Some things seemed off in this country in 2024, and many people were feeling it. We don’t have to go national on this one, because in the end: All Politics Is Local.
In a well-functioning city or region, “The Balance of Power” requires several important players:
- Public Servants: staff, professionally trained, with high ethics and medium pay, but hoping for solid benefits in retirement.
- Public Oversight: trustees and board members, with lots of time on their hands, paid or not paid, we expect them to be incorruptible.
- Interest Groups: more public oversight through interest groups, advocacy groups, and non-profits.
- News Organizations: knowledgeable, paid staff, mostly reporting the topics, and once in a while diving into investigative reporting.
- The Public: goes through and understands the topics and data and expresses their knowledge and opinion in public forums.
This balance of power hardly ever comes together because Corporate Interest has already taken hold of big chunks of the first three groups. The fourth group is in deep financial trouble, and the fifth group might care more about the price of eggs and milk than what’s really going on around them. They also get easily distracted by social media and other stuff.
Three examples where Board Members actually went off-script, provided oversight, informed the public, and called out colleagues and staff:
- BART Board – Deborah Allen
- Oakland City Council – Janani Ramachandran
- San Mateo Foster City School District – Shara Watkins
No 1: BART and the Fiscal Cliff
“Member of district’s own board says transit agency prefers to play victim rather than addressing its money problems.” [Mercury News]
In a recent regional newspaper article BART Board member Deborah Allen has all this to say:
“BART management appears uninterested in addressing its monumental operating deficits.”
“That’s because “fiscal crisis” has become a rather successful operating model for BART.“
“To avoid a fiscal calamity, strong crisis management is needed. Normally, that involves a highly specialized team of experts who work independent of management, doing a deep analysis of the operations and developing both cost-containment and revenue plans. This usually includes streamlining processes, eliminating under-utilized services, consolidating redundant functions, renegotiating labor and vendor contracts, and plain old budget cuts. So far, little of that has happened at BART.“
Whereas other agencies across the nation took some hard look at efficiencies, cost cutting, service adjustments, BART management just chose to let the voters figure this out.
Deborah Allen puts it all out. You can’t find a more honest description of what is happening behind doors at a major agency like BART. (Then again, Deborah Allen has alienated her fellow board members long before that.)
Several agencies have already come out and also announced they don’t want anything to do with BART’s fiscal troubles and won’t participate in the big Bay Area transportation measure planned for 2025 or 2026.
No 2: Oakland City Council
“My Oakland City Council colleagues think they can pay recurring bills with a one-time sports deal — but we can’t afford the overdraft fees.” [Janani Ramachandran]
Since Sheng Thao took over as Mayor, all kinds of shenanigans have been going on in Oakland. The FBI has even been searching her house because of her closeness to corporate interests – waste business seems dirty business. Her ways of balancing the budget have now been questioned by council member Janani Ramachandran. Apparently, last year, Mayor Sheng Thao and five other council members voted to balance the budget with a sale of the former Raider’s training center valued at $20 million. This year, the plan is to balance the budget with the sale of the Oakland Coliseum, which is projected at $63 million. Both deals haven’t happened, and both deals might bring less than the projected amounts, of course. It’s a very risky way of doing business. The mayor was just recalled and six out of the eight council members might not be around next year, so why would they think long-term?
A city with such fiscal problems should be more reflective and clean house.
Only a few sports teams (think SF Giants or Golden State Warriors) are professional enough to pay for their own stadiums. Most other American sports teams take advantage of careless cities and institutions. Students pay university tuition not to pay for education but to help with financing costly athletics departments for students who hardly study. In almost every state, the most expensive public employee is a university football or basketball coach. Smart city leadership should always refuse to do so – just look at what happened to Santa Clara being held hostage by a football team. Oakland leadership was never that smart dealing with professional sports teams and still keeps losing them because they wanted even more.
[Janani Ramachandran also has a nice singing voice]
No 3: San Mateo Foster City School District
Shara Watkins was on the Board of the San Mateo Foster City School District (SMFCSD). When she left, she wrote an essay in the local newspaper, where she called out her fellow San Mateo County leaders for being “multifaceted”:
“I recently rewatched some of the footage from the Black Lives Matter rally and protest that took place in San Mateo in 2020. Almost every single elected official in San Mateo County attended the protest. Almost every one of those individuals stood up in support of Black lives and marched alongside me and my daughter Kaiya and proclaimed to support the sanctity of people of color. Since then, very few elected officials in our county have implemented policies and practices that have actually changed outcomes for Black families in their respective communities. The SMC All Together Better disparities dashboard showcases that across virtually every single metric Black residents in this county fare worse and have more adverse outcomes. We. Must. Do. Better.“
Calling out other leaders who don’t live up to their own promises is exactly what we need more often. But then again SMFCSD is in the top three of purposely segregated school districts on the Peninsula – after RCSD and SFUSD. SMFCSD has made some of the good changes we haven’t seen in Redwood City, but still hasn’t gone all the way by completely dismantling their “Choice School” system. However, time will tell how the other changes pan out or if new leadership will reverse progress.
One sighting of questionable leadership in San Mateo
In this day and age, no city with ethical leadership would take down a bike lane in a low-income neighborhood. Except, of course, the City of San Mateo is exactly doing that in their North Central neighborhood … and even worse, they are thinking about replacing it with a bait-and-switch model called “Bicycle Boulevard” (see posts about Big Bikeway Bluff and The Bigger Bikeway Bluff to understand this 40-year old scam).
Children need bike lanes, and children in low-income neighborhoods – where car violence is often higher – need them even more so. In theory, San Mateo’s city manager, Alex Khojikian and his staff are already bound to act like professionals would. The County has special rules for treating “Equity Focus Areas”; the City of San Mateo has been endorsing “Vision Zero” since 2015; C/CAG should listen to the San Mateo Grand Jury reports; the Board of Supervisors (BOS) called out the Climate Emergency in 2019; the Paris of the Peninsula should be doing what’s right for their residents. City Manager Alex Khojikian would go against everything he should be standing for by taking bike lanes away from children. Especially if that transportation space is only going to have free car storage.
“Parking is a fertility drug for cars.” [UCLA Professor Donald Shoup]
The group behind this apparent bait-and-switch seems to be connected to YIMBY-endorsed former Mayor Amorounce Lee and her Home/Car Owner Association (HCOA), which apparently has too many cars. According to one resident, a three-person family owns eight cars, and none is stored in the two mandatory garage spots. And still, the HCOA is trying to make this a case of “Equity.” Something along the lines of ‘if rich car owners in rich neighborhoods are allowed to store their cars for free on public roads, then car owners in poor neighborhoods should be allowed to do so as well.” However, if this were a case of actual “Equity,” then black and brown homeless residents would be welcome to park here, too, right? Does anyone want to take a bet on what the HCOA would say in that real equity case?
Real Transportation Equity is about people without cars. It’s high time for the Board of Supervisors, the city manager, his staff, the new council members, and the school district to step up and stop this false “equity”-charade. Let’s see who comes out for the children.
Bringing it all Together
In a well-working organization, you would have a balance of power of some sort. In a balanced setup, the board members, the management, the staff, transit advocates, city council, county boards, etc., would all keep each other honest. But their relationships these days are all too intertwined and too ‘incestuous’ to have a healthy balance.
BART board member Deborah Allen puts it best:
“BART prefers to play victim and not address its money problems in part because a coalition of stakeholders stand to gain from the continuing crisis, including its labor-dominated board members, executive management, our enabling Bay Area elected officials, transit activists, non-profits and labor unions.Instead of crisis management, BART seems to be employing crisis escalation techniques. Why? Because BART’s leaders and ‘labor partners’ arrogantly believe that they are too big to fail.“
She is correct, thanks to Astroturfing you can’t even trust activists and non-profits anymore – especially those with salaried leaderships. And any labor-dispute – made public – is often staged and predetermined by a handful of players between the board and the unions.
And while each of these politicians might have all kinds of red flags going for them, it is still refreshing to see when for once someone in this coalition of conflicts comes out and puts the truth on the table for everyone else to see and acknowledge. We can only hope to see more honest local politics in 2025.
Good example of how it’s done
Ray Mueller deserves an honorable mention. Most politicians don’t know how to use social media correctly. They see it mainly as a one-way street to get their marketing message out and “like” and “endorse” other politicians and their marketing stories. However, Ray Mueller stepped up when people in his district discussed a new Smoke Shop on Nextdoor. The shop was possibly too close to various schools and had no permit. The Nextdoor post struck a nerve among the county supervisor and his staff. Instead of calling for a “study” or doing some “outreach program” first, he and county staff acted quickly. Just a few days later, the shop with no permit closed down. No, if we get the supervisor to step up again, ‘reimagine’ better local SamTrans service routes, and start installing these bus shelters we were promised in 2023 …
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Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in all blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Redwood City Pulse or its staff.
