Something Stinks in EBMUD...Stinks Like a Back-Room Deal.

Is anybody else fed up with toxic freeway pollution and garbage stink that hits you coming off the Bay Bridge from San Francisco?

Commuters driving on 880, 80, 580 and 24 catch a whiff of the stench that residents of Emeryville and West Oakland gag on every day where those freeways converge near the expanding waste complex that EBMUD operates in the Port of Oakland.

Now the Oakland City Council has given Recology, the San Francisco waste company, an exclusive contract to bring up to 600 tons a day of waste from San Francisco and the Bay Area to a new food waste preprocessing facility Recology will operate on EBMUD land. There is a lot about this deal that has not been explained or discussed in public.

All year we've heard about the ambitious West Oakland Specific Plan to bring in new jobs and housing while protecting the neighborhood. Polluting metals recycling facilities are headed to the former Oakland Army Base. This area got wacked in 1989 by an earthquake that collapsed the Cypress Freeway. For the past 25 years dozens of plans promised to make this area more livable, end illegal dumping and fix up the broken window syndrome in West Oakland.

Does that mean it's okay to start piling in again with more garbage trucks, more composting, more food waste that stinks up the area without even holding proper public hearings at City Hall, avoiding the need for a specific CEQA Environmental Impact Report that would discuss all of these issues in detail?

Recology has had a monopoly on garbage collection in San Francisco for 80 years and spent $1.75 million last summer to defeat a city referendum to open waste collection to competitive bidding. Now, Recology has won a no-bid exclusive contract to build a facility in Oakland for trash from our city and anywhere else their trucks can deliver garbage from! 600 tons a day, seven days a week, is almost 220,000 tons a year. Recology and EBMUD put forward a laudable goal, to convert food waste to methane energy. But EBMUD's anaerobic digester can handle only 100 tons a day, and Recology can bring in 600 tons a day! Does anyone care what happens with all this extra traffic into EBMUD/Recology and where will the extra 500 tons a day go after that? Does anyone care?

The Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) says there is an "significant and unavoidable risk" which the Recology food waste facility will pose to existing pollution cancer risks already facing West Oakland residents. The City Council never discussed the EIR in any detail, and the city's own Public Works Agency supervisor told the council not to worry: "This is a land use restriction within the Port of Oakland so it’s not within a land use restriction with the City of Oakland. Yes it is a deal between Recology East Bay Organics and East Bay MUD."

They didn't. The Council voted 6-2 to approve Recology's facility on February 5, 2013. Only Larry Reid and Desley Brooks opposed. No one wrote about the decision. No one seems to care. Sounds like a backroom deal.

Reid's last comment before the vote was: "I’m just gonna say this, I’m going to vote no, we’ve often made mistakes in the past and this is another one that we’re making, and we’re going to live to regret it."

In Praise of an Older Man (Leonard Cohen @ Oakland's Paramount)

Leonard Cohen is 78 years old and still giving everything he's got.

I was learning how to ask a girl out for a date in high school when this unkempt Canadian with a gravelly voice was strumming a guitar and singing about Suzanne.

If you said Leonard Cohen wasn't the coolest man alive, I'd say you were wrong.

Cohen gave two shows this weekend before two sell-out crowds at Oakland's priceless art-deco Paramount Theatre, treating 3,000 fans each night to more than three hours of his gracious, intimate and inspiring poetry and music. He was here in 2010 for a series of concerts at the same venue.

By all accounts, he is even more energized and more gracious. In the intervening two years, of course, he had to testify against his former manager, Kelley Lynch, before she was jailed for stealing more than $5 million from his accounts while he was in a Zen monastery.

That's him there, on the left, I think.

So this is a singer, entertainer and cult icon who is back to work on a 19-city tour with nine musicians and a big back-up team, and he is gracious, tender and generous in giving himself to his audience in marathon performances such as the two he gave in Oakland this past weekend.

He opened Sunday night's concert with a tilt towards his mortality and an affirmation of his state of mind: "I don't know, friends, when we’ll ever meet again – no one can know that – but tonight we'll give you everything we've got."

If you have a chance, between now and April 21, Cohen will appear at 17 venues across North America.

We in Oakland have been so fortunate to be on his radar. Rolling Stone pretty much has got it right in its write-up of Leonard Cohen singing here in Oakland.

Oakland Enlists Community to Make First Friday Safe

First Friday resumed peacefully last weekend with appeals to end violence in Oakland and moments of silence to commemorate the the fatal shooting of Kiante Campbell, an 18-year-old Oakland high school student at February's street fest.

I like the straightforward tone set by newly-elected Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney, who stood on a stage and called out: "If you love Oakland, thrown your peace signs up."

Oaklanders, including Mayor Jean Quan, wore green and white shirts that read "Respect Our City". The street festival, which draws thousands to its mix of food, music and arts and crafts, resumed in a smaller area with a shortened time format after the shooting that left one dead and three wounded last month.

Some elected officials still ask if Oakland is focusing its limited police resources at the right issues - directing traffic around the First Friday crowds in Uptown rather keeping the peace in some of Oakland's more crime-ridden neighborhoods.

It's not an easy question to answer. First Friday and the Art Murmur movement that organized the monthly open houses for galleries and clothing stores between Broadway and Telegraph Avenues from 19th to 25th Streets had grown from strength to strength, drawing Oaklanders and visitors from around the Bay.

The shooting erupted nearly an hour after the Feb. 1 street fest ended. An account in the Feb. 27 Chronicle still cannot pinpoint who shot Campbell, but he was one of three partiers who drew guns at each other at 20th and Telegraph, a few feet away from one of First Friday's most popular dessert vans that straddles that intersection.

For last week's First Friday, authorities shrank the area of the street fest to five blocks along Broadway and Telegraph,. curtailed the festivities to close by 9 pm, one hour earlier, and strictly enforced laws against drinking in the street.

"After what happened last month, we knew that we needed to change," a First Fridays spokesman said. "We had to look at how we were addressing this and recognize the gravity of it."

The Chronicle quoted a third generation East Oaklander, Lukas Brekke-Miesner, as saying, "We're not involved because violence happened at First Friday. We;re involved because this city has a violence problem."

Where First Fridays go remains to be seen. I want them to work, I want to take more friends to disabuse them of their bias about violence-prone Oakland. I guess it's up to all of us to make this effort.

Oakland Makes Bad Situation With the A's Even Worse

Messing with the A's is sort of like messing with my emotions.

A friend of mine who likes the Raiders, A's and Warriors is fretting that Oakland will lose ALL our major league franchises because we just keep screwing up! You may remember just before Christmas a story about Lew Wolff, the A's owner who wants to move the team to San Jose, writing a letter to the city offering to renew his lease with the City of Oakland to keep the American League West Division champions at the Coliseum for another five years.

I remember feeling a sigh of relief. At least five more years for the A's in Oakland, especially after the sensational 2012 season. Right?

Then it turns out that City Administrator Deanna Santana accused Wolff of leaking the letter to the press about the lease renewal instead of sending it to city, county and coliseum officials. Wolff got furious and produced proof that he had sent this letter to Major Jean Quan, the council and public officials.

Now Ms Santana is eating crow with an apology that due to "human error" she missed Wolff's email when it was sent on Dec 21. So on Monday night she takes a shot at Wolff, telling Oakland boosters Wolff never sent that letter to Oakland leaders, he just released it to the press. Then on Tuesday Wolff refutes Santana with proof he did what he was supposed to, not what she had accused him of doing. Today we're back to the negotiations the A's and City and coliseum must navigate to keep this wonderful team in our city.

What is wrong with our city leaders? How can they be so bloody-minded, taking unnecessary shots at our A's?

The Mercury News has an account of this shabby affair. I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts on this turn of events. I'm a little too sick to my stomach to write more about it right now (yes, I *do* take baseball a little too seriously, I know). PS - as I finished up this piece and went to the little "tag" box to categorize this piece, I see I'm clicking "Oakland" and "Baseball" and "A's" and..."City Council" and "Politics." It's a little telling, and even more frustrating to me...politics shouldn't get in the way of baseball. Grrrr.

Do You Need To Carry A Gun Around In Your House To Feel Safe?

I'm not judging. I'm just asking.

I was at an Open House last weekend when someone from San Francisco asked if living in Oakland was as bad as everyone says. I live a couple blocks away in the low hills of Oakland and I said, no. I felt safe, it was a great neighborhood. I didn't mention the body of a 31-year-old Stockton man found dumped a quarter-mile from my house on a Friday in January when there were four shootings in the city.

I was thinking of the two years I have lived in Oakland since I've been back, and how much I enjoy the daily pleasures of a good-sized city with nice neighborhoods, clean streets and positive vibes. Oakland is this city, but it's also a place where, sadly, in other neighborhoods, people have resorted to fight crime with their own street patrols because they feel they cannot rely on police to help stem a wave of burglaries in their homes.

A television news team recently followed a half dozen residents in the East Oakland neighborhood of Arcadia Park, about eight miles from where I live, who are fighting crime with their own street patrols rather than calling on police.

They've been hit with 25 burglaries in the past two months, and a KPIX news team found neighbors taking matters into their own hands. "You have to walk around your house with a gun to feel safe here," is how Alaska Tarvins of the Arcadia Park Board of Directors described his situation.

It's an esoteric reference...but if you've seen the movie, you'll see where I'm going with this.

One home had been burglarized twice in 24 hours, and "wanted posters" of photographs of young men have appeared on lamp posts in connection with the robberies.

Citywide, Oakland burglaries are up 40 percent - roughly 33 every single day in 2012, according to a KGO news story. I still love this city, and I admire the guts of neighbors who will take steps to make their neighborhoods safer, like they are in Arcadia Park.

I'm not the sort of person who wants to have a gun around the house, nor am I of the opinion that if I had a gun, I (or anyone around me) would be much safer than they are now. I'm not against responsible people owning guns, but...having lots of guns hanging around gives me the willies. It's just not for me. That said - I'm starting to wonder how living here, or how living in Arcadia Park, might changes one's viewpoints on gun ownership. They certainly seem to think it's in their best interest.

What do you think?

Do you keep or carry a gun? Is it a necessary accoutrement (how's that for a big word?) for living safely in the city these days?