San Leandro

Apr 282011
 

Are you, like me, unhappy about the idiotic decision the San Leandro City Council made in renewing the contract with Redflex, the red-light camera company, for eight years?  Do you wonder how we got into that whole pensions mess that risks bankrupting the city?  Are you angry that the City pays its law firm over $1 .2Million a year but cut down on swimming pool and library hours and did away with the Cherry Festival and the Christmas Tree lighting?  Well, you have no one but yourself to blame.  YOU are the one who voted for this Council.  It’s YOUR fault.

Ok, that’s sort of unfair.  I voted for them too.  Truth we told, we didn’t have a choice.  Most of members of the City Council ran unopposed or faced opponents with even fewer qualifications than themselves.  We voted, in many instances,  for the lesser of two evils – but a lesser evil is still an evil.

Ask anyone who follows San Leandro city politics closely and they’ll tell you the biggest problem is finding competent candidates.  Running for office (if you get a serious, even if incompetent, opponent) can be expensive and time consuming, there are few perks to being a Council Member and, if you take your role seriously, it’s a lot of work.   Unless you need an extra $1200 a month or have political aspirations, the only reason to do it is to help your community – and lets be honest, most of us are not that civic minded.  But without that civic mindedness we end up where we are.  So really, take on the challenge – run for office!

The next City Council elections will be in November 2012.   The seat for District 4, which mostly includes Washington Manor, will be up for grabs as Starosciak will be termed out.  Prola (District 6, the Marina) and Reed (District 2, southeast San Leandro) will face re-election.   To run for a city council seat you must live within the borders of the district you are running for (look at the map) – so if you don’t live in those areas you’ll have to wait until 2014 (when Gregory from District 1 and Souza from District 3 will be termed out, Cutter from District 5 will probably run for re-election).

I’ll be honest with you: running for City Council is not going to be easy.  In District 6, Jim Prola is virtually indestructible.  Not only does he come with all the strength of organized labor behind him, but he’s a tireless campaigner.  He’ll walk every street of San Leandro during the campaign – twice – and will have fun doing it.   Ursula Reed, on the other hand, is more vulnerable.  While defeating an incumbent in San Leandro is very hard (Michael Gregory, for example, easily got 65% of the votes in the last election), it’s not impossible as Cassidy’s defeat over incumbent Mayor Santos showed.  Reed ran a very good campaign in 2008, but it was against an opponent who relied on her name recognition alone and did not campaign.   Reed received a lot of support from part of the progressive community in 2008 that may no longer be there in 2012.  I think that a progressive candidate that could create a good grassroot campaign would be able to defeat her.

The District 4 Washington Manor seat, however, is wide open.  There have been whispers about a couple of people running for that seat but nobody has announced as of yet and none of the potential candidates are well know.  If you live in the Manor, you are smart, competent, willing to do a lot of work and make sound decisions – and preferably (for me) progressive, you should seriously consider running.

The Alameda County Democratic Party will be holding a “running for office” workshop on May 14, 2011, 9 a.m. – 1 p.m at  UFCW Local 5 in Hayward.  This would be a great place for you to start if you are intrigued by the notion of a 2012 City Council run.  For more information e-mail  info@acdems.org or call 510.537.6390.

Apr 262011
 

To blog or not to blog, that is the question; or more precisely, should you blog for free for AOL Patch?  The San Leandro Patch, like its sister Patch properties all over the country, is out in force today recruiting bloggers.  By one account, each Patch editor is supposed to sign up 5 to 10 bloggers by May 4th.  This is an impressive target for a town like San Leandro, which counts with a total of two non-business blogs run by people not in my household.  But hey, that just means there will be less competition!

The idea of running user blogs is a no brainer for the Patch, which is now run by Ariana Huffington.  Blogs mean free unique content for AOL.  They can place advertisements on these pages and make money (not shared with the blogger) and can also use it to increase their Google ranking if, as suspected, the Patch starts relying more on news aggregation.  But is blogging for the Patch a good deal for a neophyte (or even established) blogger?  It depends on whether you are willing to give up editorial freedom for some help in establishing a readership.

Creating a blog from scratch is pretty easy.  All you have to do is go to a free-blog hosting site such as WordPress or Blogger, sign up, click a few times, enter some information and you are set to go.  With a few more clicks you can link your blog to twitter and facebook (and other social media sites that you may use).  But in order for your blog to be successful, you need to get readers – and that’s where being with Patch may help.  While getting readers to your blog is not difficult, it is time consuming.  You need to advertise yourself, leave comments in other blogs, remind your friends to link to you, etc. etc.  If you blog with Patch, presumably they will post links to your blog postings on their main page and interested people will read you without any work on your part.  This can be particularly valuable if you are not likely to update your blog frequently (more than 2 or 3 times a week) – you don’t have to worry about people forgetting about your blog when you are not posting.  Now, bear in mind that the traffic that Patch is likely to direct to your page is limited, but it will amount to something.

There are, however, some strong reasons why you may want to stay an independent blogger.  For one, by blogging for the Patch, you are basically working for free for a mega-corporation, which will not be inclined to share its profits with you.  Indeed, a number of Huffington Blog bloggers are now suing Huffington for a share of the $315 Million that AOL paid for the Huffington Post.   Working for free is perfectly OK, but there is something distasteful about doing it for someone who can well afford to pay you but just won’t.

More importantly is that by blogging for Patch you are giving up a lot of your editorial control.  Patch has not yet published what their agreement with bloggers will look like, but if you take a look at the Huffington Post user agreement you get an idea of what to expect:  they can terminate your blog or access to the site for any reason at any time without notice and  they can do whatever they want with your material, including re-editing your videos, without sharing any profits with you.  Indeed, I think the threat of editorial control is very real.  Patch editors seem to routinely delete comments they dislike and Kari Hulac, a regional editor for Patch East Bay, privately e-mailed me to threaten to take me off the Patch when I made a comment questioning her truthfulness.  And according to Hulac, an editor will have to approve your post before it’s published in the fist place.

Personally, I’m sticking with WordPress.  At some point I’m hoping that someone will be create a San Leandro news & culture site that will draw postings from the whole community.

Apr 252011
 

Councilman Jim Prola seems to get around a lot – from mosquito abatement meetings to water plants.  At the end of each City Council meeting, Council members recount the public meetings and events they attended in the previous fortnight.  Here is Prola’s account from the April 4th meeting:

Listen to Audio

(If you don’t get it, this reference may help you)


Apr 242011
 

New San Leandro City ManagerSan Leandro is about to appoint a new City Manager to lead the city, hopefully effectively and for many years to come.  An ad hoc committee composed by Mayor Stephen Cassidy and Council members Reed and Souza narrowed the field of applicants from 30 to five.  The Council won’t disclose their identities – ostensibly to protect the applicants’ current  jobs – though hopefully demographic information on them will be forthcoming.  Cassidy has not heeded my suggestion that he appoint a citizens ad hoc committee to give input on who among these candidates would work best for the city, but he is soliciting the community’s opinion albeit in a very limited manner.

For one, he set up an online questionnaire asking very general questions as to what San Leandrans want in a city manager. Cassidy has not explained how the information from these questionnaires will be put to use, however.

Cassidy will also be holding a Town Hall meeting (Sat., April 30, 9-11 a.m. Lecture Hall at Main Library) for citizen’s to provide their input on this issue.  For that input to be useful, however, it is essential that the citizens attending be asked real questions concerning the particular characteristics of the five final candidates.  For example, it would be of little use of citizens to tell the Mayor that they want a Latino or Asian city manager, if none of the five final candidates are of such ethnic origin.  Similarly, if none of the candidates live or are willing to live in San Leandro, it won’t help the Mayor at this point to hear how important this issue is to the community.   It is thus essential that Cassidy and his fellow Council members take a careful look at the characteristics of these five candidates and then ask the community specific questions about what qualities about them they would find more compelling.  Would we rather have someone with more experience or with a commitment to stay in San Leandro for longer?  Do we want someone who has worked in City government all his life, or would we prefer her to have business or non-profit experience?  Do we want someone who is known for their financial skills – given our dismal budget situation – or someone with superior management skills?  Only people with access to the candidates will know what the right questions to ask are.

The five candidates won’t be interviewed by the City Council until after the Town Hall meeting, so this is also a good opportunity for Cassidy to solicit community input about what sort of questions we want Cassidy to put to the candidates – and what types of answers would make us happiest.  I will personally not be able to be at this Town Hall – it conflicts with the California Democrats Convention – but I hope that many people will attend, that the discussion will be relevant and useful and that the City Council will take the input it generates seriously.

Apr 222011
 

(Note, to understand the particulars of this case please read A primer on the Faith Fellowship v. San Leandro lawsuit first).

The 9th circuit court of appeals has just denied the City of San Leandro’s petition for an en banc hearing of the apellate decision against the City on the Faith Fellowship case.  None of the 29 9th circuit judges requested to hear the case.  That is of little surprise, the petition not only had no merit but was terribly and insultingly written.  It was so bad that I’ve argued that it should be grounds to fire Meyers Nave, the law firm that represents the city and wrote the petition.  The City Council will be meeting next Monday in closed session to discuss what to do next.  They have three choices:  appeal to the Supreme Court, go to trial or settle.

I daresay that City Attorney Jayne Williams will recommend the first option.  A Supreme Court appeal will mean that Meyers Nave gets to charge the City even more money on attorney’s fees. It also allows Williams to continue telling the City Council that the her firm’s advise to deny Faith Fellowship’s rezoning petition was correct: the 9th circuit just got it wrong.  Most members of the San Leandro City Council are not very astute legally and may not realize that not only are the chances of the Supreme Court taking the case minute, but in all likelihood the current conservative, religious-loving Supreme Court would not side with the city against the church.  It is thus possible that the City Council may go along with Williams.  An appeal would slow down the case,  putting off paying the church’s damages for some years, but it will increase the legal costs for the city.

Going to trial presents significant legal risks to the city.  The facts are with the Church: former City Manager John Jermanis himself said that there we no other properties suitable to Faith Fellowship’s needs in San Leandro.  The City led the church on for a year, suggesting it would let it use the property if the church jumped through enough hoops, only to deny them the use of the property after they had bought it and for what looks like arbitrary reasons.  I think a jury, looking at the facts, is likely to agree with that conclusion.  But even if it doesn’t,  the church still gets to re-appeal the case to the 9th circuit on “equal protection” grounds, and the 9th circuit panel that heard the case originally hinted that it would side with the church.  Personally, I think the substantial issues on this case are already lost: the city violated RLUIPA and the church is entitled to “appropriate relief”.  The question the city should be addressing is what that means.

RLUIPA provides that “a person may assert a violation of this Act as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding and obtain appropriate relief against a government”.  It also provides for attorney fees’ for the prevailing plaintiff.  While it is universally accepted that this “appropriate relief” includes injunctive relief and that the court could order the City to allow the church to operate on the Catalina St. property, Faith Fellowship no longer owns said property.  It was forced to sell it last year, for $2.5 million under what it paid for, when it could no longer afford to pay its mortgage and run its existing facilities at the same time.  Faith Fellowship has indicated that at this point what it seeks are monetary damages, the $1.2 million that it made in mortgage payments while it owned the property and perhaps even the $2.5 million it lost when it sold it.

But it is not clear that RLUIPA allows for money damages.  While some courts have found that it does, following the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Franklin v. Gwinett, the US Supreme Court just ruled in Sossamon v. Texas (in a case involving prisoners’ religious rights) that  the phrase “‘[a]ppropriate relief’ is open-ended and ambiguous about what types of relief it includes” and that, at least in the case of lawsuits against states (which, unlike municipalities, enjoy sovereign immunity) it should not be interpreted to include monetary damages.  Now, because the Sossamon court ruled on very specific circumstances, it’s not clear how lower courts will interpret the decision.  They may very well conclude that it would be inconsistent to read RLUIPA’s grant of “appropriate relief” to include monetary damages when the state actor is a municipality or county, but to not include them when the actor is a state.  Or they may decide that the fact that Supreme Court specifically differentiated Sossamon from Franklin means that Franklin applies to non-sovereign RLUIPA defendants.  Personally, I think the latter is the more compelling interpretation of the Sossamon decision, but I think that the City (if it hired a good law firm to represent it) could make a viable argument that “appropriate relief” does not include monetary damages.  At the very least, the City should be able to convince the court to limit those damages.

But litigation is expensive.  The City admits that it has spent $450,000 pursuing this case so far, though the real amount may indeed be higher.  It will likely be on the hook for Faith Fellowship’s attorney fees as well – which may very well be higher than the city’s.  A trial, even if purely on the money issues, and the appeals that would follow it, would prove terribly expensive.  Personally, I think the city needs to do whatever it can to settle the case – as long as Faith Fellowship is reasonable on its demands.  Now, the City Attorney should go to the City Council and put the figures on the table: this is how much we’ve spent so far, this is how much we’re on the hook for the Church’s attorney’s fees, this is how much more we’re likely to have to spend if we go to trial and lose.  Then, based on those costs and on Faith Fellowship’s damages, the city should make a reasonable settlement offer.  Without knowing those figures, I’d say something like $1.5 million plus attorney’s fees seems reasonable.   City help in identifying and rezoning a suitable property should be part of the deal as well.  It would behoove Faith Fellowship to accept such a settlement as well: they could get the money now rather than in a few years.  That would mean they could go on and buy a new property now – when prices are still low – and be able to move soon rather than years from now, when all the litigation would be finally over.  I can only hope that both sides will see reason.

Update 10/11:  The City appealed this case to the US Supreme Court last summer, their appeal was denied.