Commission recently approved the Panera Bakery building on the corner of 40th and Horton streets.  The City Council reviewed their decision and followed suit with an approval after checking the proposed building against Emeryville's new General Plan.  Below are the findings of fact determined by the Planning Commission and the City Council (please suspend your natural sense of propriety as you read).

The new Panera Bakery building is required to and will:

1. Be a compliment to the area
2. Be a vibrant and walkable destination for Emeryville residents
3. Be developed with due regard for aesthetic quality
4. Provide a service or amenity necessary to support a vibrant community
5. Contribute to the well-being of the surrounding neighborhood and community
6. Employ and serve Emeryville residents
7. Add to the local retail opportunities for the community
8. Create a sense of place, a memorable place

These findings were not made as compared to the former use of the site as a parking lot, rather they were made against the General Plan's instructions for how to build our city.  The eight points above are not suggestions for new development, rather they are requirements enumerated by our new $2 million General Plan.  The General Plan has a force of law; development projects are required to follow it.  If the decision makers had found any of the above points to be false, the project could not have been approved without special provisions.

Readers of the Tattler will likely consider the findings made by the Planning Commission and City Council in this case to be without merit and bizarre.  Any reasonable person would agree the Panera Bakery building and it's tenant, a fast food purveyor, does not do the things required of it in the eight points above.

Facts?

How could the Planning Commission and the City Council call the eight findings fact?  The Mayor of Emeryville, Jennifer West has reconsidered her decision to approve the Panera Bakery building (too late to change it) and she now has proclaimed the project does not create a memorable place; calling into question the idea that the eight points are facts.  Ms West's reversal suggests the eight points are nothing more than unqualified opinion.
Public policy is not supposed to work that way however.  Policy is supposed to be based on measurability insofar as it's possible and that's what the General Plan is for.

So what has happened in the case of the Parera Bakery building approval?  One of the following two points (or a combination of both) must have gone awry:

1. The General Plan is not up to the task of properly informing the decision makers 
2. The Planning Commission lied about their findings of fact

Clearly, Emeryville's new General Plan was not intended to be a document formulated to bring more fast food restaurants.  So if the Plan is not up to the task of providing proper guidance, then the people of Emeryville need to rework it.  We will need to add clearer mandates that quantify the goals better.
If the problem is more one with the elected officials, then the voters will have to make sure we only elect those who will support our General Plan.

We Call On Mayor West
The most prudent path is to do both fixes, starting with the General Plan.  After spending $2 million and countless tens of thousands of hours of City Hall staff time and Emeryville resident volunteer labor on the Plan, it is too valuable to simply let it die like this.  We say it's time to turn our attention back to our General Plan and make sure it is crafted in such a way that pro-developer ideologues on the Planning Commission and the City Council are not able to so easily subvert it.  We do not intend to sit back idly and permit the Plan to be ignored like this.  Our General Plan represents the will of the people and is not there simply for show.
We call on Mayor West: you have properly noted that the General Plan and the process has been found to be lacking in the case of the Panera Bakery building...will you now help us fix it?

Panera Bakery: More Suburban Style Development For Emeryville

New Panera Development Emblematic Of How Emeryville Subverts Its Own Goals

Opinion
If you listen to City Hall and the politicians ensconced therein you might think the ubiquitous suburban style strip mall development they've approved for the past two and a half decades is a thing of the past...they've gone to great pains recently to tell us that anyway.  But who are you going to believe; the politicians or your own lying eyes?

This 'fact file' from the company is two
years old.  Now there are 1562 stores.

The Emeryville Planning Commission and the City Council welcome their newest creation for our town: the Panera Bakery building on 40th and Horton Street.  And it runs roughshod over our new $2 million General Plan and its promise to make Emeryville a "memorable place".

NASDAQ traded, St Louis based Panera is a fast food national chain with stores across the US and Canada.  There are 1562 company-owned and franchise-operated stores total.
The corporate headquarters says they prefer to locate their stores in suburban strip malls and their business model is auto-centric vs pedestrian oriented.  With its warren of suburban malls, they see Emeryville as a perfect fit.  Our Planning Commission and City Council agree.

Here's the real deal: Does it
look like 40th Street?  Is that a
Panera Bakery in that building?

The new bakery turns its back to the street, opening up instead onto the massive surface parking lot, encouraging drivers, not pedestrian residents.  It is yet another nail in the coffin of 40th Street as a memorable place.  We remember in the early 1990's as East Bay Bridge Mall builder Catellus Development, told Emeryville residents that the incipient 40th Street would be a grand boulevard in the manner of Paris' Champs d'Elysees.  Some Champs d'Elysees it's turned out to be.

Panera will directly compete with San Pablo Avenue's Arizmendi Bakery, a locally serving worker owned collective that pays a living wage to its associates unlike Panera's $8.06 per hour wage.  Since Emeryville lacks affordable housing for its legion of low wage service workers, Panera employees will commute to Emeryville from all over the region.
Arizmendi's opened several years ago with support from former councilman John Fricke and as such might be considered the Fricke model of development for Emeryville, it could also be called the General Plan model of development since it dovetails so nicely with that document.  Conversely, Panera might be called the Nora Davis/Kurt Brinkman model of development or the anti-General Plan model.

We challenge the Planning Commission and City Council majority that approved Panera; how, precisely is this creating a memorable place?  We think this was just another in a long string of development approvals where the city employs its 'hands off developers' ethos.  It's pretty obvious they've forgotten memorability.

Let's see...Is this Emeryville or Concord or
Daytona Beach or Rancho Cucamonga or Peoria
or Kankakee or Sheboygan or Springfield?  I don't remember.